Just Cry When You're Sad

"But I don't want to be weak", he said.

We humans can use our intellect to totally delude ourselves about who and what we are.  We like to think we are cool, rational, sentient beings.  We like to think that we are thinking beings who feel.  But this is not the case.  On a PBS documentary about the human brain a researcher made the observation that we are not thinking organisms which feel, but feeling organisms which think.  That is it, in a nutshell.

Our emotions are our radars which give us intuitive information about the world.  We should use this information to make decisions.  But instead, we use our mighty brains to convince ourselves that emotions are "weak" and to try to block them off.  We then try to make decisions without the valuable information our emotions would have provided and end up messing up our lives and feeling bewildered.  What went wrong?

The man above had just lost his beloved father.  This man stood by his son through years of drug abuse and other torments.  He never gave up on him.  And now he was gone.  And he was sad.  And he believed that grieving for him was a sign of weakness.

Nonsense!

It was a tribute to the years of love and support he provided to him.  Love and support that are now gone forever.  I asked him what he would think if he went to the funeral of someone he knew to be a very good man and a loving father and saw that none of his children were crying.  He thought for a minute, then I saw the light come on.  He was denying in himself what he woulld expect as normal behavior in others. 

When I asked him how he felt after he cried, he thought for a minute and said, "Better!"  He looked surprised.  "Right!" I said.

We cry when we are sad.  This is as simple as it gets. We just make it hard.

Comments

[jss]

Easier said than done. When the message is strong that crying is unacceptable it becomes almost physically impossible... no matter how sad one might feel. I would even take it a (big) step further to say that living in an environment where crying is not acceptable generally means living in an environment where sadness is unacceptable. It is amazing how one can become so completely disconnected from the feeling of sadness to the point that it is unrecognizable as such.

[Solutions Therapy]

Hi jss,

Youre absolutely right. Crying is an expression of sadness and if we deny crying we deny someones ability to express sadness. You are also right that the more we deny any emotion the less able we become to recognize it when it occurs. If, through hard work, we finally learn to recognize it, we have no experience of what to do with it. And after years of denying it, we may have years of sorrow dammed up that comes bursting forth and has ato be processed. Thats why I feel it is so important not to pass this on to our children and future generations.

Thank you, as always, for your lucid and insightful feedback.

Peace,

Kellen

[Theresa]

Yet, I am one of those who will cry for days, even weeks, when sad. I WANT to be able to damn up the flow of tears. It affects every aspect of my life. I truly envy those who can, at least to some extent, hide their grief from the world.