TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore two different categories of crying, two different types of crying, which are polar opposites of each other. The first type of crying is what I consider to be the healthy type of crying, and that is grief crying. That is crying that is fundamentally, intrinsically related to grieving. It feels good to cry this way. It’s releasing something. It is honoring the loss, and inside of this crying, there’s some connection to the true self. There’s a channel to the true self that’s being opened up, and the crying is coming from the true self who is mourning what he has lost, she has lost, the ways in which the true self has been violated. This type of crying makes someone feel and become less stuck. The person is coming out of depression. It’s like there’s a big dark sad miserable cloud over the person, a big gray cloud, and now the gray cloud is bursting open, and it’s giving way to blue skies. The depression in someone’s soul, inside of them, buried for so long, is finally opening up to connection, to healing. And yes, this type of crying feels good. I think of myself as a psychotherapist watching people do this type of crying, and what I found fascinating in it is that they looked younger when they cried this way. Literally, I could see older people or people whose faces looked older than their own age transformed. Something happened, and they looked young. Sometimes I could see the child who had once been within them right there, showing on their faces. Their eyes looked different. Also, people looked beautiful when they were crying in this type of way, grieving crying. And I saw all these things in myself. I felt beautiful when I was crying also. I just knew intuitively that this type of crying was good for me. It was helping me. It was helping me move forward on my healing path. This was a demarcation of healing, and I’ve heard this from other people often. They just know. They can feel it. This is good. I remember having psychotherapy clients break down and just start grieving in this way of crying, like this, in the middle of a session. And they would just say, “Oh my God, this is what I’ve been waiting for. This is good.” They knew it. They didn’t have to hear me say it. Now I want to come to the other type of crying, and I call this stuck crying. It’s the polar opposite. It’s the type of crying that isn’t releasing historical traumas, isn’t releasing historical feelings. It’s disconnected somehow from the true self. It is an expression of despair and misery and frustration. I think if this type of crying had words, it would say, “Ah, I’m a victim of life. Nothing will change. I’m frustrated. I hate myself. Nothing, nothing will get better.” It’s a sign of not growing. Often, it’s an expression simply of depression—depression being stuckness, feeling hopeless and miserable. I’ve heard people say, “Is this grieving?” I don’t know. It feels horrible. Often their faces look older when they’re happy. When this is happening, their faces look tight and unhappy. They can question even more. They can feel more like they’re off the track in their life, and often this type of crying is an expression of how much off the track they are. I’ve heard it said—I remember reading it somewhere even—that there are ways to do chemical analyses of the composition of people’s tears, where they can look at the tears that come out of people’s eyes and see what chemicals are in them. I don’t remember if this article said it could distinguish between these two different types of crying, but I would speculate that these two different types of crying would be reflected even chemically in the composition of people’s tears. I’ve often noticed how I felt when I watched people doing this second type of crying, stuck crying. I remember myself feeling, as a reflection of how they were feeling, uncomfortable, not happy, feeling sort of hopeless and miserable myself, feeling self-questioning, like, “What can I do? I know I’m not doing something that I maybe could or should be doing. How can I help this person?” Whereas when I witnessed someone, observed someone doing grieving, grief crying, I often felt a sense of simultaneous relief, like, “Ah yes, this is letting go,” where the other type of crying was like holding on tighter. What can help someone do more grieving? I think anything that furthers the growth process—studying oneself, studying one’s traumatic history, getting away from abusers, setting better boundaries, cutting unhealthy people out of one’s life, trusting oneself to feel one’s feelings more and more—this sets the stage for grieving. What can lead people to feel more stuck in their lives and to do more stuck crying? Well, doing the opposite—not exploring people, their own history, not exploring all the painful things that happen, pushing the feelings down, burying it in a way, blocking the growth process in order to feel more dissociated, to feel better now. I think sometimes when people take certain psychiatric drugs, take different kinds of illicit drugs, recreational drugs, it can block the growth process, and such that over the long haul, people can end up being in a position where they’re not exhuming their pain so much, and they can cry out of desperation. They can feel like victims of life. They can wallow in their pain such that they’re not moving forward. I will say this: that in my life, I have experienced quite a lot of both of these types of crying—the stuck crying, the wallowing miserable crying. That’s much more the history of my childhood, the history of even my teen years, where it was like I couldn’t allow myself to be vulnerable enough to grow. I was still stuck so deeply embedded in my family system that I couldn’t bear to move forward. I couldn’t bear to face the rejection of my parents. I needed to stay shut down and strong and fake and artificial. I was so desperate and in such pain that when tears eventually did burst or find their ways out, I didn’t like them. I hated them. I wanted to push them down. I fought them. I was like, I felt embarrassed and ashamed of myself. And then came my 20s and my 30s—those two decades of my life when there was a profound amount of grieving. I was largely out of my family system, eventually out of my family system entirely, and only had to face how embedded my family system was in me. Slowly, I was ridding myself of that, and the more that I studied my history, studied how I’d been traumatized, allowed myself, and was in a position to allow myself to feel all that pain and horror and violation, the more that I sobbed. And that crying, it felt wonderful. It propelled me forward, and I said, “Oh my God, more! I can only pray and hope for more of this in my life because this is a testament to how much I am changing, how much more I love myself. This is a testament to my healing process, and this is a testament to the newfound hope that is coming into my life.” [Music]