What lives inside your tears? What memories break the banks, splash down the contours of your face in the direction of your heart? What lives inside your tears… What sadness fills your eyes? What hidden pains have you been holding, now spoken in each drop? Your tears, they hold so much. Traces of longing. Outlines of love. Twists and turns along the way. Weeping joy and laughter, too, with vulnerable cries of grief. What lives inside your tears, like rivers streaming through the years, narrate untold stories and unforgettable sorrows in watery summaries.
THE COMPOSITION OF TEARS
Your tears hold so much. We need our tears and what’s inside of them to shield and mobilize on our behalf like a meticulous, microscopic army. Our tears provide more defense and healing in a single drop than you likely hadn’t considered before.
We need a little oil and a watery mucus from the eye itself to bind the tear layer so the moisture doesn’t evaporate and dry the eye. The water solution in our tears amazingly contains vitamins and minerals intended to promote healthy cell function. Plus, there are proteins present among more proteins—all interacting and coordinating active strategies to keep the eyes in working order. Lipids, enzymes, ions, metabolites, to name a few, form barriers, while a vital protein called lysozyme aids our immunity by fighting bacteria and restabilizing balance.
Emotionally speaking, your potent, powerful tears are the compression of all you’re feeling —escaping in memoires, moments and mysteries— encapsulated and stored inside limpid beads of water.
Your tears speak the silent language of sorrow. They’re the open waters of joy and gladness. They appear as the meek or troubled seepage of human vulnerability. And our tears are the bridge to social bonding. When we witness someone crying, we quickly shift into feelings of genuine concern.
TEARS AND SURVIVAL
There’s a great deal of scientific research regarding human tears. One outstanding study finds emotional tears differ from other kinds of tears, like from chopping onions or being exposed to allergens. The emotional tears contain more proteins than other circumstantial tears. It’s actually been theorized that the additional levels of protein cause our liquid tears to be thicker and adhere to the skin, thereby allowing them to visibly trickle down our face. When others recognize our distress, they respond with empathy. Empathy motivates us to act upon and intervene, and all of this works as a way of ensuring our survival.
As infants, crying is our sole means of communicating our hunger, pain, discomfort and imperative need for touch and comfort. Our cires were serious signals to our mothers to tend to what we could not language. Our distress cries were normally heard and appropriately responded to, but if not, our primal cries would immediately escalate until we’re brought back into security.
Your cries are instinctual and instrumental in getting what you need to thrive.
WHAT LIVES INSIDE YOUR TEARS?
Are you a crying person by nature, or have you noticed you’ve been stirred and swept by tears in some seasons much easier than others?
Or do you rarely or never really cry, or can’t seem to conjure up the physical tears in relation to something you believe requires a tearful presence to validate it…
There are medical reasons why a person isn’t able to shed tears. My newborn daughter once had blocked tear ducts and I needed to massage a specific area regularly to release the congestion. If I wasn’t able to remedy the cause through massage, a specialist would proceed to use a tiny surgical wire to unclog the blockage and solve the problem. Fortunately, the routine medical procedure proved unnecessary since I was successful using a natural approach.
There are other biological reasons for not being able to generate tears, or for having a lack of any one of the essential components which would allow for moisture and balance. If you think dry eyes might be a concern, or a symptom of a larger health issue, it’s a good idea to investigate before condemning yourself to being too emotionally hardened to cry organically.
There are psychological explanations as to why someone feels unable cry outwardly. Much like the medical blockage I described earlier, we can become emotionally congested or we can experience psychological obstacles which prevent us from connecting to something significant.
Do you believe there could be something barring access, or a fear instated somewhere in your past, which spares or prohibits you from being flooded or from releasing?
I remember the moment I made a pact to never cry again. I was six when I recognized my need to be a big girl and manage my emotions as my grandmother taught me. I was also aware of the notion that if I visibly cried, I was being a baby. This set me into new terrain of feeling in-between. I still wanted to be a baby, or so I thought. Children require protection, nurturing, affection and comfort throughout their entire childhood. Of course, my child’s mind was not mature enough to understand these concepts, therefore I believed I needed to refrain from displaying any vulnerability or I would be seen as weak or viewed as a problem no one had the time or energy to deal with.
