I am sensitive. I mean, I am REALLY sensitive. It takes very little to make the tears start flowing. Almost nothing.
Because of this I fear that people perceive me as dramatic or weak. I perceived me as dramatic and weak for the first two and a half decades of my life.
But here’s the thing: I work hard to stop those tears.
If the people around me knew how many times in a day I have to use all my concentration not to burst into tears, I’d probably be dragged to the loony bin. But I’m not depressed*, I’m not maudlin, and I’m not focusing on problems. Ask anyone who’s close to me and they’ll likely tell you I’m a fairly optimistic person. But I’m soulful. I feel things down to my bones. Sometimes I feel like I have emotional fibromyalgia. Since there’s an observable correlation between emotional trauma and fibromyalgia, I’m betting a lot of you sweet readers are the same.
You can ask my husband, too. I’m unbelievably picky about what I will watch on TV or read about. I have many, many anxiety-related triggers, but I also just don’t enjoy watching people hurt each other. I don’t like movies where the main focus is people being horrible and evil to one another.
Just like I feel the various, many-splendored aches and pains in my body, I feel the stomach clenching pain of callousness or brutality. Many a date night went this way:
Hubby: Let’s watch this new movie!
Me: Does it have any assault? Abusive language? Trauma toward children? Sexual assault? Gratuitous gore? Animal abuse in any form? Human screams?
Hubby: I don’t think so.
*forty minutes later, I’m locked in the bathroom sobbing inconsolably*
It goes back further than that, too. The first time I watched Pocahontas was in my twenties, and I cried in the bathroom for an…embarrassing length of time.
That’s how I’ve always been.
I’d very much like to be able to watch children’s movies without sobbing.
Unfortunately that’s not my reality.
I’d like to be able to tell certain stories without crying.
It’s not my reality.
I’d LOVE to be able to look deep into the eyes of someone being rude or hateful or abusive and do ANYTHING but cry.**
That’s not my reality either.
Because of this I’m hyper-conscious of appearing to use tears as a manipulation tactic. As frequently as my tears come, they are always in response to a deep internal pain that I can’t suppress or ignore. I am terrified that people around me will decide that I’m just trying to get my way (many people have, but that’s another story). Because of this, if it’s at all within my power, I will usually remove myself from a painful conversation abruptly and find a place to cry without being seen, because if I allow anyone to see me then every tear I’ve ever shed in my entire life is suspect. Or so my brain believes.
When my husband and I were first married, one particular facet of our personal trauma responses clashed. He was very much the kind of person that would say cutting, horrible things and follow it up with “I’m just kidding” and expect everything to be okay. I should make it clear that for him this was not an abuse tactic, conscious or otherwise. He was simply behaving according to training.
So he’d say these awful, horrible things to me. I would take several deep breaths and attempt to calmly explain to him that he had just hurt my feelings very badly. I would explain why the words he’d said had hurt my feelings.
He would accuse me of trying to pick a fight with him. Often he’d repeat the words that I’d said hurt me, and explain in detail why they were true, along with assertions that I was “just being sensitive.”
When confronted with this, I did the only thing I was capable of doing. I’d walk away to an isolated place and cry myself sick.
I didn’t know how to solve the communication issue.
Honestly, it took me much longer than it should have to figure out the answer. I was too busy believing that I was too sensitive or that he was just trying to hurt me. The truth is we were both brokenly trying to shield ourselves from the other.
A few years of butting heads later, I was watching Inside Out. Yes, I cried. A lot. But more importantly, I was given the tools to verbalize something that I’d never been able to speak before.
If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. It’s an incredibly fun, deep, meaningful movie for adults and children, side by side. It explains the emotional process as kids age in an easy to grasp, visual way and that is helpful all by itself.
Did you watch it?
Okay, good.
So the part where Joy realizes the purpose of Sadness punched me between the eyes like a Mike Tyson jab.
Mom…dad…the team…They came to help…because of Sadness.
In the movie, Joy brushes Sadness aside because she can’t fathom what use such an unpleasant emotion could be. As she continues to push Sadness down, the girl in whose head they live continues to spiral deeper and deeper into depression. At this moment, she realizes what Sadness is there for. It’s to signal the people we love that we need help.
Crying is communication.
When Jasmine was born, I would stare in awe and disgust at the people who told me she was “manipulating” me by crying when she was hungry, cold, or otherwise distressed. My response was always the same.
“She’s a baby. How else would you like her to communicate her needs?”
