Feelings and Prejudices: Why we cry and that's fine

Recently, the social setting on the "positive" approaching the absurd, which is why we often feel an irrational shame for our own sadness. Such a simple and natural thing as tears becomes a crime against an unspoken life credo. According to National Geographic, for the life of the human body produces at least 61 liters of tears - it is difficult to believe that nature could supply us with so much of something useless and "indecent". The widespread stereotype that tears are weakness stigmatizes women and beats men's self-esteem. The director of the Sisters rehabilitation center, psychologist Olga Yurkova, and psychotherapist Dmitry Smirnov helped us figure out why we need to cry and what strength lies behind the ability to accept our emotions.

and moods. The enzyme lysozyme gives a tear bactericidal properties, making it the same antiseptic, like saliva or breast milk. Pain caused by children's tears may contain opioids that have an analgesic effect.

There are three types of tears. Basal (i.e., basic, basic) tears are constantly standing out to wet the eyes. With a lack of lacrimal secretion, irritation occurs - "dry eye" syndrome. In the pharmacy to fill the moisture you can buy a natural tear drops. Reflex tears flow in response to irritants: mote, onion fumes, tear gas. This is a method of emergency cleansing of the eyes from foreign particles. Emotional tears arise for subjective psychological reasons, only a person can cry. Such tears differ significantly in composition: they contain more protein, the hormones prolactin and corticotropin. In stressful situations, they can also appear adrenaline or norepinephrine.

Theories of crying

Elephants, seals, otters and, of course, crocodiles can make tears. True, for them it is a way to get rid of excess salt in the body without any sentiment. As for human crying, there are many theories of its occurrence. According to one of the ancients (XVI-XVII centuries), it was believed that when emotions warm up the heart, the body produces steam to cool it. It turned out that tears are a kind of emotional steam condensation that accumulates between the eyes and the brain when our pot starts to boil.

It was believed so until the Danish anatomist Niels Stensen discovered a tear gland in 1662 - however, the image was firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness and in many ways influenced Freud's ideas about catharsis. And in the 80s of the last century, researcher William Frey discovered protein in emotional tears and suggested that tears remove toxic substances formed during stress. Since then, there has not been a single study that confirms this idea, and yet it still seems to be plausible to many.

Today, scientists do not see a direct relationship between the number of shed tears and stress levels. The study of the dependence of mood on tears, conducted by Dutch scientists, gave not quite unambiguous results. The subjects were shown sad films, and those who did not cry while watching, reported a stable mood - both before watching, and 20 and 90 minutes later. Those who cried felt much worse after watching, but as time passed, they reported improved moods. Such an assessment is subjective, therefore it cannot be said whether the emotional state has really improved or whether it is a banal contrast.

How do tears govern our behavior

Weeping has features of the so-called displaced activity - like the "unmotivated" licking of fur in cats or a desire to drum fingers on the table or bite nails in people. Displaced activity is a defense mechanism of the psyche during an insoluble stressful situation. We usually react to danger with a desire to attack in order to defend oneself, or an attempt to escape, but when this is impossible, one can only lay low: this is a biological mechanism for “waiting” stress. Long-term concealment threatens with depression, which is dangerous for health, so that in tense situations “protective” nervous activity is manifested. Perhaps crying was originally one of its types - it distracted us, taking up the body with important things: deep breathing, shouting or howling.

Temple University psychology professor Jay Efran advanced a two-phase theory of the origin of crying. According to her, crying is a reaction to relaxation after tension. Getting into a stressful situation, the body is activated to take extra effort. After some time, the inhibition of the nervous system occurs. If the solution is found and successfully executed, the body is again out of danger and therefore can relax and rejuvenate. If it is impossible to find a way out, he decides to save power, since everything is useless.

Tears come precisely at the stage of inhibition, and not in the most acute situation, when all forces are spent on "survival." That is, according to Efran, not the tears themselves cause relaxation: we can cry only when we manage to relax. During sobs, we breathe in briefly and exhale for a long time, which slows down breathing and heartbeat; The throat, muscles and even the intestines relax. However, you can not cause relaxation, just shedding tears from a bow. So, when they say that it is harmful not to cry and keep everything in themselves, they mean not so much the absence of tears themselves, as the willingness to give yourself a break.

