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| Crying Fairy by Andreth Licensed under Creative Commons |
This totally makes sense. I'm going to have to put some real effort into it though. After thinking about it I can see crying as a spiritual practice. It's often done in public during spiritual events like weddings and funerals. Unfortunately, in American culture it is often discouraged. I remember growing up and being told not to cry. It's easy to think that if someone stops crying then they are no longer in pain, but that is not always the case. Especially if they've been told to stop crying, then it's likely that now instead of crying they are bottling up their pain and/or stress which can have much worse future consequences than simply crying it out.
I remember a church sermon from Sharon Hogan were she promoted screaming a spiritual practice. As a "meditation" she encouraged the congregation to scream. I think it's a good comparison to crying as a spiritual practice since screaming is also a natural response to pain and stress. It's much easier to scream on demand rather than cry though, which just makes it harder to incorporate crying into spirituality. However, thinking of crying as a spiritual practice may help me to actually "have a few good cries" occasionally, maybe.
There is a great deal of difference, psychologically, between *allowing* yourself to express emotions when you feel them, and pushing yourself to do an emotional behavior that doesnt fit current mood. Also, the research into positive psychology has suggested that dwelling on negative past events is worse for you. Bottling or not is less of a problem in the moment, it is the repeated mulling over things, bringing them back up to redigest over and over, that has more psychological impact, good or bad. Dwelling on good memories, bringing them consciously back into your mind to resavor them, can be a very good countermeasure to intrusive sad thoughts. For me, whem i have sad or disturbing thoughts intrude, i switch to looking at them logicallly and ask questions like is there anything productive i can be doing about this issue now or soon? Is there any way to change or prevent this from happening in the future? Sometimes just that step back and examination i senough to calm it all down, but that is my brain pattern and might not be yours.
ReplyDeleteI see what your saying. In this post I certainly meant the context of "allowing" oneself to cry rather than "pushing" oneself to cry. The only situation I can think of where pushing oneself to an emotional behavior that doesn't fit the current mood would be appropriate is theatre and other sorts of acting performances. I think there are a lot of actors that get themselves into difficult psychological situations due to their tendency to do that.
DeleteI'm not sure where the lines are between bottling and mulling such things later. If one has a tendency to bottle in the moment then I think it would be healthier to mull about it later and deal with it healthily than not dealing with it at all. If repeated mulling and healthy dealing is what's required for a situation, then it should be encouraged.
Another great thing about crying is that it's almost always sincere, so if you're crying - or even if you just want to cry - then you know that the thing you're upset about is really bothering you. I sometimes don't know that something is bothering me until I find myself crying over it, and then I know that something has to be done about it - otherwise I might not have realized that anything was wrong (since I'm not always in touch with my emotions).
ReplyDeleteI find that physical exercise is a good way to let these feelings come to the surface, especially if there's minimal distraction. Maybe going out for a run by yourself might help you confront your feelings and allow yourself to express them freely, unless being in public makes you too self-conscious.