The Complaining Pattern in the Mind

Every time you complain, you strengthen a little bit of the form identity of me, the complainer, the thought form, the reaction. Your egoic [sense of self] inflates a little bit though the complaint.

Every complaint means you are right, and what you are complaining about is wrong—the situation, the person, the place. You are superior to that which you are complaining about. That is the illusion of how the self-entity inflates continually itself through that. It never lasts for long and then it needs something else. … The self-importance grows through every complaint, the imagined superiority of me as compared to that which I am complaining about.

— Eckhart Tolle, Through the Open Door  <link>