In the body of a man, the level of testosterone can decrease under the influence of the smell of female tears, and with it the level of aggression and sexual desire

Researchers increasingly see tears not as a reflex, but as a means of highly organized human communication. Infants can cry in the second or third month, and for a long time this remains their only way of communicating. Perhaps the chemical composition of emotional tears can really affect people around them even in adulthood. The experiment of Dr. Ed Wingrehots, a tear specialist from the University of Tiburg, demonstrated that the body of a man may be reduced by the smell of female tears by the level of testosterone, and with it the level of aggression and sexual attraction.

The task of the tears is to be a social trigger for empathy: this is indicated by research by an Israeli biologist, Dr. Oren Hasson. The snag is that the environment of the weeping must be tuned to it. Often, collective ethics does not imply sympathy, for example at a meeting of directors of a large firm. In such a situation, crying can bring not relief, but humiliation and a sense of shame. In Japan, they even invented a service for women experiencing stress at work: for $ 60, Ikemeso can come to the office — a “nice comforter” —to hug you and wipe away the tears.

physical or psychological violence, loss of the ability to work or the meaning of life, termination of a relationship - any deprivation of something or someone significant, including one’s own identity or hope for the future.

In popular psychology, there is a special term for this stage in a person's life - sorrow, and he has his own stages. The first is shock and numbness; the second is denial; the third is recognition of loss and pain; and the last is the acceptance of loss and rebirth. A person is often not able to cry at the first stage, when the psyche protects him from the awareness of what happened. The stages of mourning should replace each other over time, but sometimes a person cannot believe what happened to him and gets stuck on the first. To bring such a patient to tears is a real progress in therapy, and this is necessary, because the state of stupor can lead to serious diseases.

People from different cultures and eras have always understood that we need help in realizing grief. The mourners who came to the burial probably not only performed the ritual function, but also stimulated the deceased’s loved ones, in shock, to experience grief, preventing them from getting stuck at the anesthesia stage. Therefore, the worst that can be said to a grieving person is “not to cry.” Tears not only help alleviate emotional stress, but also put a person in a cultural situation of mourning, and this is the first step towards accepting grief.

Emotional tears do not exist on their own as a physiological reaction, experiences are behind them. Everyone has the right to fully live their feelings. In addition, we want and should be able to get the sympathy of loved ones. And in order to show it, it is enough just to be near and not try to save a person from the grief that he will have to go through himself. For example, in Japan there are groups of collective crying, and many participants, of course, feel relieved after the session. The support of others is the most important part of a person’s acceptance of his loss, because it is the surrounding people that will become a temporary replacement for what he has lost.

Why are tears often considered manipulation

Attitudes towards tears in society are not just associated with shame. Any strong emotions in a person who is not ready for empathy, cause rejection and denial. Unpreparedness to empathy, in turn, is often dictated by the same deep shame or fear. A vicious circle is being formed: it is embarrassing to cry, to sympathize with the one who is weeping - also, it is easier to deny his grief and not to trust him. In connection with this, a bias towards tears is formed as a method of manipulation. This is especially true of women's crying: there is a cultural stereotype that women are manipulators by nature and will achieve their goal by any means. The result of such preconceptions is to place the blame on the victim instead of emotional support.

Tears can really be a way of manipulation - in men and women, in adults and children. But how to distinguish real tears from false? Psychologists say that sociopathic personalities cry more often “to order”: they almost do not experience empathy and hardly feel a need for it, and they can even cry out of mercenary motives. Of course, actors are also able to cry of their own accord, but they often have to recall the life experience that led them to tears.

According to the classification of personal accentuations according to Karl Leonhard, demonstrative (or hysterical) personality types are most prone to tears as a method of manipulation. Such people are socially active, but are prone to acutely experiencing personal dramas and are characterized by increased anxiety, especially in matters relating to relationships. Despite the fact that such people seem to be experienced manipulators, the organization of their psyche is childish, vulnerable, so they often cry rather for self-defense than because of the need to achieve something from you.

But do not rush to catch everybody: in the end, the only obvious sign of manipulation is not tears, but what they are demanding from you to do something that you were not going to do. If someone is crying next to you, especially if this is a person with whom you are familiar, ask if he needs your help, if you need to stay with him, and if he wants to tell you what he is crying about. And be prepared for some time to sit silently.

Before adolescence, children differ more in temperament than in sex, but then everything starts to change: on average, girls cry 50-60% more often than boys. The first reason for this difference is hormonal.

