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Tears, Troublesome Yet Cleansing
by Susan Eskdale

As a parent, friend or partner, tears can be difficult to deal with. Since you may not be aware of the source or how to console the individual you may tell them not to cry. Think about a teenage girl and why her tears are falling...

Picture a teenage girl, sitting in the easy chair, with tears streaming down her face. The situation could be a result of any number of issues, breaking up with her boyfriend, having a fight with a friend or family member, watching a sad movie or digesting the news that a loved one just died. Of course you don’t know the cause of her tears, but you are aware that she is expressing feelings of sadness.

Picture the same girl, now an adult; she is sitting in the easy chair, with a defeated look on her face. We still don’t know what is wrong, but chances are we are not going to find out if it is anger, sadness, contemplation or any other emotion if she does not share her thoughts with us. This individual is not likely to want others to see her cry as she probably feels that it shows her as vulnerable, weak or even overly emotional. Instead the urge to cry will be saved up until nobody is around and by that time the tears that have been saved up may refuse to fall.

How did this teenager go from exhibiting her emotions freely to keeping them guarded and kept far away from us? She has learned that crying is acceptable only in certain situations and that being an adult she needs to follow the conventions that she perceives all other adults follow. Where then, do these perceived rules of emotional display originate? The major sources for the rules of emotional display are cultural training, music, movies, television and our peers.

We all expect babies to cry; after all it is their only way of communicating with us. Once a child has grown to be a toddler we start to discourage tears by distracting them with other things to take their minds away from expressing their emotions. By the time a child is ready to go to school we tell them that boys don’t cry, which presents a problem for both the female and male children. Boys do not want anyone to tease them if they cry and the girls see the boys as weak or wimps if they cry.

When parents wish their daughters to be impeccably behaved, they provide certain rules, such as, girls don’t use those words, a lady doesn’t sit that way and perhaps the most damaging rule, “Big girls don’t cry”. The majority of young ladies are more expressive in terms of crying than their male counterparts.

Then comes the teenage years when hormones, peer pressure and disputes with parents and friends cause a spectrum of emotional responses. By this stage, the male teenager has already determined that it is not macho to cry and will thus try to use other coping mechanisms to deal with hurt and pain. Teenage girls, while freer than their male counterparts, limit their crying to the privacy of their room or their friend’s room. These behaviours become more deeply ingrained as the teenagers reach adulthood.

Once you identify the perceived evils of crying in public, you can begin to undo some of the damage that has been done. First, crying is a perfectly natural emotional response and we need to accept that it is something that needs to be expressed when necessary. This does not mean encouraging children to become crybabies; rather it is suggesting that children need to learn the function of tears, crying when sad or in pain as opposed to crying crocodile tears when they wish to influence someone to do something for them. By helping children to understand the purpose of tears it will help to discourage the practice of using tears to control others.

Explanations as to why others are uncomfortable, when someone is crying, are essential to the development of coping strategies for the individual. For instance, if one needs to cry and they are in a public place, they may choose to seek refuge in a washroom and shed tears in the privacy of a stall. When someone cries in the privacy of a washroom stall, it protects the individual from feeling socially awkward and it also serves to insulate others from the feelings of discomfort they feel when seeing someone cry.

Perhaps most importantly, crying is a normal physical response to debris, emotion and pain. We as a society need to accept the benefits of crying in order to allow ourselves to be comfortable with the idea that it is okay to cry. Society needs to reassure its citizens that crying is not only okay but it is a necessary part of being human.