My mother already had two younger children to tend to, so it was accepted that we older ones would have to grow up and help out in any area we were called to duty. Helping out can be understood as not creating trouble in an already maxed out household.
This was an accepted generational philosophy at the time, in addition to being an overwhelmed family system fraught with specific issues.
As children, we do need to be taught how to manage our emotions healthily, which would not shame crying. Rather, we want children to be able to connect to how they’re experiencing something and allow space for expression, in addition to teaching them how to hold or preserve something in place until they’re able to release it. With guidance and support, children’s emotional terrain becomes increasingly familiar. They are less likely to become lost among the assortment of responses and reactions , along with their growing range of feelings.
LAUGHING ON THE OUTSIDE, CRYING ON THE INSIDE
Over the years, I have met other men and women who’ve described similar self-proclaiming pacts to put away their feelings and not display tears. Many people can relate to this patterning of holding in their grief, sadness, anger and outrage until they discover they’re unable to easily untangle the emotional clog in the way.
Most can relate to this type of blockade which can further complicate processing larger, pooling emotional material. Not only is there a personal commitment to not cry, but their childhood environment created a series of crisis which cause a child to shut down, delay, or reroute their emotive responses to outside stimuli.
If you feel like you’re resonating with any of this and you’re not already familiar with developmental trauma, it might be an intriguing exploration for you.
We know developmental trauma or exposure to traumatic situations and ongoing crisis in childhood and adolescence can create warlike behavioural similarities in that there are immediate ways the complete bodily system energetically pulls itself together to survive.
And we know crying tears can offer several levels of cleansing and catharsis.
But did you know some people laugh or take on sarcasm, become passive-aggressive or don other covert displays instead of crying? A person can condition themselves or be conditioned to reroute their pain and disappointment and substitute their anguish or dismay with something other than the pure essence of what they’re feeling in the moment. It’s as though you can sense they’re crying underneath.
In some cases, alternate or compensatory responses can, in fact, surface to ease the mounting tension or offer a representative outer face in front of the internal crying face.
Our feelings can get thwarted, twisted up or tied and create a block. Crying can look like other things. Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. Strong and silent to others, yet grief-stricken and weeping within. Holding in or suppressing unintroduced feelings over time, and then raging or yelling because crying was not an option.
Sometimes one emotion will keep the space until the genuine or prominent feeling senses it can emerge safely. So many reasons why this happens. If you are interested in my insight and experiences about anything I write about or all things human-related, please don’t hesitate to write me. I receive requests to offer my thoughts and resources and enjoy researching anything I’m not familiar with already.
I have written a couple newsletters on the subject of crying called It’s Okay to Cry, It’s Okay Not to Cry. You might wish to read them for resonance. I talk about grief and crying and the cultural norms of demonstrating our sorrow with public tears. You can click the link below to read more:
https://susanfrybort.substack.com/p/its-okay-to-cry?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
And below is a message about learning how to stabilize when it’s necessary and to not break down. I believe each case ought to be recognized independent of other situations. Specifically, breaking down and crying in most, if not every, conflictual setting can prevent us from getting to the next stage of our development. It might be pointing to an area in need of our attention and is posing as a requirement to move stored material. The breaking down in tears moments could be experienced as a state of being stuck.
Follow the link to read more:
The Maps Within My Tears
Philosophy arrived in time
to rationalize my fears,
while all of reason could not find
the maps within my tears.
And the logic of my mind
could not make sense
of what my heart
had engineered—
But wisdom knows each
drop I cried
charts a world
I hold so dear.
Thank you for your subscription to my newsletters…You are a blessing in my life!
What’s been your relationship to Crying? Are you able to share the cathartic and healing properties inside your acts of crying? And have you ever or do you currently have challenges with crying real tears and do you believe you understand why?
Please share in the comments below. I look forward to learning more about you and your insights and experiences. And if you think you know someone who might benefit from the messages in this newsletter, please feel welcomed to share.
With love,
Susan
I love this so much! Yes to crying and releasing. Our bodies need it as does our soul. Thanks for sharing and putting this out into the world!