The word complain derives from the Latin for sob or bewail. It may seem that a complainer is doing something but, no, he’s just salting his soup. Complaint acts without doing. It’s an absence of love, an indifference to what is being complained about.
It is beneath our dignity to complain. Ego is not likewise restrained. It loves low places.
Victimhood gets me sympathy but first there’s that awful whining noise to endure.
The reason I want you to change is so that I can avoid the hard work of changing myself.
Anger, resentment, frustration, non-forgiveness—these are projections of something within me onto someone other than me. Projection locates a problem where it cannot be solved. It ensures that the problem does not get solved!
Who benefits from this arrangement? Ego does.
Blaming is our most enduring and devious dysfunction. It germinates in judgement. It is nourished in complaint.
Eckhart Tolle credits the Greek philosopher Epictetus with being the first person in recorded history to see that we suffer, not because of what happens but because of our interpretation of what happens.
One man says, “There is a pain in the body.”
Another man says, “Oh, it’s terrible, I tell you, really, really terrible, this pain that I have in my body. It won’t go away. What am I going to do?”
One man has pain. The other man has pain and suffering.
Pain is obligatory; suffering is optional. We do not choose to have pain. We choose to suffer.
Suffering is perverse. Its first murmur is complaint.
Lucifer contorts and curls in the bodies of men who have fashioned an identity for themselves out of suffering, who use look-what-life-did-to-me to get what they want.
Lucifer is a minor entity but he has the vigour of a hooked eel.
Men's Work 