Grievance Without a Throne

A grievance often combines pain with an expectation of acknowledgement.

The person isn’t only living through something unpleasant. They want the other to understand the damage, agree with their version and restore the order that was broken.

Sometimes that is fair. We really can be humiliated, deceived or let down on an agreement.

Sometimes the event merely touches a sore spot: the fear of turning out to be unimportant, unintelligent, unattractive or weak. The other person didn’t create that vulnerability, but hit it fairly precisely.

It helps to separate:

• what actually happened;
• what I heard in it;
• which need was touched;
• whether the action was deliberate;
• what I want now.

Forbidding yourself to feel hurt is pointless. Keeping the hurt as proof of moral superiority is less useful.

If the harm was accidental, feedback gives the person a chance to correct it:

When you joked about that in front of the others, I didn’t like it. Please don’t do it again.

You don’t have to announce in advance that there are no hard feelings. There may still be some, and they don’t clear on schedule.

If the action was deliberate, what to do next depends on more than the label “bad person.” What matters is whether he acknowledges what he did, whether he stops, and whether it is safe to keep in contact.

Refusing to show a reaction sometimes deprives a provocateur of the result he expected. But that shouldn’t rule out asking for support or protection.

A grievance stops running a person not when they have convinced themselves that nothing happened, but when they have understood the event and chosen what to do next.

The separation can be tested on something small. Colleagues went to lunch and didn’t invite you. Fact: they didn’t invite you. What was heard: “they don’t consider me one of them.” The need touched: being part of a group. Intention: unknown, and most likely absent — people left when they were free. Of the four lines, only the first is worth discussing with them; the other three are for yourself. Only the first line can be put to anyone, while all four feel bad, and that is usually where the difficulty lies.

A grievance most often lives in the third line and gets presented as the second. So the conversation is about the fact, leads nowhere, and both sides come away feeling they were talking about the wrong thing.