In the female body produces a lot of prolactin, which is responsible not only for the production of milk from a pregnant and nursing mother, but also increases the tendency to tearfulness. In addition, even in the absence of a pronounced PMS, a woman’s body undergoes a stress hormonal adjustment every month, and the fluctuation of progesterone and estrogen levels, which form the menstrual cycle, makes a woman more emotionally labile in the last third of the cycle. In addition to PMS, tearfulness rises during pregnancy and lactation due to the additional increase in prolactin, as well as during postpartum and post-abortion depression, against the background of a sharp drop in progesterone levels.

The second reason that women cry more often is in the social permission to experience. In many cultures, this is not available to men. “Men, of course, do not cry, because they protect the most fragile thing in this world - their masculinity, - psychotherapist Dmitry Smirnov laughs sadly at gender stereotypes. - Men feel pain, but it is forbidden to express it. Men are generally forbidden: not only crying, but also laughing, dancing and expressing emotions altogether. " If you move away from the standards and become more emotional, then it turns out that expressing and living feelings is not only good for health, but also pleasant.

The reason that women cry more often is in the social permission to experience. It is not available to men in many cultures.

Men grow up in conditions of emotional repression. From the point of view of psychology, raising children in the spirit of “do not roar, you are a man” is not only cruel, but also extremely harmful for the child’s psyche. Studies show that the boy’s psyche develops more slowly, and emotionality matures longer than that of girls. A child whose fears, despair, and cries for help are muffled by the total demand to be always ready to "protect the homeland" with a dry nose, becomes enclosed in itself. Insularity complicates the path to achieving emotional maturity, which requires the adoption of their own feelings. Often psychotherapy helps men to reach emotional maturity, which teaches them to accept and express their feelings in a comfortable psychological environment.

Dutch photographer Maud Fernhout dedicated one of her photo projects to the topic of men's tears: in her photos, young men do not hesitate to sincerely cry and comment on the absurdity of the stereotype that this is unacceptable. At sessions of therapy, men, of course, also cry, but for this they often need more time than women. The Jungian therapist Robert Hopke writes that, according to his experience, it takes a man to visit a psychotherapist for a year to achieve that state and the ability to express experiences in which a woman usually starts therapy.

Why tears can be a symptom of a disorder

Sometimes heightened tearfulness is not connected with the experience of loss and a person cannot even say what exactly he is crying for. In itself, hypersensitivity is not dangerous, but crying for any reason can be a sign of a painful exhaustion of the nervous system. This symptom must be taken seriously and check the work of the psyche. If you start up a tear unusually often, if, in sober analysis, it seems to you that the motives were in fact insignificant, if crying exhausts you - time to figure out what's wrong. This may be a hormonal failure, PMS or premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) - their symptoms can be corrected after consultation with the gynecologist and endocrinologist.

The combination of increased tearfulness and irritability and fatigue can be a sign of a disruption of the thyroid gland: do an ultrasound scan and check for thyroid hormones after consulting an endocrinologist. If the hormones are all right, and the high sensitivity and daily sobs do not disappear anywhere, this may be a sign of a nervous breakdown: you can visit a neurologist and get instructions from him. If behind your tears are apathy, lack of thoughts and low motivation, you can go to a psychotherapist.

What are tears of joy

The tear specialist, Dr. Vingerhots, said that in all thirty years of research, his team had managed to reduce the causes of emotional tears to one thing: a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Accordingly, the most difficult thing for them was to answer the question, why do people cry in happy situations for themselves. Vingerhots says that in every single happy case when a person is crying, he is affected by a memory, thought, or a real circumstance that makes him feel helpless. By marrying a daughter, parents lose control of the situation of her life, reuniting with her lover, a person remembers his despair and fear of loss before this meeting, and an athlete may cry at the presentation of the gold medal, because parents could not catch her success. But no research has confirmed that people are crying because they feel happiness.

Oriana Aragon from Yale University was the closest to unraveling the origin of tears of happiness. Research has led her to the conclusion that our emotional system often dually reacts to strong stimuli. Aragon watched people in situations that cause strong feelings of joy or emotion, and found that the stronger the reaction of joy, the more pronounced the latent aggression. The researcher suggested that we balance the positive emotional stress of the psyche.

A large number of scientific studies give contradictory results, which means that science has not yet solved all the laws of the human psyche. You can cry once a month or every day, from tension, helplessness or joy, prefer to cry alone or need a friendly hug - we are all different. Человеческие эмоции - одно из самых удивительных явлений в мире, а наша сила и зрелость в том, чтобы эти эмоции принимать, уметь полностью их проживать и позволить это другим.

Photo: GoneWithTheWind - stock.adobe.com, Johannes Menk - stock.adobe.com, omainQuéré - stock.adobe.com