From infancy, crying is a deeply felt, deeply entrenched distress call. It’s no different in adulthood. It’s less easy to overwhelm us as we age, but it still happens. We still cry as a way to communicate to those around us that we are experiencing pain too deep to tolerate. We cry because our faculties are overwhelmed. We cry because we need those around us to understand that we are in pain and we can’t fix it alone.
We cry because we need help.
We cry because we need love and protection and affirmation.
I’m sure there are people out there who cry to be manipulative. In fact, I know there are because I’ve met them. But those people will show themselves to be dishonest in other ways. For the vast majority of the world, crying is a desperate distress call to anyone who might care about our wellbeing.
So back to my husband. Once I realized that my tears were actually useful communication tools, I made a decision. The next time my husband hurt me with his words, I cried. I didn’t do anything differently except that I stayed put. I didn’t hide my tears from him. I didn’t walk away until I could calm down. I showed him the storm he was causing inside me.
See, I said he isn’t a callous man, and I meant it. He is a good man, taught some unfortunate lessons about how men should behave. Without seeing my pain expressed through tears, he had no reason to interpret my lectures to him as anything but nagging.
As I cried, something strange happened. I could see understanding lighting his face, along with a deep, honest dismay.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and pulled me into the hug I desperately needed. “I didn’t know it hurt you that bad.”
Why the eff not, dude? I’ve done everything but give you a peer-reviewed dissertation titled “You’re hurting me: A study.” I didn’t say that but I sure thought it. But Robert’s never been a big reader. He needed a visual aid.
And to give him the credit he’s richly due, from that point on he poured a lot of time and effort into learning how to avoid hurting me. No one is perfect. I’m certainly not. He could tell just as many stories about me. But he has made many loving choices and grown with me this whole way.
Often toxic masculinity (or the myriad of social traumas many of us otherwise gendered endure) masks it, but even the most stone-cold soul will respond to tears with a body-wide change in function (unless said soul is a sociopath or narcissist, but that’s a whole other ball of worms).
Watching another person cry causes a fight-or-flight response inside you, the observer. Your blood pressure rises. Your stress hormones release. Your entire psyche is tuned to tackle the pain besetting the crying person and make it stop at all costs.
There’s a reason crying babies are so stressful to listen to. Our brains hear crying as an urgent distress call, and that’s good, because that’s what it is.
The person that’s crying in front of you may not even be able to express why. They may not be able to tell you what pain is overwhelming them to the point that they can neither cope nor save themselves. That could even be why they’re crying, because something is so terribly wrong and they can’t make sense of it, which is one of the more stressful things our bodies can undergo, especially long-term.
Your first instinct might be to get frustrated. If you can’t see the pain, and they can’t tell you where it is, how are you supposed to help? And deep down inside, you know you’re supposed to help. If you can’t figure out how, there are three destructive choices you could make.
- You could blame yourself for being unable to end that pain
- You could blame the person in pain, or
- You could convince yourself that their pain doesn’t exist and they’re just trying to get attention.
None of those choices are going to help anyone, least of all you. When you take it upon yourself to judge the severity of another person’s pain contrary to their statement, you’ve made yourself poorer.
Here’s the other thing I want people to consider. Even if someone really is “just trying to get attention,” is that not a pain in itself? If someone is so lonely or lost or affection-starved that they’re able to make this instinctive distress signal on cue…isn’t that pain? Is that not a hurt worthy of being addressed? Maybe you don’t do anything with the reason they give you for their tears, but you look for the hidden wound. Wouldn’t that be better than shutting them down and essentially either calling them liars or weaklings?
Guys, remember as you navigate this life of chronic, invisible pain, keeping it together like the warrior you are isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes the best thing you can do is pick the safest moment possible and show your pain. It hurts to exist like this, and we can’t make it stop. But we can, and should, be authentic with those around us. We should remember that these instinctive responses to our pain have a purpose, and we’ll have greater success working with that purpose instead of against it.
Your tears don’t make you weak. They communicate to others how strong you’re having to be.
Take care of yourself. You’re the only YOU you’ve got.
*As a rule. Depression is par for the course with chronic pain, but most times if I can keep my pain and anxiety under control the depression abates.
**Certain people might point to my more sharp-tongued moments and say that I certainly AM capable of doing something besides crying. These moments are with people that for whatever reason I’m trusting not to push me too far over the edge. Too often it doesn’t work and I wind up crying over it later. Once we move into the territory of people actually being rude to me, the tears are pretty much my only response.
The Chronic Mama 