Making Room for Tears

"We need never be ashamed of our tears." ~  Charles Dickens

For years and years and probably always and forever, well-meaning parents have been telling their children, directly or non-directly (verbally or non-verbally), not to cry.  To be strong in the face of disappointment, adversity, seemingly trivial encounters, etc.  Sometimes trying to hug the tears away, and sometimes trying to force quit the flood of emotions erupting from their child.  It is pure instinct.  We don't want our children to be upset.  We want them to be happy little people who go with the flow.  It would be so great if they would always do what we say, always feel good, and never show any overt signs of intense anger or pain or sadness.  Raising little robots would be so much easier, wouldn't it?

Even as adults, when someone feels pain and expresses it, it often automatically triggers anxiety and uncomfortable feelings in a person who is witness.  And although we may want to, we can't really tell an adult to "stop crying, please."  But when it's our children, we often DO tell them to stop crying.  To toughen up.  "Chin up," we say.  "There is nothing to cry about."  We say these things, perhaps to ease our own discomfort.  Instead of doing some internal work to reduce our own anxiety reactions, and to make room for their tears.  To let them know that their expressions of frustration and feelings are okay.  I believe that most of us don't even consider the ramifications that this has on our children and our society at large.  

We are such a repressed people.  And people make terrible robots.  When we learn not to feel or to suppress what we feel, bad things can happen.  People with no feelings (or suppressed feelings) hurt other people, and hurt themselves.

We do all kinds of things to keep our feelings hidden... we run like mad from them.  So that we don't have to feel or to be vulnerable.  So we can numb out the pain.  We drink, we drug, we work too much.  We have affairs, we obsess about our bodies, we control everything we can.  Because we learned, somewhere, that it wasn't okay to have feelings.  Or we think that because they sometimes feel bad, we should keep them inside.  But here's the kicker - as humans, we DO have them.  Some people are wired to feel more.  Some people are wired to feel less.  But everyone has them.  Whether we admit it or not. 

I learn so much from being a mother.  Raising a toddler - developmentally the most transparent group of people ever - has brought me face to face with this reality that as adults, we don't want to feel.  This reality, that I have already been uncovering for myself for the past several years.  My almost three year old sometimes seamlessly turns into my life lesson guru.  And recently, she has been unknowingly teaching me a very important lesson about her tears.  And about my discomfort with them.  So often, mid-tantrum, I feel my anxiety levels creep higher and higher and higher.  I ask her, "What do you need? What is wrong?"  And our favorite new attempt to nip the typical toddler no-apparent-reason-tears in the bud, "WHY ARE YOU CRYING?"  This used to stop her for a few moments, while she thought and searched for an answer... and then went back to crying.  But her most recent answer to this question, which she has given several times, floors me.

"Because I NEED to crrrrrryyyyyyyy."

Silence.

Oh, Lord, yes.  She needs to cry.  The child NEEDS to cry and to express her feelings and this is the only way she knows how.  She doesn't need a reason.  Who am I to stop her from doing this?  Because of my own shortcomings and discomfort with her pain?  It shuts me down.  Every.  Single.  Time.  I take a deep breath and try to get comfortable with the sounds of her cries.  And almost always, when I relax and make space and let her express her emotions in this way, she calms down.  She gets it out and returns to a more even state.  But when I keep trying to get her to stop,  or to rationalize with her that she has nothing to cry about, she continues and cries even louder.  Hmmmm.

What we can learn from children, if we just listen to what they are saying. 

It can be uncomfortable... it can be awful.... but we will not be washed away by our feelings - our own  or someone else's.  They come and they go.  But when we suppress them - that can leave a permanent mark.  It is important and so necessary to express what is inside of us.  For all of us.

Children, teenagers, adults, alike.

Here's a recent personal example.  On Christmas eve, we were home in Lynchburg with my family.  We had been there since Dec. 19th, and we were leaving that day to head back to NOVA.  My Dad, after 4 more weeks at UVA medical center (due to getting pneumonia, sepsis, and suffering a series of mini-strokes) had just been discharged from the hospital the day before and had arrived in Lynchburg.  He was back at the same skilled nursing facility, just in time for Christmas.  I had these visions and hopes of our whole family being together with Dad at the nursing home, on Christmas Eve.  Singing him Christmas carols, etc.  It was really all I wanted for Christmas.  But my children had just contracted the black plague of colds, the day we got into town.  And since my Dad's immune system had been compromised and any infection could be potentially life-threatening, I knew that I couldn't take the kids over to see Dad.  I knew.

But instead of being honest about how sad that made me feel... about how devastated I was that my family wouldn't all be together, for the first Christmas in maybe my whole life... about this grief I feel about what has happened to my Dad the last few months.... I pushed those feelings aside.  I was cranky all morning, spewing meanness onto everyone.  I don't even think that I consciously realized what was going on.

And then, when I finally allowed those feelings to enter my consciousness and rise to the surface... and I allowed that wall that I had constructed to come down....

I cried.

I cried, hugged my mom and my sisters and my husband, and I told them that I was sad.

And amazingly, I didn't explode.  My tears didn't wash we away.   They served a very real purpose.  They gave me release.  

I felt better.  I was able to make peace with the fact that my daughters would not be with Papa this Christmas.  It didn't completely dissolve my sadness, but it lessened it.  Because I had allowed myself to grieve it by expressing what I really felt.  

All this to say, that I think it's possible that this pattern of shutting down our feelings all starts at the very beginning.  We need to fight the urge as parents to stop our children's tears.  To stop them from expressing intense or negative emotions, and instead, help them to find a healthy way to express what is happening on the inside.  For if they feel nurtured in their pain, or even that there is time and space to let it out (no matter the cause of it), they may grow up to be healthier adults.  And to take it a (few) steps further, we may just be able to change our society as a whole.  One child at a time, into one that is more tolerant of emotional expression.  One that is honest and wholehearted and has a chance to heal.

One that makes room for tears, instead of repressing and numbing and hurting in silence.

In all truth, it is one of my greatest hopes and dreams for myself, for those I love, and for all humans everywhere.  Some people hope for world peace... I just want people to feel.  And I believe that those two things could have a very close correlation.

Acknowledge what we honestly feel, express it, and only THEN, can we work on letting it go.

Peace could be waiting patiently for us, on the other side of our tears.  

"To weep is to make less the depth of grief." ~ William Shakespeare