The wisest words I ever heard anyone say were uttered by my (then) six-year-old daughter. I was crying one day, particularly upset. She snuggled up to me and said, “Don’t worry Mommy if you are feeling sad, because the NEXT thing you will be feeling is something else, like glad!”
It took me a while to realize that she came to this profound wisdom through me—it was what I had been modeling (inadvertently) during her formative years.
Like most of us, I believed I should look strong before my children, and I worried about the negative impact of showing emotions. I worried I might create children who wallowed in their feelings and became weak and not resilient. I worried that my children would perceive me as soft and ineffective.
My life story bears a different tale.
When my children were young, ages 3 and 6, my husband and I were at a low point in our relationship. We were dealing with the aftereffects of infidelity and wondered if we would weather the storm. We decided we wanted to do the work to heal—to dive deep together into the underlying causes of issues in our relationship. We began seeing a therapist and took a yearlong Love & Ecstasy training that taught us the principles of meditation, self-inquiry, and acceptance. During this work, traumatic memories of childhood sexual abuse from a neighbor began coming up for me. The therapist said it might be because I had been the age my children were now. She said I was suffering from PTSD. When triggered, I would feel paralyzed by shame and fear. I cried—a lot—as I learned to stay with and allow these feelings instead of burying them.
For seven years, I cried nearly every day. I didn’t always cry uncontrollably, but often openly. As I navigated the terrain of PTSD, I could no longer suppress what I was feeling—and in the work I was doing with my husband, we were learning not to.
The result was my children saw tears stream down my face all the time. Crying was a release for me, and it happened when I was sad, scared, mad, or happy. I used to say that crying allowed my heart to feel the emotion.
Don’t get me wrong. Our household was a happy place. We laughed and played and enjoyed each other. It’s just that I also cried because, honestly, I was dealing with a lot. We all are sometimes. People die. Divorce looms. Terrible, uncontrollable things happen. And yet, we believe it’s not okay to feel sad. It’s not okay to cry.
When do we learn this? Dr. Stephen Sideroff, a clinical psychologist and resilience expert at UCLA, says that our disapproval of emotional expression generally (and crying specifically) stems from childhood.
My kids saw me unlearn this.
They saw on the outside what I was learning on the inside: feeling emotions is natural, crying is a healthy release, and feelings move and change. The result was they formed different beliefs about emotional expression.
My outward showing of emotion allowed my kids to feel free to feel their big emotions too. We could turn big emotions into light-hearted episodes where we went ahead and felt challenging feelings but didn’t wallow in them and had a chance to talk about what was going on.
One of my favorite parenting moments unfolded when one of my daughters was mad or sad, crying out in frustration and overwhelmed. I put my hands on my hips, faced her squarely, and said in a mock stern voice, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you crying anyway? I mean I NEVER cry like this, do I?”
My daughter couldn’t help but smile as my declaration was so obviously false. Before long, still sniffling, she came and snuggled up next to me, and we talked freely about whatever had happened and why she was feeling frustrated and sad. The tears flowed, but none of it was that big a deal, and instead of feeling isolated from one another, we felt connected.
It was reverse psychology. But it worked. The kids had often seen me cry and recover, cry and recover. The crying was real but not the end of the world. It was just a big emotion passing through. When I stopped and acknowledged my daughter’s tears (even in a light-hearted way), she felt seen, and we connected. Science supports this observation, too. Time magazine reports in The Science of Crying that tears trigger social bonding and human connection.
Over the course of the seven years, the crying from sadness turned more and more to crying from gratitude and happiness. Because I had not shut down my big “ugly” emotions, I was free to feel the big happy ones too. The crying helped release whatever big emotion I was feeling but also signaled to others an opportunity to connect.
Crying also made me feel better. The Harvard Health blog supports my observation in an article titled Is Crying Good For You? It appears to be. We want our kids to feel comfortable crying. Crying releases stress hormones and toxins. Conversely, suppressing emotions has all kinds of negative physical and mental effects from a less resilient immune system to anxiety and depression.
What I found, too, was an essential component of self-love: acceptance. Sharing my tears helped me feel less shame. It was an authentic expression of what was happening, and I was learning to be okay with whatever was going on.
Hey, this is me; I am sad and crying today.
Hey, this is me; I am happy and crying today.
My daughters are both now mothers of young toddlers. Today, I got a Mother’s Day card in the mail. In it, my oldest daughter closes with this line: “I’m sure I tell Cedar ‘It’s okay to be sad’ at least once a day–thanks for teaching me that first.”
Crying daily may have been the best thing I did as a mother.
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