Having tears rush out of the tear ducts and letting the tears be taken by gravity  toward earth, even if they don’t get to the ground, is a magnificent, adaptive and essential part of a healthy life.  Yet so many people go out of their way to cut off their tears as well as inhibiting the tears of others.

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard the expression, “I just broke down!”  But that’s not true or accurate.  You were crying.  You weren’t broken down.  We humans like euphemisms (the use of a word that is less expressive or direct but considered less distasteful, less offensive, etc., than another) to avoid what is really going on with our tears and sadness.

Many people are phobic about crying, especially in the presence of others.  Stereotypically, males tend to plug up their tears more than females.  In the movie, A League of Our Own (about a USA woman’s baseball league during the time the United States of America was at war against Germany and Japan in WWII), the manager of the team, played by Tom Hanks, declares, with annoyance and dismissal to one of the female baseball players who was sitting on the bench crying, “there is no crying in baseball.”  Boo on the manager and whoever else takes the stance that crying in public is to be stifled.  This is so backwards.

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if crying in public or elsewhere was just as acceptable as someone blowing their nose with tissue paper, or being extraordinarily happy in the midst of a crowd of strangers in the mall?

We humans tend to want to squelch one’s crying.  “Don’t be a cry baby.”  Another variation is the angry parent who says to the child, “stop  crying or I’ll really give you something to cry about.”  A third version is “crying won’t get you anywhere.”  These attempts to stifle one’s tears are dismissive to the person crying and to the people who want the crying to go away.

Crying can be a wonderful release.  It can be a very intimate and meaningful interaction between two or more people, with at least one of them crying.  Sometimes you’ll hear the expression, “I had a great cry. It felt so relieving.” Exactly.  The flow of tears is a relief for the one who is crying.

To cry implies the expression of grief, sorrow, pain or distress by making mournful, convulsive sounds and shedding tears. To sob is to weep aloud with a catch in the voice and short gasping breaths.  There are many subtleties to the way one manages their tears.  Hopefully, we human beings can allow our tears to flow without having to be self-conscious or dismissive of our tears.  Our tears can be a part of our lives in which we honor them and have a more acceptable view of our wonderful tears through the years.

And sometimes when we are cutting an onion our tears are just because of the onion’s chemicals.  Go figure.

This is Jonathan Brower, Ph.D. saying so long until next time.