Tears as a therapy: Women and men about expressing emotions
EMOTION IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF OUR LIFE although at different times and in different cultures their manifestation was and remains taboo. We recently found out what scientists think about the evolutionary meaning of tears and why psychologists agree that crying is normal. In order to back up the theory with life experience, we talked with women and men of different ages and occupations about what place tears take in their lives and why this simple feeling does not add up to this manifestation of feelings.
I often cried in childhood, I cry a lot now. The most difficult tears - from self-pity. Most often they happen at home, with family, and in these conditions it is most difficult for me to calm down. When I feel that someone is worried about me and begins to regret, that's all, I cannot be stopped. Even if you go into a corner to calm down, they continue to actively regret you. Recently, I thought: if it is so hard for me to resist, then maybe I need to do the opposite: throw my mother into an embrace and surrender to tears? Mom was perplexed when I approached her, having burnt my soup, and sobbed theatrically. Oddly enough, it helped calm down.
Another thing - at work. In the same workplace, I was a junior employee, everyone loved (and felt sorry for me), so I continued to cry. When I changed jobs, I realized that no one else knows what kind of cry I am, and I have a chance to improve. Now, when I start to feel sorry for myself, I try to stop thinking about what has hurt me. I love “quick” tears the most: I gave a little slack - and that's enough. This happens when I remember something that I have already experienced, coped with, but I still feel a little sorry for myself. In such cases, simply switch to another topic. Be that as it may, others notice when you have eyes in a wet place. Here the main thing for me is not to give anyone a chance to pity me. "We drove!" - that's all.
There are tears for which people are not ashamed: for example, if the movie is sad, when someone died or, on the contrary, if the reason is happy (when someone gets married). Such tears are very rare for me, even a little hurt: when it would seem appropriate to cry, you cannot. As if all the tears spent on nonsense, and now wait until they accumulate. After a large portion of the cry, I feel very good. Someone screams during stress, I cry. The nervous system relaxes, as if it is rebooting, and I feel a surge of strength.
When I was a child, when I hurt my head against a table, grandfather asked me to calm me down: did the table remain a whole? It almost always worked, and even as a child I was not particularly whiny. By the age of 14, I stopped crying at all. From everything that caused tears in my childhood - annoyance, pain, an overabundance of emotions - I began to get angry and resent rather. Even in the most difficult situations from a psychological point of view (for example, when relatives died) I didn’t cry - I was just sleepy all the time.
At about 20 years old, I began to show extraordinary sensitivity while listening to music: tears came to my eyes, a lump appeared in my throat, but at the same time my heart was not at all sad. Such tears from the music - the next step after the goose bumps, but with a pronounced melancholic color. You can put a mean tear under the sad album of PJ Harvey, and under the touching aria of Maria Callas you can even reach the pronounced swelling of the nose and face. True, it never lasts longer than five to seven minutes. The same music acts differently at different times: I can rejoice at the song, over which I shed a little cry last week. It all depends on the life situation and the internal heat. We can also highlight the intoxicating tears: alcohol contributes to the emancipation (often not very healthy), and in a fit of self-pity and its "inhuman" circumstances, a throat can also approach.
Sometimes it is healing to cry, although I have been taught that it is not a man’s business to allow yourself such expressions of emotion in communicating with other people. But for a long time to cry over grief or tragedy, it seems to me, it is dangerous. While you are crying, you are very vulnerable, but you should pack up - and quickly take your feet away from the gloomy life circumstances, or at least change your attitude towards the inevitable. Now physical pleasure, similar to the satisfaction of tears, I extract from the laughter. If you see a reason to laugh where it used to be loaded, it is possible that with time the reaction to stress will soften.
The last time I burst into tears was when I read an article about girls who brutally killed animals. I was scared that children grow up sadists. Programs about orphanages and orphans, unfairly offended people or animals often cause tears in me. But in general, I rarely cry. Now I work as a pediatrician, but before that I had worked 20 years in children's intensive care unit and during that time I saw a lot of human grief. Something from the patient's stories hurt me a lot, something went almost unnoticed. But in any case, I always tried not to dive deep into the grief of others: it would prevent my work. The head of the resuscitator should work soberly, think clearly and make decisions quickly, and pity and emotions in this very much interfere. It may be very hard, but it is still a job. When patients are sick, doctors do not cry at all: this is not just some kind of code, but a professional feature. Death in reanimation is possible and usual, therefore here are always ready for it. And if you succumb to the feelings and sob after each death, you can get into a mental hospital.
In my personal life, I treat my tears with understanding: I am not a robot, I have emotions, and if I worry about them, it means that I live. Still trying to cry alone. I do not think that tears are a weakness that cannot be shown, but this is an emotion, but why should outsiders know about my feelings? This is my personal position. I feel uncomfortable when they pity me, I can allow it only to my man, and I try not to abuse his feelings. Of course, I happen to cry on the shoulder of a friend, but for me this is an extreme case. When I have to feel deeply in public, it seems that I have become more comprehensible and close for them, but not with everyone I am ready to come closer. Tears are very different - sincere and insincere. If someone is crying next to me, I will certainly show participation and offer my help, but if I feel hypocrisy and theatricality, the desire to get profit or pity, I will remain indifferent and just leave.
