A Mother’s Journey to Find Her Tears
I sat on the end of the bed. My face pulled downward while my lip quivered. My husband and I had just had an argument. But what was most distressing wasn’t the argument or what meaning I was trying to assign to it, it was that my cheeks were dry.
I realized that evening that it had been over a year since I had cried. It wasn’t because I was always happy. In fact, I had experienced a lot of sadness in that year. But no matter how sad I felt, my tears wouldn’t come. It was as if they were locked away deep inside me and I had misplaced the key.
Why People Need To Cry
Over the past three years I have become immersed in the work of Dr. Gordon Neufeld. A developmental psychologist, he has produced numerous courses on different challenges that parents face, why those challenges arise in the first place, and how we can best support our children in non-traditional environments that don’t make that easy.
One of the things that he talks about frequently is the role of tears in development. How this inconvenience that parents of recent generations have tried to shutdown are actually necessary for children to feel. Not just so that they can learn what different feelings feel like in the body and that all emotions are part of the human experience, as many parenting guides will tell you, but because they signal that the cryer is moving on to the next phase of human development. When a person can’t cry, they just keep spiraling, often experiencing (and exhibiting) anger, aggression, and “foul frustration.” And their ability to reach that next level disappears.
This Need Doesn’t Go Away In Adulthood
One thing our society struggles to understand is that much of what kids need is really just what all people need. This is particularly true if a need wasn’t met in childhood (in which case the adult may be experiencing a sort of arrested development), but in some cases it is true even if a need was met in childhood.
Such is the case with tears. Young children who are able to cry generally grow out of needing to do so frequently by 7 years of age, with normal development supported by conducive conditions. Very sensitive children who grow up in such conditions may experience a delay of about two years, but most kids—even those who didn’t grow up in an environment that supports human development—will grow out of it to a large extent by their mid-twenties. But the need to cry never completely goes away. The challenges of living a human existence continue throughout the lifespan and with them comes the need to cry from time-to-time.
The problem arises when tears become stuck and the person is not able to cry even when they feel the urge to do so. Because they aren’t able to move the emotion underlying the tears, it stays in the body just waiting to erupt—perhaps with yelling at your children instead of tears. In other words, if you have a goal of “yelling less,” being able to cry is a very useful preventative tool.
Three Practical Ways Adults Can Find Their Tears
So what is a parent supposed to do if they feel the need to cry but can’t ? Here are three ideas that worked for me to get things moving again and which I continue to use when I feel sad but can’t cry.
1. Watch the First Season of This Is Us
The subsequent seasons are good, but for me, at least, they didn’t draw out tears that consistently. That first season, though? I used to sneak downstairs after my husband went to sleep so that I could watch it alone, in the dark, and cry my eyes out.
Watching a sad TV show can be a great way for people who are a little hesitant of other people to co-regulate and support their nervous systems. (That’s right. Our nervous systems don’t just read the nervous systems of those physically with us, they also read the nervous systems of those behind screens.) Tear jerker storylines certainly help, but watching the actors navigate tough times and challenging feelings touches our nervous system in a way that just the storyline can’t do.
(Does the visual on the TV call forth too strong of a feeling in you, such that you feel compelled to switch it off? You can experience coregulation from a place of even greater safety by listening to a sad playlist. Two of my favorite sad songs are Me Voy by Julieta Venegas—possibly the greatest breakup song of all time—and Perfect by Ed Sheeran.)
2. Find a good Listening Partner
Listening Partners are one of my very favorite supports for parents and they take co-regulation up a notch from watching TV or listening to music. The idea is that you find another parent who you can vent to AND ALL THEY DO IS LISTEN. That last part is crucial and why I said a “good” Listening Partner. You aren’t looking for solutions from your Listening Partner, just mindful, loving presence. If you need an answer, it’s already inside you, waiting to be unlocked by empathic witnessing. And if you just need to cry? Words from your Listener are unlikely to get you there. Being deeply heard, on the other hand, might.
3. Do a Grief Meditation
Often, our tears are related to grief. Not the “big grief” of someone dying, but all the little griefs that we experience because life just isn’t turning out exactly as we had expected. Maybe we thought parenting would just be baking cookies and laughing together, but then we had kids and discovered that it was actually a tremendous amount of work. Maybe there is more drudgery in your paid employment that you had anticipated. Or maybe you are just really longing for some Salted Caramel ice cream, but the store was all out.
The point is, even if we haven’t lost a loved one, we all experience grief, and we do so on a near-daily basis. When we acknowledge that grief, we can often access our tears. This is why I love Dr. Laura Markham’s meditations on Healing Grief. When I am going through a challenging period and have identified something that isn’t working or isn’t what I’d hoped for, I do this meditation daily for about a week, opening my heart and finding my tears in the process.
Is it easy for you to cry? Any tips for what to do when someone needs to, but they can’t?