Why Crying Every Day Makes Me Feel Happier and Lighter

And what happened when I faced my depression

Let it flow! (Image courtesy of worldofmiri.com)

“Depression freezes, but sadness flows. (… )

Grief (…) is depression’s cure.”

Terrence Real, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”

When I finally mastered the courage to face my depression, I released an overwhelming amount of tears. The sadness seemed endless. I spent hours crying, letting go of bottled-up pain, sadness, fear, and shame I had never allowed myself to feel.

During this time, a memory surfaced. I remembered how I consciously stopped crying when I was about eight years old. I chose to stop feeling or expressing any of the so-called ‘negative’ emotions, like fear, grief, pain, or shame. Whenever I was confronted with someone else’s tears, I felt uncomfortable.

Karla McLaren, an award-winning author and empathy pioneer, whose lifework is focused on emotions, says:

“Notice … the ways that we disrespect sad people: Gloomy Gus, Crybaby, Weakling, Boys don’t cry, Big girls don’t cry, There’s no use crying over spilled milk, Stop your sniveling, and so on. I know I’m not the only person who has felt that crying in public would be a very dangerous thing, because it can mean that we’ll lose face in our emotionally-stunted world. The message is clear: Crying is not okay, and sadness is something to avoid. Completely, if possible.”

https://karlamclaren.com/welcoming-the-gifts-of-sadness/

Is it Time to Understand the Power in Our Sadness?

Walking through my depression taught me the importance of acknowledging my emotions for healing. They act as messengers, help release old trauma, and point me towards what needs to be addressed and where change is needed.

On her website, Karla specifies her view of sadness:

“Sadness is the wonderful emotion that helps you let go of things that aren’t working anyway. Most of us avoid sadness as if it is the thing that created the loss in the first place. It isn’t. In its healthy state, sadness is evoked by the fact that you need to let go of something. Listening to sadness can help you let go of things that don’t work so that you can make room for things that do. ….. Just as it is with any other emotion, sadness shouldn’t hang around forever. It should do its job and move onward. …

https://karlamclaren.com/emotional-vocabulary-page/

Why Numbing Our Emotions Simply Prolongs the Darkness

What happened to me after making the decision to stop feeling certain emotions? Could it be that accumulating those feelings, instead of allowing them to flow, played a role in my depressive states?

In his book “I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression”, Terrence Real says:

“Depression is not really a feeling; it is a condition of numbness (…).

 I differentiate between states and feelings. States are global, diffuse, impersonal. One’s relationship to a state is passive, disembodied. Feelings, in contrast to states, are specific, anchored in the body of one’s experience.

Depression is a state. Sadness and anger are feelings. Anxiety is a state. Fear is a feeling. Intoxication is a state. Happiness is a feeling. (…)

The cure for states is feelings.

(…) Feelings will run their own course in due time. (…) Feelings are not endless, but our numbing attempts to avoid them can last a lifetime.”

p. 285-286 “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” by Terrence Real, published 1997 by Simon & Schuster New York

Choosing not to feel certain emotions was my numbing act. Sometimes, my emotions erupted, uncontrollably, because I didn’t have any energy left to suppress them. Often, I added external numbing aids, like alcohol, or excessive eating, to help me stay in control. Of course, this did not address the underlying issues, but simply prolonged my depression.

My healing journey took many years and is still ongoing. In hindsight, I believe allowing myself to cry and release what I’d been bottling up, was key to moving forward. This journey has neither been easy, nor pretty. The excessive crying left me exhausted.

However, eventually a day came when the deep, dark grief grappling with my heart seemed to have lifted. This does not mean I do not feel sadness any more. Quite the contrary is true. I now allow myself to cry every day. When sadness overwhelms me, I shed my tears. This form of crying hardly lasts longer than a few minutes and afterwards I feel lighter and more at ease. I feel more aligned with my emotions, and I am allowing them to flow again. At least, most of the time.

What about you? Do you allow your tears to flow?