We have enormous judgements about crying in our society. We see crying as some sort of weakness. We often associate it with an over-emotional woman or a difficult child. When someone is crying, we often feel like we should do something to stop them from crying. When kids cry from an accidental fall we blame the stair, or the stone, or whatever, and then we tell them to give the “naughty thing” a slap. To most of us, crying signals something terrible has gone wrong. We keep ourselves from crying for many, many reasons, but I’ve often found these reasons to be conditioned ideas.
The last few years, I’ve had to challenge my own conditioned ideas about crying. I now think of crying as something that dissolves resistance instead of something that signals some personal failure. My own point of view is that when we keep that sadness blocked inside ourselves, it causes us to become cold and rigid and heavy. When we expect ourselves and others to just “Toughen up!” or “Grow up!” we become hardened to the reality of our own pain and that of others. Of course there is balance to be had here, but we should not expect someone who has experienced significant loss or trauma to just “Toughen up!”
In my own childhood, sadness (and emotions in general) were treated with extreme hostility by various people around me. I was told various things about emotions, but none of it included, “Allow it to be”, “Allow it to move through you”, or “Be with it peacefully”.
It also took me a long time to realise that people I was taking advice from did not have their own emotions (or lives) under control. Self-trust is an important and fortunate consequence of consistent emotional work. When we’re no longer buying into conditioned ideas about how we should feel, we can actually honour how we really feel. This is good. In fact, I would say that self-trust was one of the most important aspects that I’d gained from doing emotional work.
And the benefits of self trust are truly life-changing.
When we have self-trust, we no longer buy into the judgements and ideas of authority figures or other people around us. We learn to trust our own intuitions about things, our own inner knowing. Some authority figures (whether religious, medical, family related or other) can have good ideas and advice, but these ideas must always be filtered through our own wisdom and what is right for us. And having self-trust grants us discernment.
But self-trust is also a bit of a journey. It takes time to cultivate. It takes time and awareness to know when we’re acting from true self-trust. Fear can sometimes masquerade as intuition, for example. Also, true self-trust is different to self-confidence. Self-confidence, especially when it’s exaggerated, isn’t really self-trust. It’s bravado. And bravado often tries to cover up inner doubt. Real self-trust isn’t over-confidence or hasty decisions made out of anger or fear. It is quiet and still and strong. And often also a little vulnerable.
I’m now wondering how a post about crying also became a post about self-trust. But really, the two are related. Sometimes closely. Sometimes tangentially. If we can recognise and honour our own grief, if we can cry when we need to cry, and be sad when we’re sad, this also gives us the capacity to listen and honour our inner knowing. If we’re denying tears from flowing, we’re also denying how we are really feeling. How are we supposed to listen to our own inner knowing if we can’t even recognise and accept difficult emotions? If we can cultivate the capacity to be with difficult emotions and not push them away, we can also learn to trust ourselves and our own perspectives more. And when we have self-trust, life really opens up.
When I did Michael Brown’s The Presence Process the first time, I changed my view about crying and thanks to the breathing practices the floodgates opened up. There was one sentence in the book that cut through all my conditioned ideas about crying: “Crying for no reason at all … detoxifies the emotional body like no other human activity.” Brown is specific in that he talks about crying happening in private and not in the presence of others so it’s not used as a tool for manipulation.
In any case, by the time that I did the process, I was tired of being at war with myself and my emotions. I was grief-stricken and angry and heavy, and really there wasn’t much else to do but try a different approach. There wasn’t much else to do but cry. The way that I think about it now is that if we don’t let that energy out somehow, it stays stuck. If we don’t find an outlet for the sadness that we feel, it weighs us down and sometimes comes out in distorted ways.
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