There are so many places where tears are not allowed.

There are so many places where tears are not allowed.

I found myself talking to a client once about two alternative ways to deal with emotion. Either, I found myself saying, could be perfect for a situation. Could be the best way to deal with what is happening in your life.

One is to hold things together. To be solid and steady even as emotions are rolling.

The other is to let the emotion flow through you, to process it.

It is not always the right time to sob hopelessly, or shout and scream, or laugh uproariously. Not if we want to maintain our relationships, support those we love, function in the world as part of a community or society.

And, the things we go through need to be able to pass through us.

I once heard someone say something like this (if someone knows who this is, please put it in the comments! I’ve forgotten): emotions are our body’s way of processing things. We don’t judge ourselves for processing waste through our nose or our guts, so why should we judge ourselves for crying?

The Conscious Leadership Group - I think in their book, the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership - talk about allowing ourselves to process an emotion, through sound and movement. Allow yourself to move and make noises, they say, whatever comes, in order to let what you’re feeling pass through you. ‘We’ve never',’ I think I remember them saying, ‘seen it take more than 10 minutes for feeling to pass through someone.’ If you don’t want to feel like this any more, whatever that is, then if you can make 10 minutes, and let yourself move and make sounds (not necessarily words - usually not, in my experience), then you might feel quite different.

We see this in some of the most groundbreaking trauma work. That stored in the body is the traumatic experience, and until it somehow processes, the impacts of it will continue to ripple. On a training I took several years ago, they showed a video of a rabbit processing its trauma: lying down but with its legs moving as though it was escaping the predator. And, once this was done, it could hop up and hop away.

The value of the first way of dealing with emotion is probably a part of what enables a society to function. If we had no way of managing our emotions, many of the complex social interactions that separate human society now from what it was millennia ago, simply wouldn’t be possible.

But it’s not everything. Without being able to process our emotions, we aren’t able to return to the centred, sovereign self we are on our best days. We are subject, instead, to the tectonic rumbles of the supressed feelings. Rumbling into our relationships, or work, our parenting, our very experience of life.

We learn so much from our parents, our grandparents, the people around us. And for most of us, the holding things together happens in public, but the processing happens in private, if it happens at all. (And don’t forget that in most parts of the world - certainly in Europe - we are at most a few generations from real, terrifying war.)

The odd sounding 10 minutes of sound and movement is often done in private, yes. But also the crying over a sad book or song, the screaming into a pillow, and all the other ways we let ourselves process the things we feel.

There are so many places that tears aren’t allowed.

Make some time to let yours out, somewhere, sometimes.

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