The Value of Tears
Several times a week, clients gingerly show me the tender places in their hearts, accompanied by their tears. People often desire to either bypass these vulnerable emotions that are rising up, or to press them back down, deep inside themselves. It’s not unusual for tears or emotions to be quickly followed by a profuse apology, as though feeling itself is something shameful.
Unfortunately, this is a message that has been reinforced in our Western world for a long time. Historically, logic and reason have been privileged and separated out from emotion, instinct, spirit and body, as if they are not all parts of our wholeness. In her new book on embodiment, The Wisdom Of Your Body, Hillary McBride, Clinical Psychologist and Researcher, concisely traces the roots of this splitting back to Plato, Descartes and Gnosticism. She highlights, “it is precisely because we are so immersed in being bodies - and because our collective thinking has been shaped by a particular cultural framework of post-Enlightenment, settler colonialism; heterosexism; supremacy of white bodies; and patriarchy - that we often forget that the body is the very center of our existence.” It’s also the container for all of our emotions.
Give these journalling prompts a try, it’s usually an interesting mental exercise:
What did you learn about emotion from your family? How did they show their emotions?
Which emotions were allowed to be expressed? Which were absent?
Was it the same for your brother or sister?
How about in your sports teams? Spiritual tradition? Workplace or industry?
Have you experienced policies, practices or rituals to help hold space for difficult emotions?
Have your tears been normalized as part of the human experience? Have they been viewed as evidence of your big caring heart? Or were they swept away into private domains, or worse, punished or pathologized?
We live in a society that over time has diminished the value of tears, using pejorative labels, often divided along a binary view of gender, to shame away this form of self-expression. The late bell hooks, feminist, cultural critic and author of the book all about love, writes, “The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on, that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.” Not very spacious is it? We’re conveniently forgetting that we all enter the world crying. In the birthing context, crying is one of the first signs of life that we look for. Why now, has it become an action to feel ashamed of or apologize about rather than a sign of life?
And yet, tears are important information from our body about what matters to us. Sometimes they are about grief or sorrow, love lost or precious memories. Other times they reflect a depth of joy or awe as we encounter deeper life experiences. Still other times they are part of rage, showing us the intensity of our need for boundaries, mutual respect or justice. Tears are not limited to sadness, but rather alert us to something important.
We also cannot continue to ignore the obvious, that crying is a natural, built-in, physiological reaction to our context and environment. Water is literally moving through and out of our body via the direction of our autonomic (read involuntary) nervous system. As a species, we come with tear ducts, which serve several important functions. And yet our society treats crying like personal weakness, attention-seeking, or melodrama. What if we chose to make different meanings about tears?
In her bestselling book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote,“There are times in a woman’s life when she cries and cries and cries, and even though she has the succor and support of her loved ones, still and yet she cries… Tears are part of the mending of rips in the psyche where energy has leaked and leaked away. The matter is serious, but the worst does not occur – our light is not stolen – for tears make us conscious. There is no chance to go back to sleep when one is weeping.”
Have you ever had an experience like this? Where your tears were an important part of you being highly attuned to your life? Where your courage to be vulnerable actually deepened a relationship, allowed you to shift a pattern, or made you more resilient from shame? Author and Social Worker Brené Brown has dedicated her life’s work to exploring and articulating the power of vulnerability to transform our lives. In her book Daring Greatly she writes, “As children we found ways to protect ourselves from vulnerability , from being hurt, diminished, and disappointed. We put on armour…and we learned how to make ourselves scarce, even to disappear. Now as adults we realize that to live with courage, purpose, and connection - to be the person whom we long to be - we must again be vulnerable. We must take off the armor, put down the weapons, show up, and let ourselves be seen.”
So how do we do this exactly? Well, for starters it involves welcoming the tears in. Allowing our body to move through this very natural physiological response. Sometimes people fear if they start to allow an emotion, it will not stop. More often than not, emotion is more like a wave, with a rising crest and a diminishing trough. Tears often flow through in a similar manner. You couldn’t cry non-stop even if you wanted to (you’d run out of water).
After we’ve allowed some space for this body response we might explore the information that tears have for us. In counselling this might sound like, “If these tears could speak, what would they say” or in art therapy, “If these tears could make a picture, what would it look like? What colours and shapes would we see?” We might explore, “What do these tears need right now?” and try out some self-soothing or co-regulation strategies so you feel a little less alone, and your nervous system knows we’ve gotten the message that something here is important. Often when we’ve allowed the tears to come out, and not judged ourselves for feeling, we discover a new spaciousness or clarity inside. Sometimes we have to dismantle some of the narratives we’ve been taught about tears and unpack the core beliefs that we’ve inherited. In this way we start to see a reunion of all the different parts of ourselves.
As psychologist Pamela Moskie writes from a yoga psychology perspective, “as I engage with my life force as a spiritual practice, and I come to know it through yoking the mind and the body I then can see my own small and natural existence as part of something larger…My authentic expression of movement and feeling is like a voice in a larger symphony. I sing the song of my authentic expression, a holy mark on the fabric of a larger tapestry. When I cry I lay myself bare at the altar of my humanity…”
