Crying

 I kid you not. It was the hardest I’ve cried since my childhood. And I learned about myself as it happened.

I won’t tell you what sent me over the edge, but once I got over the edge, I leaned into it. I recalled many experiences that I haven’t thought of in a long time; experiences that hurt me just a little bit, but never enough to cry about, and some never enough to talk about. But they came back to me, and I let them out.

Crying is the body’s natural way of processing trauma and relieving emotional stress. If you can do it with a safe person, or in a safe place, without fear of injury or invalidation, it will actually make you STRONGER. When the brain accesses emotional pain and exposes it to a safe experience, it lets go of fear and shame. It gives you more capacity to do hard and scary things. It gives you more capacity to enjoy things.

Very few people needed to learn how to cry as babies. But many of us learned how to NOT cry (and must now relearn). This may have served a useful purpose at some point, especially in families and cultures where crying was not tolerated. But chances are, if you have mental illness or built up stress, you could use a dose of your body’s natural healing method.

You might think, “but I already cry uncontrollably!”. The tears are bursting out against your will because you aren’t giving yourself enough space to cry on purpose. Crying on accident–at the wrong time and place–hurts. Crying because we WANT to is healing. Experiences trigger crying if they bear some similarity to previous unprocessed emotions (which are stored in the brain whether you like it or not). You are crying about EVERYTHING, not just the seemingly small thing that happened today. Let it happen, and while you have those brain pathways open, see what other things you are crying about. You’ll be surprised what you learn.