The Catharsis of Crying and Letting Go: It’s Different for Everybody
Letting go can be a great feeling.
And it can take on many forms:
Letting go of a problem you’ve been trying to fix, because it managed to get fixed eventually. Letting go of a troubling feeling. Or perhaps letting go of a person, after spending years with difficult emotions that have been caused by him or her.
Letting go is a path to freedom. Because once we let go, we are no longer confined by our emotions. We get rid of the things that shouldn’t have mattered to us even long ago. Even if they did, that feeling of letting go is liberating, empowering.
Some people may think it’s a mistake. Or maybe for others, letting go is completely out of the question.
But when something holds us back or causes us pain, letting go can be a very beautiful feeling.
“Catharsis” is one word for it.
Merriam-Webster defines it as the purification or purgation of the emotions; or as purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension.
Health-and-medical writer and science reporter (for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Health Magazine) Benedict Carey writes about this feeling of catharsis that we get from crying:
Studies that have been done on its cathartic effects have come up with some common observations:
Crying is infectious;
Women cry more often than men;
And the physical signs of crying mirror the psychological.
Although these are commonly-held beliefs, the truth is also that people tend to remember things selectively.
With crying, we tend to choose to remember what is less painful: that is, to remember crying as something that enabled us to “let go” of certain emotions…
“Memory tidies up the mixed episodes — the times when tears brought more shame than relief, more misery than company,” writes Carey.
Aside from brushing off painful memories, the cathartic effects of crying depend on “who is around” and what the reaction can do to influence one’s environment.
Jonathan Rottenberg, Lauren M. Bylsma, and Ad Vingerhoets conducted research for The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, where over 5,000 people from 35 different countries participated, discovering that 70% of participants reported a “positive, comforting” reaction from others when they cried…
This goes to show that people are oftentimes empathized with whenever they cry, and so an obvious reason as to why we allow ourselves to do so is to garner empathy and support.
James J. Gross, a psychologist at Stanford, has claimed: “Almost all emotions are, at some level, directed at others, so their response is going to be very important.”
It seems we also cry for affirmation.
Dr. Judith Kay Nelson, a therapist in California, has likewise said: “Crying, for a child, is a way to beckon the caregiver, to maintain proximity and use the caregiver to regulate mood or negative arousal.”
She differentiates between protest crying and sad crying:
Protest crying is the type of crying we do when we feel helpless and want someone else to fix our problem for us;
Sad crying, on the other hand, is an “appeal for comfort” and an invitation for closeness.
I hold on to some belief that even as we get older, a part of us remains children.
Not in the sense that we are immature, but more in the sense that we continue to want, to need, to hope.
As children, even as adults, we continue to send out pleas (though in much subtler ways). As children, we continue to yearn for protection and comfort, security and connection.
Maybe the truth is that we remain our “child selves” all our lives, only under the disguise of a more “perfected” adult.
Crying can still be a good idea, but now we know some of the reasons why we do it.
Last night, I was talking with some friends who have been telling me to move forward from past experience.
Along the way, I was prompted to delete thousands upon thousands of photos on my phone over the past years.
These photos were a random motley of people, places, encounters, events.
I decided to transfer these thousands of “memories” into a backup file, keeping only ones from the most recent months: the only ones I will allow myself to look back on.
It was simply an act of saving storage, and I realized, partly a reason to forget about the past, as I found myself deleting more and more photos… but all the same, it was cathartic.
Letting go is cathartic.
And maybe that act of deleting thousands of photos was my catharsis.
I may have cried a few times; I may have tried stupid things to let go. Maybe we all have.
But catharsis, like in a theater, is something that comes to the subject or audience in an unexpected way.
For some people, protest crying or sad crying will probably work. For others, they have their own ways of freeing themselves from limiting emotions.
For me, this happened in the simple act of deleting photos.
Though catharsis can be an end for a certain drama or play: in reality, it happens gradually if not all at once. It happens one way for one person, and another way for another person…
In short, it will probably happen differently for everybody.
And perhaps that’s the beauty of catharsis. How it can happen to us throughout our lives after every storm or heartbreak. How it can happen in the most unexpected moments in our lives.
We can still cry. Or we can choose to let go in other ways.
We do these things like children: in search of comfort, in want of security, in need of empathy.
Which just maybe proves that all our lives, we are all just searching for love and affirmation, which is the most human thing possible.
Letting go is a great feeling. Cry if you need to.
But maybe, most of all: pat yourself in the back and remember that you’re here in search of love. Even if you, yourself, provide that for you.
Letting go will mean different things for everybody.
People let go in different ways.
Allow yourself to shrink back into a child sometimes; you don’t always have to be strong, but you will always be brave if you allow yourself to feel what every human being must feel.