I freely cry if there are reasons for this. Fortunately, in the form of "I could not stand it, I broke off and wept" there are almost none. There are two ways to cry that I regularly use. Firstly, it is very pleasant to cry after a good movie. The last time it was from the picture "Man - Swiss Knife", before that - from "It is good to be quiet." In general, these films are not very many, but, for example, Pixar cartoons sometimes seem to squeeze out a tear on purpose. Instead of "squeezing a tear," you can say more pathetically: cause catharsis. That is, if a work of art tends to cause me anxiety, I do not particularly resist. The second way to cry is quite unusual. At the end of a particularly difficult day, I sit down to meditate and try to relax the facial muscles. If it works, my tears start to flow. This lasts a few minutes, after which you can meditate in the usual way. I do not know where this skill came from, it is relatively new to me. It relieves stress very well.
I prefer to experience deep feelings without witnesses. I can well imagine myself leaving the cinema in tears, but, for example, I will experience the death of my beloved cat alone. This applies to any emotions, not just tears. In my work, do not hold back feelings, but hugging and crying with each client is not the best idea. One of the tasks of the therapist is to withstand any emotional manifestations of clients, including tears. If the therapist begins to cry in response, he may be suspected of being too involved in the situation and also unable to cope with the surging emotions. The therapist must say with all his face: "Well, yes, horror. But not horror, horror." Probably, that is why I try not to cry in public: many people suffer heavy negative emotions, they try to quickly fix or stop everything. On my own therapy, I, of course, cried, although I preferred to do it after the session. And once I climbed under the table and cried there for two days with breaks for food and sleep.
Years before 12, I sobbed regularly. For me it was a kind of problem solving. She cried - everyone got scared, felt guilty and made a concession. But then I decided that I didn’t like it at all. I began to tell myself that tears do not really solve problems, and stopped crying all the time. I can hardly remember when it was the last time. Not that I had no reason to cry - probably, you can always find a reason. It just seems to me that crying with someone is ugly, and sometimes even ostentatious.
When I was in school, I had a classmate who threw tantrums with tears, snot and other charms almost every day, and it always enraged me. She could cry from not particularly significant two and calm down after a couple of minutes. Because of this, I always thought she was terribly insincere. In general, for me, tears are something very personal: if you are crying with someone, it means that you either trust this person very much, or something really serious happens to you.
Every day a lot of things happen to us, and sometimes it happens that you get very upset, you do not have time to think about the situation - and suddenly you feel a huge lump rise up to your throat, and your eyes are in a wet place. In order not to cry on people, in such situations I try to get angry as much as possible. It doesn’t matter who or what: on himself, others or just the situation. If it turns out, then the desire to cry immediately leaves. But still sometimes it is necessary to cry. It helps to throw away the accumulated negative and relax. In such cases, it is necessary that there be a very close person nearby who could listen to my complaints, look at my red face, give a napkin, stroke my head, eventually. After this, it definitely becomes easier for me and there are forces to still get up and go to solve my problems.
In childhood - probably, like everyone else - I cried often enough, and most often from injustice (perhaps imaginary). "Well, dismissed the nurses! ..." - such a misunderstanding plunged me into horror and despair. When I was a teenager, my beloved grandmother died, and somehow I did not immediately understand. And once I went to the cemetery and remembered how she told me about the afterlife - and here she began to cry, entering in crying more and more, until she began to cry with lamentations, asking for her forgiveness. At the same time, I remember that, with relief, I felt some kind of awkwardness, almost shame that I roared like a village grandmother. I even secretly looked around - does anyone see.
Later, as an adult, attending a funeral and a requiem, I sometimes urged myself to cry grief. Tears appeared, but never did I reach such a mournful ecstasy, as at the grave of my grandmother. The exception was the death of my best friend in January 2010. I was on tour in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk when I learned about his demise, and suddenly I felt such orphanhood, such an abandonment, that I burst into tears at the hotel all night. They even knocked me on the door — how could I help? I thanked, apologized, but the tears continued to flow.
For a dramatic actor, tears are necessary. You can catch the spotlight with your eyes to shed tears, but it is ideal when you are so involved in the fate of the hero that your tears are real. In case of "dry eyes" there is a reliable way: transfer to one's own destiny (loss of a loved one or other grief). Sometimes I remember how I was separated from my village dog when it came time to leave for Moscow: they tied her around the house, but she came running after me to the station with a tattered rope. Without letting us say goodbye, I was shoved into the vestibule, and thrown into the pond. I shouted and cried, calling the fascists the whole carriage of insensitive adults. With age, I seem to be becoming more sensitive and unnecessarily tearful. It happens in my practice that the events of the work are pushed to the tears of sympathy for an artist. Here I have to restrain myself with all my might, remembering the rule: "The audience in the hall must cry, not the artist on the stage."
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