This is the third installment of my advice-ish column; here are the first and second.
To submit a question for consideration, write whatshelpingtoday@gmail.com.
Hey Sandy,
You've talked about this in the past and I really related to your experience of it, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts if you have any or think this would be suitable for an upcoming installment.
I have CPTSD and wasn't really allowed to cry or have feelings as a kid. I struggled to cry as an adult. I worked on this a lot in therapy and on my own and now I cry freely and frequently! But it sometimes (often) feels so overwhelming, both to myself and others. I sometimes feel okay about how tender I am, and I'm okay with feeling that way especially given what is going on in the world right now driving a lot of those pieces for me, but other times it just feels like too much. I also find that other people seem to be...generally sort of put off by this and are constantly trying to make me feel better which often feels even more invalidating.
Any thoughts on how to relate to these experiences, how to explain it to others, find the right supportive folks and ask for what you need etc? Thank you so much. 💜
K.
Dear K.,
I also have CPTSD and wasn’t really allowed to cry or have feelings as a kid! Wow did I relate to that sentence of yours; grim perhaps, to feel kinship in such experiences.
Reading your message I remembered, as I often do, how when I was eighteen a friend of mine killed himself, and when we all gathered in this big auditorium for his funeral, I couldn’t cry.
Hundreds of people there, everybody sobbing, and I was the only one with dry eyes, it felt like. I also felt horrible, being so focused on myself. My lack of tears.
His death, such an utter tragedy, our community ripped apart.
Why couldn’t I just cry? I hated that I wasn’t normal. I hated that, also unlike everybody else in attendance, I’d probably known his suicide was coming, from stuff he’d said and because I’d been contemplating the same for so long by then.
I never cried, back then. I’d even boast about it. I never cry. Perhaps — now I think — it was a bit like how I used to love telling people I hated chocolate. It was a way of indicating I wasn’t conforming to what were then assumed gender stereotypes. I hate chocolate. I never cry. (I’m not actually a girl.)
In the case of crying or liking chocolate, of course, both things are human things, not actually inherently gendered things. These days I’m a man who eats chocolate sometimes, especially dark. (Though I don’t really like milk chocolate still and I continue to hate white chocolate.) These days I’m a man who cries.
At first when I started crying, back in college, I couldn’t stop it at all, perhaps not unlike you describe. Like for years, tears poured out of me, an endless stream. Today it’s slightly less extreme.
Being real I probably cry a lot by most standards, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s normal regarding anything, really. Sounds like you will maybe get what I mean. I never knew what “normal” was, not when it came to sadness, not when it came to anger, not when it came to love. I’ve had to make up everything about how to exist in human society and the world, totally on my own, it’s often felt like.
I do alright.
I also carry tremendous pain, many years in therapy notwithstanding. The world just continues to heap pain onto one, as well. So I cry. Often readily. And not without reason, either. The last few years for example I’ve had much to grieve. Sometimes when one is grieving especially I find you just have to give in, let the feelings have you awhile. That is their purpose, tears, a release.
Anyway, how to account for my emotionality to others — what you’re asking in other words — it’s something I’ve sure thought about. How to explain oh I am very fucked up from damage incurred over a long period years ago, and so no matter what I do — I think! — I’ll still be pretty fucked up, and that’s sometimes just going to get the best of me, no matter how excellent at self-care or seemingly evolved I become?
I’ve written before about my daily self-care routines and I will discuss them a bit. Because they are largely about me feeling like I have more control, when it comes to all this. To put it in such terms, people who are very emotionally unregulated, say, as a result of major childhood trauma, can we retrain ourselves in a better way? If so how?
It was in trying to harness greater control over my debilitating back pain and panic attacks that I was told about Nicole Sachs’ JournalSpeak from a therapist friend, which is the method I use primarily to this end. This work often appeals to people with diagnoses like ours and for good reason.
Nicole Sachs (on her podcast for example) will often use the metaphor of a reservoir. As in, we all have emotional reservoirs. Figure everything we’re taking on, it’s all going into our reservoir, especially that which we can’t actually express. If we were raised in a situation where we weren’t allowed to have feelings, where we weren’t allowed to cry, and I’ll add, perhaps we were witness to and victim of violence, perhaps all the time, that all went in our reservoir. So sometimes — especially if we’re being overwhelmed by what life has handed us — our banks will flood.
For me, that can then result in a back spasm or panic attack, especially the totally-overwhelming-throw-you-on-the-floor variety. During high stress times I also experience other symptoms, including insomnia, depression, IBS, other pain other places (shoulder, neck, headache, hip). The pain, the panic, these are symptoms I’ve contended with since I was a young teenager. These days, largely because of my commitment to practices like JournalSpeak and meditation, I am much less often locked on the couch in debilitating back pain, or frozen in a panic attack, my world reduced to an effort to breathe.
But I still have back pain. I still have panic attacks. I still cry, sometimes cry more than I’d like to. I sometimes experience huge rage. But I will say that the years now of meditating daily, all the JournalSpeak, the yoga, the walks, it has all helped. Moving to the country, quitting alcohol, coming out, starting T. It’s all helped bring down the overall level of my once-very-high reservoir.
So I don’t know, I’m not saying you have to do these same practices. But, to echo something Nicole Sachs often says as well, be kind to yourself, have patience. If you do this sort of work — practices like JournalSpeak, or continued therapy of whatever sort, or however else processing the hard shit you carry inside — and if you give your nervous system opportunities to chill out, to get out of that flight or fight mode, you will over time bring down your overall level. That’d be my bet, anyway.
