Responding to the “Everything Sucks” phone call

Dr. Lisa Damour's metaphor changed how I approach my young adults' venting sessions

"Blam - Oscar The Grouch" by vandalog is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

I don’t seek out much parenting advice these days, but one expert I consistently nod along with is Dr. Lisa Damour. Her new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents (Amazon/Bookshop.org affiliate), just came out last week.

Lisa co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast where she answers parents’ questions in her relatable, practical way. Recently, she answered a question that made a light bulb go off in my head.

First, some context.

The “everything sucks” phone call

My adults don’t call often. One’s a busy student; the other is a college graduate navigating the early months of independent life. Add the million things they’ve got going on to the generational allergy to phone conversation and I have a damn quiet phone. Maybe I should switch their ringtones to crickets chirping! Ha ha!

Point is: when they call, it’s often to problem-solve, and the conversation often begins with a litany of complaints about how EVERYTHING SUCKS.

The “everything sucks” phone call was a regular feature of my son’s freshman year. He’d usually call in the evening when my energy was lowest, full of frustration and WTF.

Look, I get it. He was adjusting to new academic and social pressures and dining hall food and a cramped triple dorm room with a problematic roommate, etc., etc. Things did kind of suck. I really did sympathize.

And yet.

These dump sessions were hard on me.

I’d breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. Some days I could listen, but other days I felt the tolerance leaking out of my ears and the anxiety going through the roof.

I had about three minutes of tight-lipped silence in me till I shifted into “helpful suggestion” mode. This usually made things worse and brought the conversation to end with a clipped goodbye. I felt drained and inadequate and self-righteous and disappointed I wasn’t hearing more good news.

One time he complained about stuff his roommate was doing that he himself used to do when he lived at home. “Can you believe that?!” he said, and I wanted to reply, as Bradley Whitford as Captain Lawrence in The Handmaid’s Tale Season 5 said to Serena:

Do you have an irony deficiency??

My daughter’s “everything sucks” phone calls differed in tone but were similar in function.

We were all in bumpy transitions — them, adjusting to the pressures of independence; me, adjusting to the pressures of parenting remotely.

Back to Lisa’s podcast

Lisa recently fielded this question from the parent of a fifth grader:

My kid complains constantly. How do I get him to stop?

This parent is over it. And even though I get “everything sucks” phone calls less frequently now, I HAD TO LISTEN IMMEDIATELY.

The emotional garbage bag

Lisa and her co-host Reena Ninan riff and commiserate in a way that’s validating without blaming. At 3:40, Lisa put forth her “Grand Theory of Complaining.” She reframed the “everything sucks” dump session as a healthy tool for disposing of what she calls “emotional garbage:” the residue of stresses that build up over time.

Then she offered parents a way to interpret being on the receiving end.

You want to picture yourself opening an emotional garbage bag, right? You are there just to collect all the energy debris of the day.

Holding the emotional garbage bag! That’s something I can do! It’s an act of service! I can do this! I want to do this!

I know they’re heroically keeping it together while navigating the obstacle courses of their lives. I know they need a way to release the pressure that builds throughout their days and weeks.

I know this because I need to empty my emotional garbage, too. We all have days when we don’t want advice. We just want a little acknowledgement and validation and sympathy, and then we can move on with our lives, ready to face another day.

But there was still a problem

The problem was, when my kids were done “discarding,” they’d walk away feeling lighter but I was in the dumps. Sometimes for the rest of the evening. You could say I was left holding the bag.

AND THAT’S WHEN I REALIZED THE TRUE GENIUS OF LISA’S GARBAGE BAG METAPHOR.

I had mistaken holding the garbage bag for becoming the garbage bag myself.