The ability to distinguish between a complaint and a request coexists with the ability to differentiate between giving advice and being able to help.

Quite often, people are happy to live with the complaints they share. Complaints are the way people describe what is bothering them. It is the excuse they provide to avoid changing. Consider the unavailable time, the money one doesn’t have, the relationship that isn’t as good as it could be, the age one has, etc.

We are used to these complaints and will find them understandable. In many situations, hearing a complaint will result in someone reacting using his experience or ideas to offer them as solutions. As complaints feel uncomfortable for everyone involved, they can become an excuse for the other person to provide advice or to have the hope of solving the other person’s problem.

While complaints seem to point at a problem, they rarely are the problem the person identified, if they even identified one. While the complaint does sound like a problem, it is more of an imagined solution that is not accessible given the person’s other choices.

Someone complaining that they can’t come to a party as they don’t have the time for it imagines that with more time, things would be easier. Assessing the situation, one might thus discover that a problem they might experience is choosing between different activities.

A typical complaint will also seem to contain an objective. In the above example, it would be to have more time or to find how they can establish a better balance between their activities. However, given that example, the objective of finding more time quickly becomes impossible as time is limited, and squeezing every interesting activity into one’s schedule isn’t a possibility.

Using a complaint, people often choose to generalize a specific problem. It seems to create the possibility of working on a solution, but it does so without addressing the problem present in that situation. Generalization helps to see oneself as proactive and concerned with solving one’s problems. However, what it may do at the same time is to transform a concrete problem into an abstract one. Having an abstract problem feels beneficial as it allows for a distance from the discomfort of the current situation.

But there is an issue with sticking to the complaint. Neither the problem nor the perceived objective have been named. However, acknowledging them is the essence of one’s ability to determine the help one needs and the solution one can work on in the given situation.

Not every complaint has the solution one might hope for. Quite often, people know that instinctively. But letting go of that hope may be too early for them as a realistic solution may not be attractive enough.