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
This essay was originally posted on October 23, 2023 and it’s now lifted from behind the paywall as part of the month-long collaboration with 12 other Substack writers who contribute to
@’s September anthology on crying. Some details have been updated, namely, my partner became my ex-partner.Tomorrow, I pass the baton to
to carry on the challenge to delve deep into this subject.
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?”
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.
There's a Korean saying: People don't die from crying. They die from the inability to cry.
~Dr. Ben Kim
I told my mother about a bullying incident at school. I was visibly shaken and tears were about to drop. Instead of allowing me time to fully feel and express my sadness, she went straight to asking me to snap out of my self-pity.
“Be strong! Show them what you’re made of. Work hard, and be better than all of them!”
That’s her strategy for dealing with bullies. It had some merits, and she was doing her best as an encourager. But what she wasn’t aware of, was that she had completely bypassed the emotional impact this incident had on me. She didn’t understand the importance of bearing witness to my suffering.
I felt my feelings were dismissed. A story began to form inside me, that shedding tears was equivalent to being weak, and being weak was something my mother — the most important person in my life — despised and could not tolerate.
This was the earliest trauma related to crying that I can consciously remember. The trauma wasn’t the bullying incident itself. It was the lack of acknowledgment of my pain. As international trauma expert Gabor Maté said, trauma isn’t the stressful or hurtful event itself. It occurs when a person is left alone without a witness to hold the space and acknowledge their emotional suffering after the event.
Following this exchange with my mother, I felt unsafe expressing any emotions that might smell like weakness to her. In addition, when someone made me mad, I thought it would be a sign of weakness to express my anger, let alone confront them and resolve the conflict directly. The way to go would be to just keep calm and rise above my “enemies.” There was no time or space for tears. Wear your big girl pants and move on!
My father was no help either. He was the peacekeeper in the family. He didn’t stand up for himself when faced with my mother’s rage, blame and criticism. He showed me the “traditional virtues” of tolerance, patience, and loyalty. Above all, he modeled the importance of not getting angry.
In short, “suck it up” became my motto.
Sadness and anger turned inwards become depression. And emotions that are repressed go sideways, often with collateral damage.
The kind of collatoral damage from my suppressed emotions had a significant impact on my personal relationships. Because I didn’t learn how to express my rightful anger at the right time, and draw a healthy boundary to stop others from treating me the way I didn’t want to be treated, the pent-up anger showed up as resentment and from time to time, “volcanic eruptions.”
Anger turned inwards becomes depression. And emotions that are repressed go sideways, often with collateral damage.
One of those eruptions, which included wailing and screaming with helpless pleas, scared my ex-partner, and it did a great deal of harm at the early stage of our relationship. We spent the next two years repairing the damage, and my ex’s negative reactions to my emotional expression made me feel ashamed of my tears. I worked with my therapist and coach to learn new ways of communication and self-expression that were more “contained” in the hope of reducing the emotional “threat” to others. I also learned how to connect with myself in a loving and compassionate way so that I would hold the space for the inner child who needed to cry.
However, it became clear to me much later, that others’ reactions to our emotional expressions can be a projection of their own trauma. They may not be able to handle our expressions because they themselves have some toxic shame or traumatic experience related to strong emotions.
In my ex’s case, my crying reminded him of a childhood trauma. He had noticed his mother frequently looking sad and crying in her room. One day, when he was around 11, she tried to take her life. So he started to associate crying with an overwhelming life-and-death situation, one that threatened abandonment by her own mother.
The projection of his fear of others’ crying had caused me to suppress my tears lest it rattled his mood. I found myself learning how to sob without making a sound, and I always closed the door or wait till he was away to cry my heart out.
There’s another layer to this relationship conflict centered around crying: About a year after my ex’s strong reaction to my emotional eruption, I discovered that he had been cheating on me. In hindsight, my strong emotions were my gut’s response to what it already sensed! By shifting the blame and shame about my crying onto me, my ex made me doubt the legitimacy of my own tears.
Blame-shifting and gaslighting are two of the most commonly deployed tactics by narcissists to avoid dealing with the consequence of their behavior. In this case, it was his sexual betrayal that he was trying to hide, and my rightful anger that he was trying to avoid. He used my “emotional volatility” to deflect the attention on his secretive behavior that hurt me like a thousand knives.
