"I can't get through this without crying"

“I can’t get through this without crying.”

I was with a patient, Pam*, this week who happened to remember a time in her childhood when she saw her grandfather carried away, deceased, on a stretcher, saw tears in the eyes of her father (the only time in her life she has witnessed this). She cried and cried and was rebuking herself for her feelings:  “This was 40 years ago!  What is the matter with me?” 

[*Names and details will always be changed to protect confidentiality]

Such moments are archetypal. It seems we all have, at times, an innate fear of our deepest, least understood but profoundly felt, emotions.

I spent years of my life cut off from such feelings. I remember the seedling moment when I understood that I could cut off the pain inside of me. I was about eight years old and I had fallen on the pavement two blocks from home and my elbow was bleeding. I cried and moaned as I held my arm and began to walk the two blocks home. After about one block of this I was running out of breath and finding that I wanted to stop crying and that the pain in my arm didn’t require me to weep if it meant I couldn’t walk home. I thought to myself, “Oh, I can control my tears. This pain in my arm doesn’t hurt nearly as much as things that hurt inside and emotionally. I can control my reaction and numb myself to those pains too.”  And I made good on my new understanding. I spent almost 20 years after that with a pride in the fact that I didn’t cry when things hurt.

I’ve come to feel differently about crying. In my late twenties I began therapy and realized there was a deep pool of sadness inside of me. As I slowly began to be able to access those pains, I began to have a more comfortable relationship with my tears. I can feel inside of me the benefits of crying sincerely, of feeling what is true inside of me, even when it hurts and involves feelings of weakness and overwhelmedness. On the downward side of feeling the ache and the tears, I find a peace and a feeling in my body of relaxation and greater presence.  I’m proud of the courage I’ve found to feel my feelings. I like knowing that Strong People feel All their emotions.

So, I sit with my clients often very comfortable with and supportive of their deep sadnesses. It reminds me of a phrase regarding therapy I hold with me: “Good therapists learn to be with their patients in the suffering state, and not acting on a felt need to take the patient out of such states.”

And too, I know within myself something of the myriad ways that it is all too human to want to avoid those places inside of ourselves. And I must admit, these forays into deep pain, pain that is normally held down, unaccessed, unrecognized – these kinds of journeys into my own pain are hard to step into. I find myself thinking, “Haven’t I plowed in this field enough already!”  This has become my signal thought inside to let me know that I’m resisting some emotional work that needs my attention.

As Pam writhed with sadness, with pain, as she cried and wiped tears and then cried some more, as I sat across from her and felt in myself, “Something here is important, is healing,” Pam calmed, took a few deep breaths, and with a suddenly resonant and deep voice stated, “This one, this time … I can’t get through without crying.”

This day in therapy with Pam I could see that she had profound emotions attached to this memory (I see such memories as “screen memories” … a single memory that holds myriad experiences/emotions/necessary recollections of the Core of how it felt to be ourselves growing up) and I felt particularly warm and supportive of her as she falteringly deepened down then rose up and away from these feelings and then deepened again.

It seems to me that Pam was speaking for all of us, at times, that the only way through something is via a willing recognition of the depth of the feelings involved. I say her words as a benediction, as a reminder to myself:  “I can’t get through this without crying.”