It is Katies birthday today, her first since we have been married. Ater handing her the sack loads of cards and handing over her birthday gifts, she tootled off to work…
The closeness between us made me reflect on our time together and for some strange reason, I just kept thinking back to all the times I nearly cried or have cried with her… I mean, I even blogged about me blubbing in front of the TV coverage of the paralympics, so inspired and in awe I was.
I cried while we practiced our wedding vows… When we’ve watched films… Even in front of TV shows that are so cheesy, I know I shouldn’t… Blimey, my Dad and Granddad would think I was very soppy, my football pals would likely pull my leg, my favourite song by The Cure was ‘Boys Don’t Cry‘ … What is it all about? Do you cry much? Do you allow yourself to? Let me go into this in some more depth…
Lets be honest, nearly all of us cry sometimes…I have clients that hold it in… But when they let it out… Boy do they ever let it out… What is it that actually makes us cry? How often we do it? How often is healthy or how often is just wrong? I guess these answers vary from person to person… I also guess that how crying makes us feel surely varies massively from person to person.
I searched for research on and about crying and there is surprisingly little, though there is a recent piece just cited here at science direct website. Considering we have such attitudes and responses to the subject of crying, we are prone to it and all are capable of it, it really is an under-researched aspect of human behaviour.
The team conducting the piece of research mentioned asked 196 adult Dutch women (aged between 17 and 84 years) to answer questions about their personalities, their mental health, their propensity for crying and how crying made them feel:
Consistent with past research, people who reported being more neurotic, extravert and/or empathic tended to cry more often and more easily. The research was correlational, so it’s not clear if having these personality types leads to more crying, or if crying more contributes to these personality types. Perhaps surprisingly, mental health, in terms of reported depression, anxiety and so forth, was not associated with how often or easily people said they cried.
When it came to the effects of crying, the pattern was the other way round. Aspects of personality were not associated with how the participants said crying made them feel, but mental health was. While the majority of the participants (88.8 per cent) said that crying brought them relief, a minority, especially those with depression, anxiety, anhedonia (a loss of the ability to experience pleasure), and/or alexithymia (a difficulty expressing or processing emotions), said that crying left them feeling worse or just the same.
The researchers said more work was needed to find out why crying brings relief to some people but not others. “Currently there is only anecdotal evidence that learning how to cry and how to derive positive effects from it could help people who are having difficulty expressing sadness or crying,” they wrote.
As someone who cries more often and more eaisly than most, I’ll put myself down as extravert and/or empathic rather than neurotic — for the public record! … Maybe I am making up for those years when I firmly believed that it was just not something a man did…
Adam, I worked with a client recently, a lovely older man, who came to me because he was very sentimental and would tear up while telling uplifting or happy stories or watching TV shows which featured such stories (yes, there are a few shows like that). He was going to be giving a speech at a family function, and had also accepted a position which would require public speaking fairly frequently, and wanted to be more in control of his emotional reaction.
I used the “control panel” technique with him (giving him a mental metaphor of a slider or dial which he could use to adjust the strength of his reaction) so that he could still tear up when it didn’t matter but could “dial it back” when he wanted to. Last I heard from him it was working well.
I think it’s becoming more and more acceptable for men to cry, which can only be a good thing. If you’re not dealing with your emotions, they’ll throw off your physiological balance and make you ill.
Don’t think I cry excessively…but do succumb at times! And it is a release. Sometimes it’s more a sign of needing to catch up on sleep or take a break from study. Like when I feel a bit choked up at the end of episodes of Secret Millionaire. Gets me every time! Sad 🙂
Wonder though if some of the people who are depressed or anxious don’t feel that release because of their attitude to crying? If you felt that “breaking down” was a sign of weakness or of not coping, it would be a very negative experience rather than catharsis…
Thank you Mike, lovely story… And Gráinne, thanks again, your contributions are highly valued 🙂
A couple of weeks ago I cried at the X-Factor… Man oh man… The guy who had lost his wife, was rearing his children alone and was singing to his deceased wife in his audition… And who was very good…
We were sitting down at a wedding the following weekend, and after a few drinks we mentioned that we had been wobbly chinned with this episode of the X-factor… All the other men around the table said they had got emotional and cried too… Or at least ‘glassy eyed’…. It was very funny…
I do actually think the Secret Millionaire is genuinely surprisingly touching though. The millionaires go in with a preconceived idea about the place and the people they’ll meet. They generally expect to find wasters and scoundrels living off benefits because they can’t be bothered doing anything else. Instead they find these fantastic communities with people who have nothing and yet work for those they see as less fortunate. They manage to find a sense of community that I thought had been pretty much obliterated and find truly generous people who give what little they have to others, and if they have nothing give their time and love. Even when the millionaire tries to give money to them at the end they usually are thrilled only because they can follow through on plans to help even more people. The “goodness” always gets to me…as well as making me feel humbled. And reminding me of the loving kindness that exists if only we look for it 🙂