Crying: a somatic release
During the time when I was in a fog about what was really going on, I plunged into a depression, all the while blaming myself for my ex’s pulling away and coldness toward me.
How does depression feel in my body? Usually, it feels like a dark cloud has descended from above, and gradually it envelops me. I feel a dampening sensation on my chest, and fatigue comes down so bad that I don’t even have the energy to do my regular routines, such as cooking and exercising. I feel anti-social. I feel that my sullen look probably would scare people away. So I avoid people. I feel weepy but am afraid crying would make me feel gloomier. I also lose interest in things that normally give me pleasure and delight. There’s a generous sense of hopelessness and loss of purpose.
During the past two months, my symptoms were so bad that at times I felt nauseous.
My therapist asked me to locate my emotions, and I pointed at the pit of my stomach. The emotional buildup manifested as strong stirrings there.
She recognized that it was time for a release — a complete one.
She reminded me that at this point of my therapeutic journey, some of the emotions that emerged didn’t necessarily have to do with any current triggers. In other words, I didn’t need a reason to cry!
She then told me what science has found: that tears contained stress hormones and toxins from emotional processing. When we cry, we release them from our system and restore a sense of emotional balance.
I also found in this article, that crying is “a way to acknowledge painful or challenging emotions. Sometimes our pain can be buried so deep down, that it can be difficult to articulate. Crying allows us to express challenging emotions when we can’t find the words, and it may offer a sense of relief.”
So I let my tears come up and drop. That immediately relieved my nausea. I then spent half an hour after the session devoted to letting myself cry. Unlike what I had imagined — that if I started crying, I would never be able to stop — my tears ran out before the half hour was up. I felt a sense of lightness in my body, and my head felt incredibly clear, as if the windshield was wiped clean.
Unlike what I had imagined — that if I started crying, I would never be able to stop — my tears ran out before the half hour was up. I felt a sense of lightness in my body, and my head felt incredibly clear, as if the windshield was wiped clean.
I was wary that this was a one-off effect. But it turned out that the heavy cloud hovering above my head stayed lifted for over a week. I don’t know how long this sense of lightness and equanimity will last. In fact, I had another depressive episode a few days later, but it was circumstantial and the symptoms weren’t as severe as before. I made sure that I listened to the stirrings in my chest and gave myself a good cry when that happened. The next morning, I woke up feeling restored.
I decided that I will make crying a part of my wellness routine, and fight to remove the shame around it.
How can we as a society remove the shame around crying?
Science has discovered the importance of tear ducts and how tears change our brain and our behavior. But it will probably take a long time before the act of crying crosses the final frontier and become socially acceptable.
For heaven’s sake, it took more than a century for workplaces to introduce the lactation room for working nursing mothers. This physical setup is a major shame-buster. It also sheds light on the real biological needs of mothers of newborns. If she can't pump milk in time, engorgement can lead to plugged ducts, mastitis and even abscesses, sometimes requiring hospitalization and intravenous antibiotics!
By the same token, shouldn’t workplaces instigate a “Feeling Room,” “Emotional Processing Room” or a "Crying Room”? Just like the lactation room, which normalizes breast feeding, it’s important to acknowledge the need for people to take care of their normal human function of “emoting” and crying. When we’re not allowed to cry when we need to, we end up developing various kinds of mental and physical illnesses as a result of repression.
If people don’t let their tears out in good time because, for example, it would obstruct productivity, they may become desensitized to the stirrings inside, and lose touch with their emotions. Emotions are incredibly intelligent and important signals that inform us of what we need to maintain a sense of well being. But they aren’t loud and it often requires some deep investigation to get in touch with them.
I’m not optimistic about the instigation of such a room at the workplace because of the deeply rooted belief that emotions get in the way of logical thinking, and therefore may impede productivity. This may take another thousand years. Nonetheless, it’s an idea worth pursuing. And for those of us who work from home, perhaps we can start by practicing healthy crying in our own safe space?
