feel your feelings NOW!

a road-map to emotional wellness

Now listen to me. if your somebody who didn’t learn to express their emotions in a healthy way. if your somebody who had learned its safer to hide them than to express them. if your somebody who was so thoroughly conditioned to believe your emotions have a power over somebody else or vice versa. this post is FOR YOU. and in many ways for myself aswell. here we grow, we learn, and we unpack the why behind the cry.

this isn’t another pretentious self-help fad trying to earn a buck from your insecurities. no, this post is coming from somebody who cares about your emotional health and surprisingly, hers aswell! she has swam in the murky waters of emotional neglect and suppression all her life. therefore, this post albeit important to me- slips through my tongue like water. not only will the science be evidence-based, but the truth will speak through my sentimental attatchment to this subject.

have you been somebody who cried so often in your childhood and was told not to be sensitive, whinny or.. even insensitive for it? when you dropt a plate, a bowl, a cup and it cracked or broke. when you got beaten or verbally assaulted for it? did you cry? did you feel guilty and take blame for every accident you made? were your feelings taken lightly and your emotions not welcomed? did you feel at some point that it was safer and more convenient to hide them? bottle them up and pretend they never exist? if so, your not alone. i too was that kid (in many ways still am).

but now as an adult, or adolescent things have changed. not your feelings but your awareness to them. in fact, you may feel the same way you were when you were a child. your emotions still neglected and at times laughed at. but hey, i need you to know that they aren’t fake or weak expressions of your character. they are the element of your being. they are what defines you- your ability to feel and construct logical reasoning.

what and why do we (need to) cry?

crying is an innate human expression of pain, joy, laughter, and love. it is a cathartic bodily reaction that needs to be expressed. it also is contemplatively, the truest form of emotional expression. because it doesn’t hide, can not be hidden. and a good cry can never be faked. crying is not so dissimilar a bodily mechanism to osmosis or homeostasis or active transport. these are celluar functions while crying is a physiological and emotional mechanism of communication and regulation.

As children we cry when we get injured, or when we’re hungry, or when we need the bathroom- its the only means by which babies and most children can communicate to their caregivers in their early stages of development. However, as adults we cry as well, maybe less or more often, yet reasonably we inevitably have to cry. to express the joys and sorrows of life; we cry as adults, to grieve a lost one, to process the joy of a new engagement, a failed test-score, to severed friendship ties, a lover etc. there are plentiful reasons why we cry- why we need to cry. only because we humans feel more than we know. we feel what we know and what we don’t know.

crying much less is a safety mechanism in times of pain, trauma, or stress our body produces energy in the form of tears. in the broader sense, feelings (like crying) provide us with a ‘feedback system’ to assist us in maintaining an emotional, spiritual, and physical balance. without that balance, a healthy relationships with yourself and others become impossible. therefore, as we come to know crying is not a shameful act of weakness; it’s an internal management tool.

why we stopped (outwardly) crying?

crying is an extremely vulnerable expression of our emotions. that’s due to it being such an uncontrollable and overcoming emotional response. it dares not to be disturbed or denied. however, in the patriarchal society we live in, we find that boys and young men are socialised not to cry; told that to cry it to be weak. that if one dare cries they are banished from manhood. from exuding the qualities of strength and power that dominates men in our society. as well as girls and young women, crying only means that she’s emotional or weak or dramatic. it seems we only reward whats harmful for us and judge that which is good or normal expressions of humanity.

you likely stopped crying because in childhood development it was made clear that crying was not right. you’d either get verbally admonished for it or physically silenced (via whippings or beatings). trauma-induced experiences like these has led many of us to collectively suppress and mirror the emotional neglect. it seems society now a days just operates in this apathetic and automated way. we’re told to bag up our emotions and get the work done! if not verbally then implicitly. but what it forgets is that we’re not inanimate objects- we’re human-beings that need to feel in order to process anything from trauma to enjoyment.

as described earlier, crying is a form of energy. the basic understanding about energy from the laws of conservation of energy is that: “energy can not be made or destroyed and can only be transformed from one form to another”. when we learn to stow up heavy emotions induced from traumatic events and prevent ourselves from expressing them in the form of tears- the pain doesn’t just go away, it builds up and the pressure impounds! Eventually this feeling (energy) transforms into other forms such as anger, rage, self-harm and various compulsive behaviours like binge eating (poor me).

How must we return home to our feelings?

it all starts by acknowledging the deficits in our childhood and filling it’s gaps. by recognising that your feelings aren’t your enemy. that they are only here to assist you through life. and tears are one way, so cry because as therapist, Tamara Johnson said

“To heal, it is essential to witness the harm that has been done to your childhood self and to provide your childhood self with an empathetic response to what you witness. this means that you must pay attention to your feelings while you re-visit memories that are painful. if that experience encourages tears, cry! Allow yourself the luxury of letting tears fall that you were too afraid to let go of while you were being hurt. think of it as a gift you are offering to your child self. now you have the potential to be a nurturing, protective parent towards your child within.”

after this quote she proceeds to give us this scenario where if you saw a child (whether your own son or daughter) hurt. what would your immediate response be? would you walk away, ignore them, or wrap them in your arms and soothe them, allowing them to cry if they need to? then asks, what would your response be? it’s more likely that you’d resolve to the latter response. helping and comforting the child. now take this same scenario and APPLY it to YOUR INNER CHILD. don’t you think they deserve just as much compassion knowing that they perhaps were never given permission to cry?

stop suppressing your emotions, especially tears! give yourself just as much permission to feel your feelings as you’d give to a child. because that is your safe road back home. even if it means stopping everything your doing, sitting on your kitchen counter or kneeling on your feet and unloading the truck of pressure from your chest! there is nothing weak or embarrassing about acknowledging old wounds and responding to it compassionately towards yourself. and i know, we often hide our pain out of fear of worrying others- but i think the most worry you can cause someone is being emotionally challenged. so lets cry, lets become emotionally mature. let’s acknowledge that we’re not perfect. that your just as much who you were then (when you were hurt) as you are now. that part of you is not suspended through time, they’re embodied in your psyche.

and lastly i’ll leave you with this quote from her, Tamara Johnson,

“The act of listening to your feelings and honouring them IS NOT an active act of rebellion against anyone..Nobody outside of you has veto power over your feelings-whether that person is in your memory as in childhood trauma or whether they are a real-life, present-day person who would rather you ignore what you feel in order to serve their purposes.”