8 Reasons Blaming and Complaining Aren't Fruitful

The Role of Blaming and Complaining

As we face difficult and negative realities, blaming and complaining make sense.

For example, when a friend isn’t as trustworthy as we thought or a loved one makes decisions we disagree with, something in us doesn’t feel safe and secure. We want (sometimes need) to protect ourselves, which prompts us to assign fault (blame). We also struggle to process the pain we feel, which leads us to various attempts at expressing it, which sometimes means complaining.

Blaming can be helpful when it clarifies who is responsible for what. Complaining is helpful when we’re honest with our experience to metabolize the bad and use what is good. 

Please know there is a place for honest emotional expression as part of the healing process. Pouring out our complaints in this way means we’re using words and emotions to work through frustrations and pain.

Blaming and complaining make sense, and they play a role as we reorient ourselves from the need to have life perfect and the reality that it isn’t. Something is out of our control. At the same time, these actions often don’t bear fruit for the Christian who wants to experience are more fully alive life with God. Too often, we’re not engaging in honest expression; we’re engaging in defensive protection from pain and feelings of badness.

Here are eight reasons why blaming and complaining aren’t fruitful.

1. Focuses on What You Can’t Control

I typically think of blaming as the act of telling another person what they did wrong. Maybe they're responsible, maybe they're not. The easy path is to find someone to blame and focus on the problems of others rather than what’s going on inside of us & how we want to respond to difficult situations (Matthew 7:3-5).

Other people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are not in our control. Some events in life are simply out of our control and not the fault of any one person. The more we seek someone to blame, the more we focus on what we can’t control. This leads us to a spiral of unhealthy thoughts and experiences.

We can only control (or manage) our choices, like how to respond to a situation and deal with overwhelming emotions when they surface.

2. Prevents Personal Responsibility

Focusing on what’s outside of our control (or outside our realm of responsibility to manage) keeps us from noticing what is within our control. I call this our realm of self-stewardship. We are each responsible for managing our lives, including our thoughts, actions, feelings, problematic patterns, painful realities, and our choices and gifts.

Blaming and complaining become a way to prevent personal responsibility. If our problems are always someone else’s fault, and we don’t choose how we will respond to them, then we never take ownership of our actions, thoughts, emotions, needs, gifts, and desires.

God calls us to manage what is ours to manage (1 Corinthians 4:2, 1 Peter 4:10).

3. Prevents Peace-Filled Living

We feel worse when we insist on defending ourselves from bad feelings by blaming and complaining. Even though we may unintentionally engage in these acts to try to protect peace in our lives, we end up preventing real peace-filled living.

Peace comes through the Lord (John 16:33, 2 Thessalonians 3:16), and we experience peace when we experience God’s good design in us. This design includes experiencing being known and loved, even when we’ve done something bad or feel bad. Suppose we don’t take personal responsibility for what is ours to manage by blaming and complaining. In that case, we miss opportunities to receive God’s love and acceptance (directly through him and other people).

4. Denies Deeper Need

Pointing the finger at someone or something else as the source of your problems keeps you from noticing and attending to deeper needs. We may use blaming and complaining to keep the focus off of ourselves and our inability to manage distressing emotions. A surface-level need may be to stop feeling bad or to have someone else’s behavior stop. We need to go further to identify and address needs such as validation, connection, compassion, encouragement, affirmation, rest, and healing from stress and overwhelm.

Having someone listen well & understand the way you experience the pain you feel, along with your thoughts and emotions about a person or event that impacted you, helps you get to deeper needs of being seen, known, loved, and accepted. Simply complaining about what and who is wrong denies your real needs, which lay deeper in your soul.

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5. Changes Your Brain in Unhealthy Ways

One of the beautiful things about our brains is something called neuroplasticity. A quick search will bring up all kinds of information if this is the first time you have heard of this. This concept lets us know our brains can change, for good and bad. What we think, say, do, and experience impacts brain health. When we engage in patterns of thought connected to our reactions, we build pathways in our brains that make it easier and easier to follow that path in the future. Continually blaming and complaining create unhealthy brain changes that make us feel bad. Over time we continue to feel worse and get stuck.

Thankfully, we can improve brain health too. This is one of the reasons gratitude helps us feel less anxious. We’re helping our brain and body have a different experience. Gratitude alone isn’t usually enough to change unhealthy patterns. Neither is telling ourselves to stop blaming and complaining. To build healthy patterns in your brain and body, you need new healthy experiences of being loved and accepted. If this is an area where you feel stuck, a quality therapist or counselor can help with emotional experiences for deep relief.

6. Blocks Connection to Self

When something bad happens, what happens inside you? What’s your experience of difficult circumstances or troublesome relationships? Do you notice your thoughts, feelings, and needs relating to what someone did or how a situation played out? Awareness of what’s going on inside us helps us put on what God designed for our lives (Galatians 6:3, Ephesians 4:22-24).

Noticing what’s going on inside of us helps us connect to ourselves. As mentioned above, blaming and complaining focus on what’s outside of our control and deny our deeper needs. It also blocks us from connecting to our inner world, souls, minds, and bodies. We need this kind of awareness to attend to what is needed and move into action steps that help us experience a healthy connection with God and others.

7. Blocks Connection to Others

To blame another person is to assign responsibility for a problem. For the purpose of this article, we’re talking about a pattern of blame that is not fruitful for developing healthy relationships or a healthy, vibrant, peace-filled life.

Blaming causes others to move into defense mode against the badness they feel. No one feels good when someone tells them they did something wrong. This doesn’t mean we never address the truth about someone’s harmful behavior. It means that when our focus is a blaming stance on their behavior, they will have a harder time connecting to us at a deeper level.

Also, complaining about a person or an event makes it difficult for others to connect to you. When your conversation focuses on what’s wrong outside of yourself rather than an honest revelation about what’s going on inside you, you miss an opportunity to receive a heartfelt connection.

8. Blocks Connection to God

Disconnection to ourselves keeps us from experiencing good things from God. If we deny we have needs or deny the pain we feel from being hurt, we deny God’s gift of meeting our needs. When we blame and complain to defend ourselves from pain, we miss out on God’s restorative process that alleviates inner pain and God’s redemptive growth process (Matthew 11:28).

God’s design in the Garden of Eden included regular communication and connection with us. We were naked and vulnerable, yet fully safe, secure, and loved. Today, we don’t always feel this to be true in our bodies, even when we want to believe with our minds. As a result, we move into self-protection instead of self-stewardship.

May we notice patterns within ourselves that keep us from experiencing a more fully alive life with Christ. May we receive the courage and guidance needed to grow in vulnerability with God and safe others, the wisdom to manage ourselves when others are not safe, and care for the deeper needs within us so we can steward this one life we’ve been given.

NOTE: As a trauma therapist, I believe it is important to note that the purpose of this article is to focus on ways that blaming and complaining are not fruitful. The blaming and complaining I refer to are problematic patterns of focus and not simply the act of assigning responsibility where it belongs or making your complaints knowns (such as the pain you experience). This critical difference affects how we grow and mature as God’s beloved. It is also critical regarding patterns of abuse and misuse of authority in faith communities. If someone tells you to stop blaming and complaining, consider where responsibility for harm lies and how harm affects you.

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