To Complain or Not to complain (while autistic)
A common experience I hear from autistic people I know is the struggle with being labeled a “complainer” - a label which feels deeply unjust and punitive. They have legitimate concerns, and yet they struggle to have effective conversations that don’t leave them feeling gaslit or like a rejected annoyance to others.
Have you ever heard an autistic person complain to an allistic (non-autistic) person? It can feel incredibly tense. I see it as an epicenter of the unbridged divide between the two neurotypes’ culture and communication differences.
Autistic person may be thinking:
Here is a thing that isn’t working properly. Thought you should know. You’re welcome.
I am having a difficult experience that I need to articulate so that I can get through it.
I don’t like that and am not OK with it. Please stop.
To the autistic person in this scenario, expressing complaints are neutral to useful or even necessary social exchanges until the response comes around.
And allistic person might be thinking:
Why are you blaming me?
You are going to make it worse by obsessing over it.
You are being rude/making too many noises.
The allistic person in the scenario has jumped to conclusions per their social programming, and may feel feel put upon, triggered, and confused.
The hidden social rules about complaining
Allistic people complain too. But, generally they follow certain rules about complaining that may not be obvious or seem fair to autistic people. I’m not here to catalogue all the rules - the rules are always changing. But here might be a few rules you notice:
Imply a complaint, don’t state it.
Only complain once you have a proposed solution.
Complain about people who aren’t in the room, but act like everything’s fine when they enter.
Only complain privately to the person who can directly impact the problem.
Keep your thoughts in your head until they are organized, then speak them.
In a hierarchy, one-downs don’t complain to one-ups. You can only complain if you have equal or higher status to the listener, or if you’ve paid someone you are complaining to.
So, the rules about complaining are plentiful, hard to read, and may involve towing the line, suppressing feelings, and only sharing fully-formed thoughts. Even if these rules are learned and begin to make sense to autistic people, they may be very inaccessible.
So, what is the function of complaining for autistic people? Does it help?
I see complaining as a form of reality testing and self-advocacy. Are you there and do you share my reality? Is anyone else seeing this? Should I be OK with this? This is so awful right now…isn’t it?
Complaining is also a form of emotional discharge and regulation, and an attempt to put out in the world what may be feeling wrong internally. It is a step towards problem-solving in some cases, although it is only the first step - an attempt at naming the problem.
Complaining can create an experience of immediate relief, but it can also create a cascade of negative appraisals and projections into the future that can be dysregulating and unhelpful. It can lead to more clarity about what is going on internally, but it can also be a distraction - a place a person has put their attention to deter from a deeper, more cumbersome problem or feeling. Because complaining is commonly loathed by the listener in the room, it also creates relationship friction.
Relationship traps with complaining
Autistic and allistic people should be aware of some of the traps that lay in waiting around the culture of complaining. They include the following (and many more):
Cognitive dissonance - this deeply uncomfortable process of being faced with the differences between values and actions is often met with defensiveness. A complaint can point out that someone is not following through with their word, or a practice doesn’t match a stated value, or is unjust. This complaint in the big picture is an act of service by the complainant, but the discomfort of the listener seeing that things aren’t good enough as they are, or are incongruent, can make the feedback hard to accept.
Power struggles - complaint can be a form of self-advocacy, but it lacks a clear change request, which can make a person on the receiving end feel helpless. Most people respond badly to feeling helpless. A person in authority may find a complaint to be a power challenge and disruption of the hierarchy.
Communication mishaps - a person may be complaining in a “stating the facts” manner but the recipient may infer there’s a request or action demand. The recipient may find the demand unreasonable and resist it. For example, “this humidity is horrible,” may come off to someone as an unreasonable request to change the air outside or stop whatever activity is going on. It may or may not indicate a care need, but the person hasn’t stated one. The gaps in communication and faulty inferences create uncomfortable ambiguity and can lead back to power struggles.
