Have you notice this particular pattern about yourself: your tears are flowing at the mere trigger, whether it’s a movie or old emotional memories. Sometimes even looking at your kid or at your pet makes you cry. Are these tears of happiness and gratitude or maybe those are tears of fear, old trauma and a flashback from the past? It is very easy to find out.
Just write down 2-3 feelings right when you start to cry, check your notes one week later and you will notice a pattern.
With this little exercise you will be able to identify what makes you emotional and you can go from there. You can work on that issue (fear, worry, overthinking).
But in many cases, and statistic is showing some upsetting numbers, that there are people who want to cry but the tears don’t come out. Or they have a belief that “crying doesn’t help”, “crying is a sign of weakness”. Eventually the body stores all those unexpressed pain for years and sometimes even decades.
I have heard people tell me: I never cry, I don’t remember the last time I cried. But when you go further and ask for health history, people open up and reveal pages and pages of chronic pain and random and sometimes very serious illnesses.
And this is an interesting fact: it is not an easy task to find the cause of the illness, especially if you have years and years of repressed emotions. When I ask my clients in hypnosis, who don’t cry, this is how conversation can go:
Therapist: Where do you think those tears and that pain goes?
Client: They pile up.
Therapist: And where do they pile up?
Client: In my back, in my throat, in my chest. (feeling very surprised for saying that)
Therapist: So the anxiety you are feeling every day in your chest, in your throat, what is it telling you?
Client: My tears are screaming to come out, I was told as a child to never cry like a girl, so I stopped. I shut down. Now it’s hurting me (at this moment most of them start to cry).
Therapist: What is hurting you?
Client: My inability to express emotions, my anger, I can’t say no, I can’t set healthy boundaries, I don’t know who I am (the crying from the client becomes louder).
The list goes on and on. And all the pain and hurt that people held inside for so many years starts to come out. It is a liberating process to become aware of that pain and to start bringing back memories from the past so that they can change the meaning to those events.
Let’s look at some of the words our primary caregivers say in early childhood that affect our lives 10, 20 and 50 years later:
- Stop crying. Don’t be a girl
- Crying will make it even worse, so don’t spend time on that
- If you cry, you will be punished
- Look at you, a cry baby
- Better go do something, then cry
- Go cry somewhere else, it’s annoying
Being a little child, it is extremely hard to cope with such rejection and emotional neglect.
As a result, we can form beliefs that we carry into our adult life and that can keep us stuck and unable to feel real emotions. Here are some of those limiting beliefs:
- There is no one to help, so I have to do everything by myself
- People cannot be trusted
- If I cry or show emotions, I will be ridiculed, judged or punished
- Crying and expressing emotions will only make things worse, so it’s better to keep it all in, ‘suck it up’.
- Men don’t cry, they are strong and resilient.
How do you think these beliefs play out in our life? Do they help us or actually harm us more than protect? What would happen if we actually cry? What would happen if we face the past?
Answer these questions and you will be able to see the real picture. You will be able to change those beliefs, because as an adult, you have so many more options that as a child.
Sometimes, the truth can be painful or quite uncomfortable, but if you are on your healing journey, there is no way back, once you start to do the inner work, it becomes something that you have been waiting your whole life.
If you like self-therapy tips, follow me on Instagram where I share my knowledge about mind and body connection. You get the chance to experience profound inner changes if you follow my advices.
