How and When to Cry – life beyond therapy

Many of us have grown up with the messages that crying is shameful and a sign of weakness.  Whether we are gay/bi/trans men who were told to “just suck it up” or tough-as-nails women who long ago decided: “I’ll never let anyone see me cry again”, most of us got the message that strong people rarely cry and only sissies and fragile people do.

This is bullshit.

Sadness is an emotion natural to us all.  The ability or inability to EXPRESS sadness is a learned behavior, and can be unlearned.

Many people don’t even know what emotions they’re feeling.  Somehow, there is a “disconnect” between what we feel and our ability to recognize what we feel.  A lot of this stuff comes from our childhood; we’re “programmed” from birth on what to do with our emotions.  If our emotions were validated and mirrored back to us, we realize it’s okay to feel them.  However, if our emotions were invalidated and we were encouraged NOT to feel them, then we internalize emotional repression.  Over time, this gets “hard wired” in our brains so we don’t even have to think about repressing our emotions…we just do it subconsciously.

I went to a workshop recently and the speaker said that in his experience, women need to learn to express their anger and men need to learn to express their grief.  While this workshop was predominantly for heterosexual men, I think the speaker has a point.  Many of my female clients cry when they are angry, while many of my male clients get angry when they’re actually sad.  Good mental health means being able to responsibly express both anger and sadness, regardless of gender.

For some people, crying feels like giving in…like surrender.  Most of us feel better after a “good cry”: our bodies are more relaxed and our tension and stress levels go way down.  It is also true, however, that crying may open the door to feeling more emotionally, and sometimes that is not what we want.  Let me give you a simple exercise to help you control how much you “feel” at any given moment in time:  when you want to feel more, breathe deeply.  When you want to feel less, breathe as shallowly as you can.   Your breathing strongly affects your ability to feel your emotions.  Try it.

One way to get in touch with your feelings (e.g., sadness, anger, grief) is to notice where in your body you feel them.  For example, let’s say your sadness is in your chest.  You could pay attention to it, and see what the sensation is like.  Does it feel like tightness, a burning sensation, numbness?  Just notice what’s going on in your body.

If you want to cry, but find it difficult, notice if your tears are right below the surface, pushing at the backs of your eyes.  Let your eyes relax; don’t force the tears (it doesn’t work).  If you were told as a kid, “don’t cry…suck it up”, you may need to be patient with your tears.  By starting to notice them and the physical sensations that accompany them, you’re giving your tears more and more “permission” to come out.  It takes a while to undo all the “brainwashing” from our childhood.  Go easy on yourself and the tears WILL come!

I’ve had clients, who were afraid to cry, tell me, “Once I start crying, I won’t be able to stop.”  This is just a fear: believe me, you’ll stop.  But you may need to cry quite a bit before that happens.  If you’ve dammed up your tears up for a long time, you’ve got quite a backlog there!  They may come out over time or over the course of a few days.  Let them out!

If you’re new to crying (isn’t that a funny phrase?), let the tears come out in private, in a safe, relaxed place.  You may want to start off alone, or with a trusted friend or lover there to comfort you.  Or, like some of us, you can practice in the dark of a movie theatre or watching a video at home.  Crying is like any other feeling, the more comfortable you get with expressing it, the easier it is to do so.

This winter, if it feels right to you:  why not let yourself cry?  Your body (and mind) will thank you.

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