Competing needs - in families with people with diverse needs, there may be a combination of complainers and demand avoiders who share culture and neurotype but have differing needs. The complaining creates implied demands, which trigger others. Complaining can also carry a tone that is painful from a sensory perspective. If someone is working on not engaging in negative thought spirals, but is faced with unwanted complaints, they may find it hard not to join in and spiral together, or have a separate self-critical spiral afterward. Additionally, even in autistic-autistic relationships, one or more people may feel the need to uphold dominant cultural standards and reactions around complaining, or have ingrained these to such a degree that they don’t see the cultural norms.
Entitlement - complaining can lead itself to interpretation as entitlement. Entitlement can feel very threatening to a person when they link it with disrespect or anticipate pressure to change something they are not prepared to change.
“If you weren’t so reactive to my complaints, I wouldn’t complain so much!”
It is good to be aware of the negative impact of ignoring, reacting to, or punishing complaining. If complaint is an effort to be heard, then shutting it down is likely to elicit more extreme efforts. See if it is possible to hear and tolerate the truth or feeling in the complaint, even if you don’t like the delivery. You can also respectfully request a different delivery that will help you hear the person with a clearer head. Remember that you hold a culture and a perspective - what you find annoying or unhelpful may feel necessary and useful to another person. You may feel an urge to take things personally, but that doesn’t mean the complainant is personally attacking you.
How to complain more strategically
Given the baggage inherent with complaining, I recommend that people use skills and strategy to address their concerns wherever possible.
Convert complaints to requests or boundaries. If the point of the complaint is to initiate change or say no, be more specific about what change you want to see or what you are willing and unwilling to do. Speak about your experience and what change would help improve your experience.
Use “I statements.” Instead of “this food is too spicy,” you can say, “I can taste the spice, and it’s too much for me.” That’s way more specific, and harder for someone to personalize and react to, because you own your experience.
Ask if you can have a complaint or vent session. That might sound like, “I’m really grouchy and feel like venting - are you available to listen?”
Ask for a strategic planning meeting to give people time to prepare for change requests. This can sound like, “I don’t think this morning’s routine worked for me. Can we talk tonight about our experiences and how we can improve the process?”
Create rough draft complaints via journaling. If you need to better understand your internal experience, you may have as much to gain by putting these thoughts in writing as you do speaking them out loud. Then you can bring more formulated thoughts (for example, awareness of a value, unmet need, preference, or feeling) to a conversation and experience more receptive listening.
Have a complaint partner - find someone else who finds complaining useful or necessary, and complain back and forth. This creates a safe place to express feelings, a complaint exchange where no one is expected to fix the other person’s experience. Be cautioned though - mutual complaining can really amplify negativity and create a lot of energy where you may not want it.
It is also an option to collaboratively create a culture of complaining with specific parameters and responses that everyone agrees to. Complaints can be delivered in certain types of meetings and ways, and in exchange responses can be scripted or agreed upon. For example, in my personal life, as long as my family member goes on a hike with me, she gets a solid ten minutes of complaining that we willingly accept. We make this a game, and her complaints get really creative and outlandish, which I find funny even though the tone hurts my ears. It seems to help her get through the uphill portions to the rewarding views at the top. Even though she finds hiking difficult, we notice that it genuinely improves mood for all of us, and she is more able than she tends to predict, so we have an understanding that complaint isn’t a refusal of hiking, and it’s not forbidden either. We don’t expect anyone to love every minute of it. We’ve built on our hiking routine to include some of her favorite things (picnics, as much detours for bug collection as possible), and we let her decide how far we go. We take her struggle seriously by adjusting the structure and support, but we don’t react much to her complaints in the moment. “Duly noted,” a quick way to let her know we hear her, and she receives it just fine.
I think that we have an under-discussed opportunity to improve harmony, especially in cross-neurotype relationships, if we can handle complaining a little differently on each end. I hope you have found something here worth experimenting with.
