Friday, March 21, 2025
6 Tips for Healthy Venting as a Staff
Church Production Magazine: We’ve all inappropriately handled our emotions at work. We’ve either stuffed our emotions when we should’ve shared them, or we’ve spewed emotions when we should’ve stayed silent. Below are six best practices that have helped me vent in a constructive manner as an employee and as a manager.
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8 comments:
This article is very interesting when you put into the context that it is made for church organizations and people working in churches. It says alot about how a typical work place setting would have different social expectations than a religious work place setting. I appreciate that the article acknowledges that venting is healthy because it very much is. I think its honestly kind of strange that this article recommends venting to your manager. If i were a manager i simply would not care if one of my employees came to me and emotionally vented to an extreme. That is unprofessional. The point of venting is to verbally release your unfiltered thoughts and frustrations that are being caused by stress from different areas. I do not think you should be venting under any circumstances to an employee that is at a higher standing than you in your work place. But I digress because the culture in a church must be very different.
I think this is super important topic for people to start talking about and understanding better. Trying to remove all emotion from the workplace is simply not possible for anyone to do. Having that kind of expectation will immediately lead to resentment and festering emotion that will split apart teams easily. This is even more critical in a theatre setting with high stakes and stresses. Maintaining a healthy work enviornment will make the entire process so much smoother for everyone. I agree with the tips that were given in this article and what they talk about in order to make sure that everyone can express their emotion freely and feel seen in the workspace. I think it can be hard in some cases if the manager or higher ups are the one that are causing an issue. But everything can be solved with good communication and working with people that will support you to make change.
I like how this article clearly states that venting is a healthy process that can help you feel better or help solve the situation. I think it is interesting how much of an emphasis this article puts on venting upwards, to your manager. I think that the basis for this provided in the article is smart. If you vent to a person of power, they tend to have the power to help fix your issue. However, sometimes you just need to get your feelings out to destress. In that type of situation, I don't think venting to your boss is the way to go, as there is no purpose to it. I find it kind of weird that the article discourages venting to your coworkers. Your coworkers are going to be able to empathize with your problems more easily then someone working above you. And, it could lead to open discussion between employees about things like pay and benefits. This is what I feel like the article is trying to avoid.
This was an interesting read, but I think not very widely applicable in theatrical spaces. First and foremost, the chain of command is not nearly as rigid or as linear as this example, and additionally, at least in this space, the people who are above you are also likely students who are learning. It isn’t really productive, in my eyes, to only rant to a manager. First, managers aren’t infallible, but second, they’re not able to be fully objective in some situations. I like to talk to someone outside of the organization, or at least the direct conflict, to bounce ideas off of until I reach a more balanced and less emotional equilibrium. I feel that if I were to take all of my unprocessed feelings straight to a manager, it would burn more bridges than otherwise because I’d be talking with them about problems in an unproductive way, or because I hadn’t yet found the right way to put to words what I needed to get across.
I love that several times throughout the article tells us to vent up over anything else. I do like this as I have often seen people venting sideways and the whole team now knows but does not do anything about it. Venting up or above the manager can definitely get the ball rolling easier about fixable situations. However I know there are sometimes, especially when the venting is about the boss, or maybe if the vent isn’t actually anything that needs action taken about it where venting to the boss would be a hindrance or just not helpful. Having friends outside of work where there can be mutual venting time for both sides can help go over problems and solutions without getting to the serious levels of corporate. Though venting to the manager will definitely help with any serious issues, even if they are less serious at that moment, a pattern could be established that the manager is now aware of and can take care of.
The article makes a good point about “venting up” and not “sideways”, and I think that is very important to remember. But other than that, I don’t think it was very informative. It didn’t offer any alternatives and it kept repeating the same point. I also disagree with the idea of never venting sideways. I think venting sideways can be needed for your own well being every now and then. I don’t think you should always be venting to your coworkers/friends, expecting them to do something, but I do think there is a benefit. It can be nice to vent to someone who is on the same level as you, experiencing the same problems. Your superior is not having the same problems as you, a coworker is. It can also help to talk with a coworker first before approaching someone higher up.
This article was not really what I expected it to be, but I am also not mad about it. I think this is a cycle and epidemic that plagues so many organizations, but I feel like, and maybe I am biassed, but especially arts organizations. This gets really messy really fast. Once you vent down once, you lose control. And once you lose control it is really hard to get it back. I have been involved in venting more times than I can count. And I have played every party, unfortunately. I have been the one that upper management has vented down to. I have vented in all direction. I have received vents from all directions. And as much as I would like to say that I have gotten better at not vetting down or sideways, I really have not and it is kind of bad. It is something that I am actively working on.
This is certainly an interesting list of tips. The idea of “venting up” only simultaneously makes sense from a self-advocacy perspective, kind of, but also really feels a lot like a “don’t talk to your coworkers about your wages” kind of thing. It definitely makes sense not to “vent down,” but the repeated advice not to “vent sideways” just feels like a way to discourage any collective bargaining. Anyway, did you know that the original sense of the word “vent” in this context (e.g. expressing pent-up negative feelings) actually dates all the way back to the humoral theory of disease? It’s from the idiom “to vent your spleen,” as the spleen was believed (incorrectly) to produce yellow bile, which was associated with anger, and black bile, which was associated with melancholy/depression. Tying this back to theatre I guess this actually crops up in Shakespeare’s Juilus Caesar where Brutus tells Cassius to “digest the venom of [his] spleen.”
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