Normalize crying.
I was watching The Voice the other day and one of the contestants said something like, “I didn’t know I was going to cry today” and I thought to myself, “What is with people being surprised when they cry? Do they really not cry that often that when they cry it’s a shock to them?”
I cry all the time. I go into most days just assuming I’m going to cry. And then I went down this rabbit hole of thought of how people, particularly men, would view that as a weakness. Many men take a “just get over it” or “mind over matter” approach to their emotions. From what we know about body-mind science, this is silly. If emotional stress is brewing in your body, self-regulation is needed and crying is a totally valid form of self-regulation. In fact, there’s only a twenty percent chance that telling yourself to not cry is going to actually resolve emotional tension because only twenty percent of our nervous system regulation happens from the brain down. Eighty percent happens physiologically. All these “tough people” holding it in all the time are actually just closing the door on emotions that come knocking which isn’t really tough at all. Tough people keep their doors open so that these emotions can come and go as they please. Resisting them just leads to their eventual bubbling over and this is why there’s so much rage and anger and violence in the world. Unfortunately, this is what our society has come to view as strength but I think strength is keeping our doors open, weathering the emotional storms, and letting the tears fall as they may.
So next time you cry, don’t view it as not being able to handle your emotions. You’re actually quite literally handling yourself and anyone who says otherwise probably can’t handle themselves.
