The Healing Power of Tears

How giving myself the permission to cry a good cry helped me process unspeakable pain and lifted me out of deep depression

I’ve been in therapy for about two years now, and have been working with my current therapist for just over a year. My work with her has been tremendously helpful, particularly in helping me make sense of my responses to the stressful events and circumstances in my life. Making sense of things from a deep, psychoanalytic perspective helps me find mental clarity and make decisions that support my personal growth.

However, the focus on making sense of things, either from the conscious or the unconscious level, had left an important part of my mental health out in the cold. Noticing my severe bodily symptoms of depression, my therapist asked, “Have you given yourself a good cry lately? I mean, a complete cry?”

Have you cried until you ran out of tears? Or are you too scared to start crying because you imagine your tears will never dry out?

I found myself speechless. Not because I’m someone who isn’t able to cry. Quite the contrary. I pride myself on having easy access to tears.

Why did I find that question such a surprise then?

The key lies in the word “complete.” My answer was a “No,” followed by a whisper from my inner critic, “You failed!”

It is a sign of the supreme wisdom of small children that they have no shame or compunction about bursting into tears. They have a more accurate and less pride-filled sense of their place in the world than a typical adult.

~Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey

You see, I have always been a proponent of leaning into our pain and vulnerability and expressing our emotions in a healthy way. Well, I came to take that stance not because I was any good at it, but because I was terrible at it.

I was terrible at getting in touch with my feelings and was terrified at expressing them because it wasn’t safe for me to do so growing up (you will read more about that in my future “Memorish” essays.)

In fact, my high school classmates told me they couldn’t figure me out. I probably had the best expressionless face they’d ever seen. Starting as a teen, I had forced myself to put up a “stiff upper lip” (British expression) and white-knuckle my way through rough patches.

The young me reckoned that this was the only approved way to handle upsets and setbacks. It was what my own Chinese culture celebrated, and later, my adopted Swedish culture also celebrated. So I kept calm and carried on.

But a lifetime of this kind of stoicism was a form of emotional suppression. A widely read author on Substack once told me that if it felt like suppression then I was “doing stoicism wrong.” It was quite an insult to invalidate a deeply personal experience like that. This is a way of viewing the world through the lens of right and wrong, which I don’t share. So that’s that.

Anyway, back to the session with my therapist. I told her that I hadn’t given myself a complete cry for quite some time. So she urged me to do so. “Cry until you have completely released the emotions pent up inside,” she coaxed gently.

A voice then repeated inside me: “Cry until your tears are dry!”

At this point, my tears couldn’t wait anymore. A floodgate was opened upon getting the “Go” signal.

“I’ve been trying so hard to contain my emotions, you know,” I sobbed. “I was afraid that they’d spill over. I feel so ashamed that I’ve tried to censor my tears all this time!”

The shame around crying shackles our emotional freedom

A natural function of tears is that it signals to the people around us we need help. However, some of us may have been told or given the message that it’s shameful to ask for help this way.

In fact, I once had a therapist who told me that crying is a manipulative and immature way of getting attention. It added a thick layer of shame to my need to cry.

Many of us probably still remember how our parents yelled at us: “Stop it!" as soon as tears started to come out of our eyes, making us feel as if we were committing a big sin. The truth is, our direct and unbridled emotional expression rattled them. They didn’t know how to handle it.

For those of us who feel ashamed of crying, there are probably a number of significant stories behind that shame. I’d love to hear yours!

For me, it went way back to when I was 12….

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Ahead, I will share two traumatic events that made me feel ashamed of crying. I will also cover these topics:

• Crying: a somatic release

• How can we as a society remove the shame around crying?

There's a Korean saying: People don't die from crying. They die from the inability to cry.

~Dr. Ben Kim