Learning how to cry

Feeling my way back to belonging

Rainbows on the Teton Crest Trail, from a 2013 backpacking trip

I went sixteen years without crying.

Sure, I’d had quiet tears emerge during evocative movie scenes, or the tears of joy/awe that accompanied the births of my children. I’ve experienced the hot tears that come with gritted teeth in the face of extreme physical pain. But not a sob, or the full-bodied release of sadness or grief… since my last long-term romantic relationship ended when I was 23 (a three-and-a-half year relationship with my college sweetheart).

Rationally I understood that crying is a normal human emotion, and a way that human bodies process and express sadness and grief. I watch with amazement—and if I’m being honest, some envy—how easily my children cry, how readily they feel and express their emotions. I’d noticed that since becoming a parent my emotions were far closer to the surface, way more raw: I would tear up more easily at movies, books… many things, really. But still: I wouldn’t cry. Not sob.

Today I want to talk about my process (ongoing!) of returning to my emotional self, to allowing myself to access and express sadness and grief in the way humans were meant to.

TL;DR: Patriarchy sucks. And: I am capable of giving myself the care I yearn for… and am slowly building the capacity to allow others to witness my vulnerability.

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Why can’t I cry?

Obviously as a student of patriarchy I understand why I don’t cry: I can remember innumerable examples growing up where I was told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that it wasn’t okay to cry.

I was always a sensitive kid, and a sucker for sentimentality. When I was a teenager I got all the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and would read them at night by myself… a rare safe space to feel in a world and body where that wasn’t encouraged. But once adolescence started, I understood the way all boys do that crying wasn’t allowed.

But I don’t believe in that shit: I wrote my foundational piece on patriarchy back in 2019. I already gave myself permission to reclaim my humanity and my emotional self… intellectually, at least.

So, like the good rational man I’ve been socialized to be, I decided to look into it: why can’t I cry? Is it that I have nothing to cry about? Or that I’m suppressing my emotions? I started my inquiry in earnest in the fall of 2021, attending Staci Haines’ flagship Somatics, Trauma, and Resilience course at the Strozzi Institute dojo in Petaluma (highly recommend!) Despite doing deep work, I remained unmoved (well, unmoved to tears, to the full-bodied release that I witnessed literally everyone else there experiencing). I felt some envy, and frustration: damnit, how come I can’t feel?

Six months later as part of deepening my commitment to embodiment and better understanding/integrating my erotic self, I attended an ISTA course. I set a number of intentions and inquiries for that weeklong immersion, but a key one was this: can I cry?

Once again I found myself disappointed: while people fell apart all around me, I couldn’t collapse. I accessed pain, sadness, grief, and tears did come… but the same tears as always. Careful. Under control. Contextualized. Disembodied. One of my goals there was to lean into surrender… and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let go. I felt frustrated with myself.

Allowing myself to feel

But something happened during my time at ISTA. Something powerful. When I returned home, it finally happened: my first full-body cry in sixteen years.

It’s been three years now since I embarked on this journey to reclaim my emotional self, and in particular my human capacity to cry. To express and release sadness and grief. And it’s still really hard for me. I realize that I’ve had a tendency to rely on my resilience strategies to discharge the feelings in my body, rather than feeling and expressing them.

In her course, Staci distinguishes between survival strategies that keep us alive but prevent us from fully healing from trauma and keep us closed off, and resilience strategies that help us metabolize trauma and remain open. Good news for me: I’m really good at resilience, at discharging emotions so they don’t get stuck in my body. Usually through physical activity: mountain biking, hiking, or otherwise leaning on nature to replenish me.

Bad news: I’m not very good at feeling. (Yet!) I have learned to discharge my feelings without actually feeling them. Or: I “fix” the issue. I solve whatever thing is giving rise to the sensations… a strategy Prentis Hemphill observes can be a cop-out:

We move toward fixing to skip over feeling.

It’s been interesting to me to note all the subtle ways I “solve” and discharge what I track in my body (often pre-cognitively) as “unpleasant” sensations. Tightness in the jaw, in my chest; constriction. I will intuitively start massaging my chest, or unhinging my jaw. What if I didn’t? What if I listened to those sensations (dare I say, felt them?) and what they are trying to tell me?

I want to feel more. Both for myself, but also in service of connection with others. As I told my somatic therapist in a recent session: “I wish I didn't have to prove to people that I’m human.”

And: people could be forgiven for not seeing my humanity… because I’m not allowing them to. I’m not expressing my vulnerability, my feelings… the things that make me human. It’s a barrier to the thing I long for most: belonging. Intimacy and connection with others.

Feeling me… so I can feel you

This year one of my 2024 intentions was to slow down and allow myself to feel. Honestly, it’s a radical practice. I learn so much when I slow down… and I appreciate in new and different ways why it’s so hard, and why more people don’t do it. As Emily May aptly put it:

For sure. Way easier to just go for a mountain bike ride. And yet: I am a commitment to repairing the ruptures of patriarchy. Including in myself. Which means I owe it to myself to feel my feelings, to expunge the enduring vestiges of supremacy from my body: I will not violate my own integrity for the sake of ease.

That’s not all. I’ve been in a deep inquiry around empathy in recent months, and have reached this troubling conclusion: my capacity to feel what others are feeling is limited by my capacity to allow myself to feel it. How can I truly empathize with someone else’s sadness if I never allow myself to truly feel sad?

