I cried the other day. Unexpectedly, and yet, not. I was lying on my acupuncturist’s table for my first-ever acupuncture treatment. She was putting a needle in my left foot when I shared, “I feel like I’m going to cry.” And then I welled right up, and breathed some deep breaths through the release as tears flowed out and down towards my ears. Unfazed, she dabbed the tears dry and went back to placing needles.
I sobbed a few more times during that treatment, alone on the warm bed, music soothingly buoying my hearing self.
Historically, I have not been one to cry very much. I recall an awareness in my teen years of it having been years since I’d cried. And then in my early twenties while in seminary, I discovered Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings - a piece of music that just got me sobbing. For several years, whenever I felt like I needed the release of a good cry, I would play it, and like magical medicine, it would reliably undo me.
Over the years, I’ve been intrigued by crying. What is it? Why do we do it?
At some point, I googled to see what I could find out. I learned that we release toxins through our tears, which affirmed my intuition that it’s good to cry. Crying is restorative. But my (admittedly, limited) research left most of my questions unanswered.
I still wonder: what is going on in the brain when certain kinds of sensory inputs, or certain thoughts, cause us to cry? I don’t know about everyone, but I can physically feel the sensation begin: an area behind my nose, beneath my eyes, and above the soft palate in my mouth seems to wetly swell, and if the process continues, tears and snot emerge, and my abdomen convulses uncontrollably with sobs, which often draw in the participation of my voice: audible sobbing.
I learned, on a trip to Thailand sometime ago, that elephants are the only other animal, besides humans, known to cry. While this distinction may or may not remain true, what it suggests to me - because of the similarities between humans and elephants - is that our evolutionary adaptation of crying is interwoven with our highly complex social systems. It makes sense. Crying in one elicits compassion and tenderness in others. It pulls us together; strengthens our bonds.
Why, then, does such shame and embarrassment accompany crying? Many in my generation were blessed to grow up with the awesome record album, Free to Be… You and Me. It included the song, “It’s Alright to Cry.” Of course, stoic kid that I was, I thought the song was dorky and sappy so I tended to skip over it. In truth however, underneath, I was likely afraid that simply hearing it would make me cry.
What really miffs me, currently, is the trendy euphemism for crying: “getting emotional.” Crying is but one of many emotions!!! We’re already so inept at articulating the nuances of our many emotional states (I’m thinking of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication; a great process for managing interpersonal conflict). By taking the general term, “emotion,” and ascribing it to the specific emotional response of crying, we distance ourselves from truth, self-intimacy, and self-understanding. We feel safer, I guess, if we can - if only verbally - back away from the messiness and lack of control of crying.
But what of the consequences?
I believe that crying signals the presence of a deep and mysterious truth.
What might our tears teach us about our values and our passions? What if we stayed with them, let them flow, and gently observed the circumstances that sourced them? Who might we see ourselves to be, then?