I sometimes sob during JournalSpeak, belly sob, ugly sob. Which feels good, after, honestly, like, job well done. The exercise’s point is we’re allowing ourselves to safely feel. So I think of the 20 minutes of unfiltered writing as a sort of safe container for that detonation.
Meditation too, I’ll at times totally fucking break down during meditation. Which, again, I remind myself, is okay. I’m usually alone when meditating, but for my sleeping dog, who doesn’t mind if I cry. So I cry and cry and usually, after a while, the crying ends.
Sometimes I actually laugh, when I’m asked, “How are you?” because I find the question so challenging.
I wish we asked, “How’s your weather?” to one another instead. Because I never know what to say if someone says how I am. I am often a cacophony of things and I am usually pretending like things are fine, which they usually aren’t. Aren’t we all? I don’t know, I guess. Again I’ve never known what a more “normal” or “regulated” or less stressful experience of earth-life would be like.
These last weeks, I admit, my internal weather has been quite stormy. I’ve ridden some huge waves of huge feelings. Those around me have felt this all too. But yesterday, today, as is sometimes also true, the worst has passed, my skies are calm. Even powerful storms tend to be fleeting.
When I’m no longer drowning in whatever I was feeling, I try to express gratitude to those people who can and do receive and support me when I’m at my very worst. All the time I try to nurture such connections as if they are life saving (because they are).
Perhaps because of my history, I’ve always felt a bit annoyed by schema which divide people according to whether we are abnormal or normal as regards our internal worlds. Rather all of us I think are the logical outcomes of whatever it was we were set up to be, genetically, environmentally. In my case, I wasn’t taught my own feelings were safe to have, I was mostly taught they were bad. Crying was bad. Anger was bad. I still am working to convince myself otherwise.
Joy, too, joy can be challenging for me to actually feel. Like it’s forbidden, almost, joy. Like I have to really allow myself to experience good news, if I ever receive it. Maybe to other people that would sound very strange, I don’t know.
It’s okay. It’s just how I am. You, you’re okay too, you’re just how you are. I hope you’ll keep company with people who love and accept you, the whole of you. And if you’re around people who do not get it and you have to sneak off to cry somewhere sometimes, I think that’s fine. Not everyone will understand people like us, is certainly something I’ve learned.
I’d consider, if you haven’t already, taking up a daily meditation habit, or even a daily JournalSpeak-and-meditation habit, because I do find it so helpful for working on this. (Again here were my thoughts from the last column on starting meditating.)
To me it’s sort of funny, how our society seems to believe that people who don’t cry except during very extreme occasions are somehow superior, as in people who reserve their tears for ‘appropriate’ moments like deaths and losses at sports.
Nothing against such people, people who seldom cry. I often recall how right after my first book published, I got this beautiful email from a psychiatrist who’d read it and found it very moving. He described how he never cries, but then listening to the audiobook in his car, commuting, hearing about Bob’s life, he’d cried. He seemed so surprised by this.
I was indeed excited I’d made this unemotional man cry. I love whenever I hear my work has affected anybody. Maybe it’s why I’m in this gig — art — and not another, is I am such a big fan of feelings. And art is all about feelings.
I love movies and music and books that make me feel, always have. Maybe this is just another way of burning off some of all that excess feeling I’ve long carried inside, much more than I’ve ever known what to do with. My childhood was spent on stages and in acting classes; how marvelous it was to have safe forums for feeling super big. (I adored Molly Ringwald’s thoughts on such topics, in this excellent conversation.)
My point is, it’s okay to be someone who feels, and maybe yes you want to find spaces that are absolutely safe spaces to do so. A journal page. A therapist’s office. A darkened theater. Hell, an improv class. And yes I think this is why people get into sports.
As a man now, I’ve found myself hesitating to cry, especially if I’m in public. There have been instances when while past-me would have probably cried, but me-now has held back or hidden.
Like the other day at the bank, I had an utterly humiliating experience, but waited until I was back out in the parking lot to actually react. I burst into tears. But what had happened inside the bank was bad enough, I didn’t want them seeing me cry, too.
Which is bullshit, toxic masculinity, and yet there I was. (It’s all bullshit, that we can’t just feel what we do. Would that we could all just be like babies and feel everything purely. How I envy babies.)
I’m hard on myself and I tend to adore people who feel big. I love criers. One of the judges on the aforementioned Great Pottery Throw Down is a wide-shouldered British potter who cries often and freely, with joy for example over a contestant’s perseverance or their artful use of glazes.
Maybe I wanna be like that, the sort of man who cries with joy and freely.
But maybe I’m scared to be that kind of man. Or maybe I’m working on it, the larger question of what sort of man I want to be. Or how to cry only when it’s appropriate and not when it’s not, which, I dunno. It’s all so confusing. By which I probably just mean, life.
Good luck, with your own healing journey. I wish you lots of patience and kindness towards yourself. And, sincerely: Thank you for your note; it made me feel less alone.
Take care,
Sandy
p.s. What’s Helping Today: I’m thrilled our culture has remembered that Tracy Chapman is the absolute best. Tracy Chapman was my first concert (the Fillmore West, in San Fransisco, around my sixteenth birthday. I have the poster somewhere in storage; I’ll try to scrounge it up). I really enjoyed this Keep It! discussion on Tracy and I truly enjoyed revisiting her first album this morning. Easily one of the albums that saved my life when I was a teenager. In those days I needed desperately to hear someone acknowledge the stuff of my reality (alcoholism, domestic abuse, the ineptitude of police). Tracy Chapman was who sang to me.