If you talk about someone more than you talk to them, you’re not solving a problem. You’re building a fan club for it.

There is a kind of complaining that feels like problem solving and is not. Each retelling finds an audience, the audience agrees, and that is satisfying enough to keep postponing the conversation that would change anything. Meanwhile the person involved has been given no chance to do better. Sympathy is easier to collect than resolution, and it resolves nothing.

Count how many times you have described the problem to people who cannot fix it. Anything above two is your signal. Take the next version to the person it concerns, shorter and calmer than the one you have been rehearsing.