Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC, 2011. All rights reserved.
Dear Soul Arcanum:
My family and I have had a horrendous 10 years. We’ve moved countries and continents, been cheated in business, had to live with family, gotten thrown out on our ears by family, and found it very hard to get by. Business deals that were sure to go through would just not happen at the last minute; this is still happening. There is constant worry about money even though we’re all working. It’s been really horrible and exhausting. I have also been cheated of my inheritance by my own sister because we lived and worked overseas and she looked after our parents. She feels she is entitled to everything they left behind: jewelry, property, everything. She took care to put everything in her name while I was overseas. My question, Soul Arcanum, is why can’t I cry? I have been hurt so badly by my sister plus all the stuff that we’ve been through, yet I can’t seem to cry. Please help.
K.
Dear K.:
I’m sorry to hear of all your heartache. There are a number of possible reasons why you can’t cry.
The most obvious explanation is that you are depressed. When severely depressed, many people experience the same thing you describe: an inability to cry. With severe depression, emotions become so flattened that one is essentially beyond weeping. I encourage you to see your doctor about this possibility. Of course, if you have already seen a doctor and are on anti-depressants, you have your answer: anti-depressants are known to blunt emotions, so many people who take them feel too numb to laugh, cry, or feel much of anything.
Another possible explanation is that you are too overwhelmed to allow yourself the “luxury” of succumbing to tears at this time. It sounds like your struggles are ongoing, which means you are not yet in a place where you can look back on your experiences and begin to heal and release the trauma involved. This is a bit like being in the midst of battle when you are wounded; since you are still in survival mode, you may not even feel the wound until the danger is behind you. Even if you are in pain, however, you know you have to keep going in order to survive, so you ignore the wound and keep on fighting. If you feel like you simply don’t have time to “fall apart” right now, that may explain why you can’t cry.
It’s also possible that you’ve got so much emotional pain bottled up inside that you’re afraid of what may happen (or what you may do) if you started to let it out. When our emotions feel more powerful than we think we can handle, it can feel like if we even crack the door of our hearts open, a tidal wave of emotion will burst through and sweep us away. We may fear experiencing that much pain all at once, or we may fear that if we allow ourselves to feel those feelings, we will lose control and do something we may regret. In either case, the solution is often to just keep our hearts tightly locked shut and keep plugging forward.
It is also possible that your inability to cry goes way back to early childhood or even a past life. Our experience of crying is naturally rooted in our early childhood and our relationships with our caregivers. After all, crying is the only way infants have to communicate that they need something. Those of us whose parents responded to our crying in positive ways tend to find comfort in crying as adults; those of us whose parents ignored us or became angry or upset by our crying tend to have crying issues.
If, when you were a little girl, your parents somehow punished you for crying, you may have difficulty allowing yourself to cry in any situation. Parents who don’t want to be bothered with their children’s complaints tend to say things like, “Stop crying! That’s not worth crying about,” or the ever popular, “If you want something to cry about, I will give you something to cry about!” Some parents even send their children to their rooms and refuse to let them come out until they have stopped crying. Of course, there are other ways parents reject or censor their children when they are upset. Some parents are so uncomfortable seeing their children in distress that they say things like, “Please don’t cry. It breaks my heart to see you so sad,” which tends to make the child feel guilty for crying. Even when they don’t verbally discourage their children from crying, if the parents are uncomfortable, the children may sense it and decide to stifle their tears.
Yours is a perfect problem for hypnotherapy. Since there are many potential causes, hypnotherapy could help you to quickly pinpoint and heal whatever is really going on. If you came to see me for therapy, I would spend our first couple of sessions helping you get comfortable with the therapeutic process and giving you subconscious suggestions to begin to heal and release whatever is troubling you. (This gentle, gradual approach tends to work best with people who may be afraid to feel whatever emotions may come up.) Eventually, I would dialogue with your higher self and ask about the root cause of your inability to cry. If this took us back to a traumatic event in childhood or a past life, I would guide you in re-membering that event and feeling all the feelings involved. Since your presenting problem is an inability to cry, my goal would be get those tears flowing. Once you were sobbing on my couch, I would know we had achieved a breakthrough.
Some therapists believe that reliving the emotions of past events is unnecessarily unpleasant; some believe that it is essential to the healing process; I believe it depends on the client and the situation. I do believe there is great healing power in catharsis, and that it is never wise to deny, repress, block or avoid emotions. Interestingly, recent scientific research has discovered that when we cry in sorrow, our bodies release endorphins and our tears contain toxins; when our eyes are simply watering due to irritation, neither of these is true. This means that crying is in and of itself therapeutic and healing. I think we all know this based on personal experience: who hasn’t succumbed to a good cry after a period of great stress or upset, felt completely spent, and then wiped their tears and decided to get on with things?
In my experience, cathartic sessions tend to produce healing miracles. Let’s take for example the case of a woman who had an inexplicable fear of driving a car. In therapy, a past life in which she had died in a car crash was discovered. Though this awareness alone didn’t produce results, in the last session, she was regressed to relive the accident, during which there was a great outpouring of emotion. That is when a breakthrough was achieved: following that session, her fear of driving completely disappeared.
Of course, it is always helpful to simply have someone loving and understanding to talk to. If you don’t have a friend or relative you feel you can pour your heart out to, you may find traditional counseling helpful. It may take a while to develop the trust and rapport necessary, but if you open up about your troubles to a caring person, eventually those tears should begin to flow. From deep tissue massage to EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), there are many different healing modalities besides talk therapy and hypnotherapy that can release stored emotions, so explore your options. If you pray to Spirit for the answer, I’m sure you will be guided to the perfect healing path for you.
– Soul Arcanum