When the impulse to cry strikes, we should be grown up enough to cede to it as we did in our fourth or fifth years. We should repair to a quiet room, put the duvet over our head, and allow despondency to have its way. There is in truth no maturity without an adequate negoation with the infantile and no such thing as a proper grown-up who does not frequently yearn to be comforted like a toddler.
If we have properly sobbed, at some point… we’ll know that the worst of the storm may be ebbing.
~Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey
Resources:
“Constructive Wallowing: How to Beat Bad Feelings by Letting Yourself Have Them” by Tina Gilbertson
Can’t Cry? Here’s What Might Be Going On: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/why-cant-i-cry
Dr. Ben Kim: “There's a Korean saying: People don't die from crying. They die from the inability to cry.” - Read his story here.
“A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from the School of Life” by Alain de Botton
Care to Share?
An article, a Substack note, a poem, art, a great quote or music?
A personal experience with tears or crying.
Here’s how:
Create a piece about your tears or crying
REFERENCE The Carer Mentor Collaboration ‘Caring About Crying’ OR Simply draw a Heart with ‘I CARE’ inside it.
SHARE the URL Link in the comments below with the TITLE in CAPS
FIND and READ someone else’s piece, comment and restack.
A few catalyst thoughts: When did you last cry? Tell us about your most profound experiences of crying. Do tears come easily? When someone cries, what do you do—how do you receive tears?
Here are some great Substack resources that I recommend for anyone trying to understand the complexities of grief:
Debbie Weil, writer of Bold Age: Please don't say "Sorry for your loss"
Victoria Chin, writer of Carer Mentor: Grief is Messy: It’s Not a Tidy Five-Stage Path
Anne, writer of The Future Widow. ‘Intentionally Building Resilience One Day at a Time’
Victoria Chin, writer of Carer Mentor: Grief Resource Articles
The Caring About Crying Anthology. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone.
Sept 1 Launch article: Caring About Crying. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 2 Crying: 'Did you know?' Resource: Tears the science and some art. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 3 Cry, Baby. Why Our Tears Matter' A Podcast Interview. Dan Harris and Dr Bianca Harris of Ten Percent Happier with Reverend Benjamin Perry. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 4 ‘In Conversation with Rev. Benjamin Perry’. Victoria interviews the Author of 'Cry Baby: Why Our Tears Matter' By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 5 My stoic mom's parting gift: Making peace with tears By Sarah Coomber at Sandwich Season
Sept 6 We Invite You to 'Care About Crying'. By Victoria on behalf of the team.
Sept 6 ICU Special Edition: There's Crying in Baseball? By Nurse Kristin at HCT:Heal Cure Treat
Sept 7 Triggered. Caring About Crying Anthology By Kristina Adams Waldorf, MD at After He Said Cancer and Anne at The Future Widow
Sept 8 'Can't Cry. Want to Cry??' A Caregiver's Paradox of Human-ing. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sep 9 AWC Town Bulletin - On Crying By Tiffany Chu and Bakhtawar at Asian Writers Collective
Thank you, Louisa. This essay is packed with personal insights and wisdom.
Like you, I don't share the binary right or wrong view of how to feel our feelings. As our life experiences are unique, so too are our emotion-constructs (Ref. Prof Lisa Feldman Barrett).
As Rev Ben Perry says in his book, we are often quick to leap to judgment instead of letting our feelings be felt or our tears fall, in ourselves or in others.
I'll be re-reading this piece, there are several threads that resonate - esp about the work environment. I agree there is a 'deeply rooted belief that emotions get in the way of logical thinking, and therefore may impede productivity.' especially in large corporate organisations.
However, times are changing, small evolutions e.g. Susan David's reclassification of soft skills to essential leadership skills. Also, change is happening faster in start-ups and SMEs. I'm hopeful.
Thank you for writing this and sharing all these tremendous resources. I do have hope that with time, and with some conscious parenting of the next generation, the shame that represses tears will slowly cease. Tears make people uncomfortable. So it makes sense that we, ourselves, can’t let ourselves fully cry - till they run out. I have quick access to my tears yet I often “put them away” almost as soon as they fall.
The somatic connection is huge. I’m learning how emotions are just energy in motion. Tears need to be released! And witnessed.
Thanks for bringing all of this into the light.