11 Jun When tears help and when they don’t

I feel like I’m suffocating, I look left and right to see if they are gasping for air too—no, they aren’t. I feel my eyes welling up, tears trickling down my cheeks in little streams a moment later, and yes, finally, the air is coming back. I look at Ronald Goedemondt, who is imitating the sound of a salad spinner. He is so good at the ordinary. It is the things that happen to us all that he fiddles with. The saliva ejector that sucks on your cheek at the dentist and then makes a gurgling sound. Again, little streams of salt water flow over my cheeks.

I get an association. Not long ago, I had so many tears in a similar situation. There, too, I was sitting in the audience, next to Jean-Luc, a good friend of mine. We were watching Hamnet. I was glad it was dark, because it was almost embarrassing, as I had to cry. I didn’t even try to hold it back and just let it flow. I only dabbed up the puddles every now and then.

Tearjerker
Hamnet was described in the newspaper as a tearjerker. Ronald could certainly stand right next to him. There was another similarity: in both cases, it did me good. With Ronald, it was an eruption of joy. I sat there laughing for an hour and a half. When I came out, I floated light-footedly through Amsterdam, cycled home cheerfully, and saw the humor in it all for the rest of the weekend. With Hamnet, hidden doorways were opened. Sad situations came flying in from far away in my memory: ‘Hey, are you sad? Move over a bit, we’re just coming to snuggle up against you.’ And suddenly, there I was, reliving swampy spots of my past. And that did me good, too.

Tear Tea
We have a children’s storybook on the shelf called ‘At Owl’s Home’ (Dutch book ‘Bij Uil thuis’, written by Arnold Lobel). Owl lives all by himself in a forest cabin. There, he experiences extraordinary adventures stemming from his own owl brain. During one of the adventures, Owl picks up a small kettle and places it on his lap. Owl starts thinking about sad events. ‘A pencil that has become too small to write with anymore. A little spoon that has fallen behind the stove and will never come out from behind it again.’ Owl becomes sadder and sadder. ‘A beautiful sunrise that no one has seen.’ Now he starts to cry. After a while, the kettle fills up more and more with the drops flowing from his eyes. Then Owl stops, closes the kettle, and puts it on the fire. He pours himself a cup. ‘Hmm,’ he says, ‘tear tea is always delicious.’

Diversion
Owl is right. But not always. If the tears come after a loss, it helps. Even if this happens many years later in the cinema next to a good friend. But if the tears come after you have been insulted, hurt, unseen, unheard, or humiliated, there is probably something more going on. Then the grief can be a diversion by your inner system to avoid having to feel the pain. It is as if you have just been stabbed and, instead of crying out ‘Ouch’ and feeling it, you slip away to your room and cry there out of indignation and disbelief.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ you might ask. Well, if you don’t dare to feel the pain of that sting, you won’t process the fact that you’ve been stung either! By crying, you are, as it were, pulling the incident into a quiet corner of yourself: ‘This was so mean, I feel so bad that this was done to me’, instead of towards the cause: ‘This hurts me, this touches me, this is painful’. In technical terms: you need to dare to feel the primary emotion, being hurt. The secondary one, sadness, may be there, but it solves nothing. The emotion only settles down when you dare to feel the primary pain.

Allow an unpleasant sensation to be present in your body
That is also the reason why someone can still struggle with injustice years later, even though they have cried so much over it. This person is at a dead end and has left the main road. One more thing: daring to feel the original pain isn’t even that big of a deal. It is about ‘allowing an unpleasant sensation to be present in your body,’ after which the pain subsides on its own. Afterward, you will potentially be able to calmly bring up the incident with the person who caused it, or clear up the misunderstanding.

*This post has been automatically translated from Dutch