It’s been a rude challenge to my self-conception as an empathic person. And I am: I’m really good at cognitive empathy (intellectually understanding someone else’s experience). But it turns out that’s one of only three dimensions of empathy, and not the one people I’m closest to want from me most. There is also what researchers call “emotional empathy,” itself further divided into three distinct sub-components. The one I struggle with most is what they call “emotional contagion”: feeling what the other person is feeling (I actually think I’m pretty good at the other two components: feeling distress at their suffering, and feeling compassion). As Brené Brown put it:

In order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.

As always, my commitments are fractal and interconnected. The work I need to do for myself is also the work I need to do for my relationships is also the work I need to do for the world. Sigh.

It’s fun to grow

I like watching myself get better. Since that foundational moment in April 2022, I’ve now had four additional full-body cries. And I’m getting better at recognizing the need, and intentionally creating space for it. A few weeks ago on a trip to Seattle I felt the familiar welling up: a tightness in my throat and jaw, constriction in my chest. Aha: I need to cry.

I think the universe is pushing me in this direction: for the second straight year I’ve had a debilitating injury that has prevented me from accessing my primary sources of resilience (last year’s wrist surgery meant no mountain biking; this year’s ACL reconstruction means not only no mountain-biking, but also no hiking or even walking… at least for a few weeks). Which means that if I want to discharge this stuck energy in my body… the only way out is through.

Interestingly, I wasn’t yet sure what the emotion was, or the source of it. I knew I needed release… but from what? I’ve consistently turned to music and movies to help me access and release my emotions. That first time back in April 2022, I knew exactly what songs I wanted to listen to, and in what order. Even then I wasn’t yet fully cognitively aware of what I was needing until I heard the specific lyrics/chords that unlocked the feeling in me.

This time it took me almost two weeks to create the container: no kids in the house, my partners’ needs attended to, cleared my professional plate, so I could claim space for myself. I knew that I needed to watch the end of the movie Encanto, but even with that clarity I still wasn’t totally in touch with exactly what I was feeling. It wasn’t until I got to the scene I had not-fully-consciously been waiting for that it hit me: the unlocking, the release… at last.

Honestly, it felt really good. To let myself feel.

Undamming the flow

One key for me has been getting in touch with my resistance, trying to understand without judgment why this is so hard for me. In her work on human sexuality, Emily Nagoski frequently refers to the “dual control model” where she uses the metaphor of accelerants and brakes. I’ve found it helpful in my emotional work to identify the brakes… and then to work really hard on removing them. I think of this work as undamming work: an homage to the climactic scene in Frozen 2 (one of my favorite movies), and a metaphor that reminds me that I am natural and healthy; it’s these supremacist systems that I’ve internalized that are the problem. They need to go… to let me be me.

It turns out: I don’t trust people to hold me when I collapse. I unpacked this more in the stone-catchers post, and it still feels deep. The truth is it still doesn’t feel safe to fully emote in the presence of others. I hold a high bar (an appropriately high bar, given my identities and life experience) about who I let see me in my vulnerability. And I’m practicing letting more of my vulnerability—more of my humanity—show. With discernment.

But there is a deeper practice I’d been shirking, that I’m only just now leaning into. I don’t actually need others to give me that care (I mean, of course I do)… but I don’t have to wait for them. I can provide that care to myself. It’s a revolutionary practice: I can give myself the care that I’m yearning for. I’ve been slowly easing into this work with my somatic therapist: she’s an incredibly skillful space-holder, and I feel safe to allow myself to collapse in her presence.

This week was powerful medicine: I had my longest cry yet, a consistent release of emotion for over an hour. It felt incredible. Cathartic. And even then I was aware I was holding back: I cried, yes, but not as audibly or as bodily as I would have without her there as witness. I wasn’t trying to be stoic… but it still felt too vulnerable to fully let go, even in the presence of this person I trust. Fucking patriarchy.

I’m proud of myself for naming my care needs. And proud of myself for creating containers in which they can be met (therapy, a quiet space alone in my home, in my hammock by the creek). And even more proud of myself for actually feeling. This week felt like a real breakthrough: the first time I’ve given in to a full cry without the crutch/assistance of music, or a movie. I’m getting better.

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I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve been fortunate to have close friendships my whole life, including close male friendships. And in the twenty-five years post-adolescence that I’ve been in deep loving relationship with a variety of men, I can’t recall even a single time where one of us truly cried in front of the other, even in the face of deep heartbreak.

Worse: we won’t even allow our wives to witness/hold us in that vulnerability. I was married for 14 years before I let my wife see my truly cry.

It’s a fucking tragedy.

I still have lots of work to do. My kids still haven’t seen me cry. Well, that’s not entirely true: they know which movies get me, and these days I can rarely make it through a whole book without tearing up (holy hell I was a wreck for an entire chapter of When You Trap a Tiger… whooee). But they haven’t witnessed my sobs. I’d like to give them that gift; after all, they do it so easily. It’s inspiring.

I want to close with gratitude to Prentis Hemphill, for inspiring this post. I was listening to their podcast interview about their new book on Glennon Doyle, where they vulnerably named their own struggle learning how to cry. This is how vulnerability and courage works: it inspires others to lean more deeply into our truths.

In community,

Brian