When is private venting ok and when is it a workplace issue?

A worker learns her coworker, with whom she privately vented frustrations, secretly recorded their conversations for over a year — HR blindsides her, firing her and promoting him

Coworkers share secrets after work. Image: Vitaly Gariev / Unsplash

Everyone needs to have a good vent every now and then.

It is generally accepted that everything that we say or think about our bosses, parents, professors, or other authority figures isn’t how we always feel about them. We know that what we say isn’t even necessarily true; it’s just how we happened to feel in the moment.

Still, there are lessons learned from this workplace issue and coworker betrayal.

Situation Summary:

*A woman shared how she was fired from her job. She was working in a small office, a job that she generally enjoyed and where she kept to herself and got along with everyone. After a new coworker joined the team, the pair gradually became comfortable chatting while working late. Their conversations included ordinary workplace frustrations about management and workload, comments that OP believed were simply private exchanges between colleagues. Everything changed when HR summoned OP to a meeting and repeated those conversations back word for word.*

As other readers have already pointed out, workplace trust issues are important considerations to make. You never know what people’s motivations are. While you might be “workplace besties” now, you have no idea who this person is outside of work and how loyal they are to even their longest-time friends. You don’t know if your relationship is just convenient to them for the moment. And maybe sometime in the future it will be more convenient for them to throw you under the bus instead. Maybe they think it will get them on the boss’s good side, or maybe they have just come to see you as a threat.

This may constitute wrongful dismissal, but who can say for certain where that claim will even get you? It certainly won’t put that chaos back into Pandora’s Box once the lid is cracked and your boss and HR have taken a look inside.

The more important lesson is that our own thoughts and feelings carry weight. Each of us is accountable for what we say, as well as what we think. Workplace trust issues aside, you don’t have to worry about trust if you aren’t getting worked up about other people and saying bad things about them anyway.

It’s easy when they’re passing thoughts to let them fly in and fly out of our mind, but managing those thoughts and not letting them take up too much real estate becomes the entire battle.

And the problem with venting is the outrage and the sense of justice feels incredible. It gets the blood pumping and the dopamine racing. And that all adrenaline coursing is addicting (ok, maybe that’s just that late-afternoon coffee you knew you should have avoided.)

But when that is happening often enough, it becomes a pattern and a pattern becomes the norm. Before you know it, the only thing going on in your directing mind is that outrage and indignation. And when these things occupy enough space in our minds often enough, suddenly this becomes all we’re thinking about: it is your mind.

They say you are what you eat, and who knows what that’s supposed to mean. But you are quite literally what you think.

So while a vent is healthy, this pattern is not. It prevents us from solving our problems in a healthy way.