HEALTH PLUS:Just as highs of life are our inheritance, so too is the profundity of sorrow and of life. writes MARIE MURRAY.
To weep is to make less the dept of grief– Shakespeare
CRYING IS healing. Capitulating to the passion, abandoning oneself to feeling, releasing the constraints of repression, relaxing the stiff upper lip and allowing the howl of human pain to emerge is a universal human experience.
We feel it, we witness it, we sometimes control it and we frequently release it depending upon the context in which we find ourselves when we are ambushed by the urge to cry.
We begin life with a cry, signal of our arrival and portent, perhaps, of what lies ahead in the human experience which of necessity and essence includes the emotions of sadness, sorrow, loss, longing, grief and mourning at some times in our lives.
Just as the highs of life are our inheritance, so too is de profundis– the profundity of sorrow and of life.
There has always been understanding of the power of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Biblical accounts describe how Jesus wept at the death of his friend: a grief so overwhelming, he brought him back to life.
Aristotle, in Poetics, pointed the way to emotion’s cathartic potential. In drama lay the vicarious experience of other people’s tragedies, evoking tears that released what resonated in oneself with what was happening in another.
In Shakespearean times the populace was united in the spectacle of all life’s vicissitudes displayed for them upon the stage. Today, our tear-jerker movies may be the modern equivalent of the Greek Tragedy, and none of us think it bizarre to recommend a book or film to a friend that will provide “a good cry”.
Darwin documented the expressions of emotion in man and animal, their cross-cultural universality and familiarity, identity and display. Studies using photographs of people’s faces revealing the emotional repertoire are instantly recognisable internationally to people asked to identify the feelings signalled by the face.
These results show that while there may be cultural differences in how a society permits or represses the public demonstration of emotion, no differences pertain in the experience itself. Also, cultures may change their emotional displays. In Ireland we once enjoyed dramatic keening for the dead at wakes, articulating the loss for family and friends. This happens much less now.
Of course, crying is not confined to sadness. We cry with grief and with joy. Research using “crying” diaries confirms the range of feelings that move us. For example, 49 per cent of our tears derive from sorrow, and 21 per cent from joy, while anger, frustration, anxiety, injustice and fear can also induce bouts of tearfulness.
Empathic crying occurs when we are moved by the emotions of another: when the crying of others pierces our own emotional world. It occurs when we are not just witness to, but feel their pain, understand their loss and know what they are experiencing because it is echoed in us in a symbiotic way.
Empathy is a profound and pure emotion. Deeply human, it traverses the normal boundaries and barriers that individualise us. These are emotions we dare to share.
The tears that flow from emotion are different to tears caused by eye-irritants: one healing the soul, the other cleansing the body. Nature’s anaesthetic, emotional tears also relax, sedate and calm.
Tears allow us to vent, release, display, acknowledge and express what we feel, removing physical toxins and psychological tensions and returning us to a state of equilibrium. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twistidentifies the advantages of crying when it "opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes and softens the temper".
Most powerful is what is known as “aesthetic crying”: when we are privileged to be “moved to tears” by the beauty of nature, the language in a poem, the divinity of music, the creativity in art, the epiphany in a play, the immensity of human courage and access to the emotional dimensions of nature and humanity when they are supreme.
We are moved by courage. We are driven to tears at the inanity of our inhumanity to each other. We weep when we are noble, we mourn when we are base and we cry most of all when we love and lose love, for the rupture of attachment with what is precious to us.
Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson reminds us that “we weep so we may not die”. Crying is a psychological salvation. It may be embarrassing, inopportune, inappropriate or overwhelming at times, but it is nothing to the parched, dry-eyed aridity suffered by those who are so sad they cannot cry.
- Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of UCD student counselling services.