Solstice Greetings
This is the time of year when we create our own light. It is not a coincidence that throughout Chanukah a few weeks ago candles blazed nightly, or that Christmas lights adorn and glitter through our cities and towns, as if we have tugged the stars down to earth to be with us in the dark.
We need light at the end of December.
It seems suiting to me to send this post on the day that the sun begins its return. The idea of The Art Of Therapy blog is to share some of the varieties of light I’ve picked up, developed and learned from others in working as a therapist for the last eight years. Supporting someone in pain requires going with them into the dark, and I am humbled daily when I sit with people who let me travel alongside with my lantern of therapy beside them, to feelings and memories and corners of their being that they didn’t even know existed.
The blog below explores what seems on the surface a very simple idea: of tears as healing.
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Some Thoughts On Tears
IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT MOST PEOPLE feel lighter after crying. Biochemist William Frey concluded that emotional tears actually release body toxins, such as manganese and prolactin, and that tears bath our eyes with lysozyme, cleansing and protecting our sight from germs. So, tears help us feel better, and they also aid us in cleaning our windows to the world. In my practice, I’ve noticed tears can sharpen our inside vision, as well. A client weighted down by self-doubt once said, after wiping his eyes—a kind of calm after the emotional storm—“My mind is clearer now. It’s not chattering at me or making me question myself.”
He paused.
“I feel peace.”
Another client shared with me that her heart had felt “waterlogged” until she had tears, and she reported later on that she had made bold decisions in the weeks afterward. She could feel more of her actual experience, and she saw more clearly what she needed to do.
Many people say, after crying, “I needed that.” As if they had come in from a sauna, a massage or a nine-hour sleep.
There is a kind of age-old wisdom at work here when we literally express our pain, over depressing our pain. But what if it feels almost impossible to surrender to tears? Or what if once tears start they are hard to stop?
Difficulty Surrendering
Our tendency to avoid emotional pain is easy to understand. Culturally, vulnerability is not often supported and encouraged for men or women. Just think of the taunts: Crybaby. Boys Don’t Cry. Don’t Be A Girl. (Which manages to insult both sexes in four short words.) Or, I’ll give you something to cry about, which sews distrust, shame and terror into a single line. It’s no wonder there is a self-stigma and defensiveness in many of us about tears!
So, sure, it’s good for us to cry, but it’s not always easy. And to even be able to nudge closer to crying, we have to feel. When I ask people, “How are you feeling right now?” many respond blankly, or gaze at me like I’m speaking to them in some forgotten Sumerian dialect. They have often worked for years to defend against expressing their fear, shame and sadness—with the tenacity some would fight for their lives.
The question of crying then transforms into: how do we find our way back to feeling?
Here are a number of strategies and ideas I encourage people to do outside of the sessions to help begin to explore how they feel—which is one doorway to tears.
– Take a risk to share something difficult you have had happen (big or small) with a person you have faith in, who listens well and who will hold your life gently, as you reveal a part of it to them.
– On our own, there are ways we can connect to our emotions as well. Make some time to simply notice the sensations in our bodies. We can turn off our smart phone, music, TV, and the internet and just sit with ourselves and take a deep breath. Lewis C.K. has a great wisdom and humour around cell phones in particular on this subject.
– Don’t worry if you can’t always name the emotions that arise. Just notice the sensations. I think of sensations as new-born emotions, ones which we haven’t got to know well enough to name yet.
– Franz Kafka wrote: “Sit in silence and the world will fall in ecstasy at your feet.” It may also be that pain or joy or un-felt emotions are waiting to fall at our feet.
– Scan your body. You can start at the top of your head and say out loud (or in your mind—I sometimes do this on the subway before work): “I notice that…” (my forehead is tight… my mind is spinning with thoughts… my stomach is uneasy… I’m really tired… I’m feeling kind of anxious about in my ribs about…)
– Some of my clients express a fear that staying with how they feel may literally make them “crazy.” One client describes his unfelt emotions as a “megalith of pain” and a “castle of pain”. This fear, while perhaps relevant in cases of someone who has faced extreme trauma or attachment breaks, or who has a fragmented personality due to a serious mental illness, is bigger in theory than in reality. In fact, emotions will pass more quickly if we let them course through.
When Tears Keep Coming
I also work with clients on the other side of the crying continuum—those who cry very easily. They may tear up at the start of the session, and cry with the rhythm and consistency of breathing. This form of crying can, in some instances, actually act as a defence against feeling. How then to get to the tears beyond the tears?
The above list of thoughts and ideas are just as relevant. In some of my earlier posts, I wrote about our defenses. All of us have developed brilliant and creative defenses to survive when we were younger and were faced with something overwhelming. Someone who cries a lot, and has trouble stopping, may be finding a way to stay away from the feelings of grief that lie underneath those tears. They may have gotten initial comfort or tenderness or attention from their tears. But not the safety and comfort they needed.
In one client I worked with, who cried often in our sessions, she said she wanted to “learn to stop” crying. It was affecting her work, her ability to feel confident. I noticed that her crying was almost like a nervous tick, an anxious response like trembling hands or a quavering voice. But she was told that it gave the message that she was unable to handle herself in stress situations. Paradoxically, when we explored the underlying pain that this client felt, and I encouraged her to stay with those body sensations, her crying became harder and louder, her body shook, and after sometime, her tears stopped. She was very quiet for the next few minutes. She said, “Those tears felt different.”
They were tears of grief.
In the end – no matter our current relationship with tears – all therapy and healing is about grief, small or big. It is about letting go of what area we cannot change, and feeling our present state as fully as we can. It is scary. It is unknown. It is about walking up to a small wall of discomfort, or a mid-sized wall of sadness, or a wailing wall of grief and—instead of turning from it—we put our hands up to its coarseness and stay with it. Feel its grain. Feel its immovability. It’s existence. It’s unstop-ability. And that’s when the tears may come. And when the wall begins to dissolve.
