Nothing a Good Cry Won’t Fix
I woke up this morning in a low mood. That’s become rare for me, and I’m afraid I got caught up in the gravity of my thinking for a few minutes. I believed what I was thinking and got sucked into some apocalyptic feelings.
Half an hour went by and I found my mind had gotten very quiet, exactly like anyone’s mind will do when they stop stirring the pot of their thinking. In that moment of quiet, I saw those apocalyptic thoughts for what they were: just thoughts whose disturbing nature made them seem very real.
And just like that, my world changed. It was such a dramatic shift to feel that dark, low feeling be swept aside and replaced by an excitement about what the day held, that a funny thing happened. I broke into tears of joy and gratitude, which very quickly turned into laughing and crying at the same time.
That state of simultaneously laughing and crying is just about the most wonderful emotional release valve I can think of, and it reminded me of the way our culture regards crying. Crying is looked at as something filled with shame, something you should never do, something there’s no need for.
What does crying really mean?
Seen realistically, crying only means something feels wrong for you, or you’re emotionally overwhelmed. Instead, it’s seen as a sign something is wrong with you.
Crying doesn’t mean anything other than that something needs to get out of you, something needs to be expressed or released in the only way it can be expressed.
I was on a call with a client one day. He was having a tough time, and I think it came as a complete surprise to him when he found himself in tears. He has a big job as chief of surgery at a hospital, and at that moment, it was just too much for him.
He started apologizing. He was clearly ashamed that he was crying in front of me.
After I told him that seeing a client in tears was something I saw on a regular basis, I asked him, as a doctor, what he thought would happen if he decided not to urinate for a period of days or weeks. “Uremic poisoning” was his answer. So I asked him, “do you understand there’s an emotional equivalent to uremic poisoning? If you don’t let out what needs to come out through tears (or laughter sometimes) it doesn’t just go away. It tuns into something emotionally toxic.”
I’ve always been a cryer, and I learned not to fight it a long time ago. It doesn’t take much to move me to tears. In other words, I laugh as easily as I cry. My tears are at least as often an expression of gratitude or a reaction to some tiny slice of life I find almost unbearably beautiful.
When I broke into tears this morning, I was reminded, as I am almost every time I cry, of the sense of physical release and relief that comes from crying.
That’s usually the case with a good cry. You feel better after letting out what needs to be let out. Crying is the flip side of laughter, and every bit as necessary.
You probably know someone or more than someone, who is neither able to cry or to laugh at themself, because the two often go together as symptoms of what you could call “emotional constipation.”
Let It All Out!
Emotional constipation is just as nasty as it sounds. And for what reason? Just to convince yourself and those around you that you’re “in control?”
Let it out, whether it’s laughing or crying. You’ll feel better either way. There’s very little a good cry (or a good laugh) won’t fix.
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