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crying is a process adults rarely let themselves *complete*; the complete process feels like too much to ask for, it is loud, it makes you look insane or like a child or both, other people get scared and don't know how to handle it. but it is totally normal and immensely healing
"After being hurt, an infant will cry loudly and continuously and, if permitted to do so, will seem to recover from the hurt very quickly." https://t.co/E6MPbCOLL0
"Apparently babies - given a chance - would keep themselves free from hurts simply by their natural discharge of painful emotion. In our culture, no baby gets very much of a chance because... the discharge of her painful emotion is interfered with and shut off so repeatedly..." https://t.co/UDGd0H50ee
"The profound process of discharge of which tears are the outward indication is the getting over of grief. Tears indicate freeing one's self from grief. Crying never occurs unless a person needs to do it." https://t.co/zsseM1SKJv
the clearest indicator i know that you have *completed* the process of crying about something is that the same thing that was causing you unimaginable pain while the crying was happening is now something you can laugh about https://t.co/OaH4kZAJBN
if there are old pains you need to cry out (*loudly* and *continuously*) and you've been prevented from doing so you can walk around for years or decades being tortured by your own emotions. it is exactly like being constipated for that length of time
existence may come to seem fundamentally tortuous, reality may come to seem inherently metaphysically bad, you may construct elaborate philosophies of suffering, when the actual thing that was happening the entire time is that you needed to poop out of your mouth and eyes
several times while engaging in my own crying practice i have thought "this is the central heartbreak of my entire life, it was tinging my entire existence up until this moment with the deepest possible suffering" and afterwards thought "huh. okay. now what"
if anyone is curious to learn more, the stuff i do is a variation of @DougTataryn's NEDERA process / bio-emotive framework which i learned at a life-changing retreat in 2019. i don't know where i'd be without this stuff. website: https://t.co/BNhWIv5d0S
ah and i forgot to link to the page i was actually quoting, it's this page on co-counseling https://t.co/60tFlhfLLz
the bio-emotive team is offering an online training! if you often feel emotionally “stuck” and like you could use a good cry, i can’t recommend this stuff or the tataryns as facilitators highly enough https://t.co/bST24p8qkS
@QiaochuYuan I was literally just thinking about this https://t.co/sEVmjDLsGh
If “grief is love with nowhere to go”, I wonder if crying is so cathartic because it allows love to go somewhere. Usually it goes to the person/thing we love, but without that, it can at least go into tears, undeniable physical embodiments of love (lost)