Tears and Healing
Why proud men don't cry and why they must
We are all on a spiritual journey. A very important part of that journey for many people is the need to heal from wounds from the past.
What do I mean when I say wounds? I am talking about how certain people have grown up in broken families, have been bullied at school or in their workplace, or have been victims of abusive behaviour in other contexts.
When someone in your life has hurt to you, it can affect you on both a mental and physical level. An act of anger directed towards you can cause damage, in that you may absorb some of that anger into your own body, which can lead to what I tend to describe as emotional pain. Emotional pain, if it festers in the body for a long time, can lead to physical illness. You will no doubt have heard the expression ‘I need to get it off my chest’, which is important because sometimes we instinctively know that we have been hurt emotionally and need to release the emotion that is on our chest as a result of getting hurt.
When you are living with emotional pain, you have internalised emotions that live in your body which you are not necessarily able to express. I once heard someone define the word emotion as ‘energy in motion’, and when you are attacked emotionally, some energy may well enter into your body and remain there until such a time as you are able to heal from it and return to a state of inner peace. The process of healing is often a response to love that leads to the shedding of tears, an act which releases trapped emotion and frees the body to return to a state of peace and equilibrium.
On my own spiritual journey, I spent years living with emotional pain trapped in my body due to an abusive father. My father always acted towards his family in a very controlling way, and one of the ways in which he maintained his sense of power was to bully everyone in the family into emotional submission. This caused a great deal of hurt — it’s the reason why my mother became ill and eventually died of cancer, and why both my sister and I have been in therapy for years.
If you do research online into the causes of cancer, you find a whole array of different perspectives. You will find articles by doctors or scientists saying that the causes of cancer are unknown. But you will also find the occasional article talking about the link between emotional abuse and cancer, and this is where my current understanding lies after seeing what happened to my mother, and then what happened to my father’s second partner, who also died of cancer.
When I have tried to help my father in ways that might stop him being hurtful to others and have indicated to him that there are reasons why his relationships break down and end in death by cancer, his response has been, “Well, some people just get cancer and others don’t.” This cold appraisal is a kind of denial — he uses his scientific background as a way of hiding the fact that it was his abusive behaviour that caused my mother, and then his subsequent partner, to both become ill with and die of cancer.
I could be angry at my father over the way he has caused so much pain and continues to do so, but I am not at all. Sometimes it does cause me a kind of shock when he does something which seems insanely cruel, but I have come to realise that he is a deeply broken person who has lost the ability to experience and express true love, which makes me sad more than anything.
My father needs to heal. He needs to learn to show vulnerability. He needs to learn that it’s okay to connect with his own emotions and to embrace rather than deny that he is an emotional person. We are all emotional people and emotions are healthy. I know my father must have grown up without the benefit of having people in his life who showed him the kind of unconditional love and emotional competence that are central to a healthy mind, a healthy character, and healthy relationships. Understanding this allows me to have empathy towards him rather than anger.
I long to see my father experience the healing benefits of shedding tears. In those rare moments when I’ve seen him become emotional, he has fought back the tears. But those tears are the key to his healing — they would allow his ego to dissolve into love and peace and as well as being healing for him, they would be a wonderfully healing thing for my sister and I and the other people in his life who are the unfortunate recipients of his controlling behaviour.
The tears that we shed are a gift from God, and men should never feel as though crying is a sign of weakness. Crying is about taking care of yourself so that you can be free and healthy enough to take care of others and live life from a place of inner peace, leading to health and happiness for you and those around you. If you think crying is a sign of weakness, just look at the example of David in the Bible, whose psalms are filled with examples of his shedding of tears, despite the fact that he was a king and a great warrior. Even Jesus wept.
If you think you may be harbouring some emotional pain but find it difficult to cry, you might need to reach out to God in prayer and ask Him to help you. The Lord is most gracious in hearing our prayers and responding to them.