Joe’s story of how he learned to cry again is the clearest illustration of why feeling can’t be forced or reasoned through. After thirteen years without tears—his parents had shamed crying out of him—he kept a photo of himself crying on his desk to remind himself. Knowing intellectually that suppression was unhealthy did nothing.
“That’s why I haven’t cried in 13 years.”
It took eighteen months before he resorted to extreme measures: hiking deep into the LA back country, far off-trail, just to fake cry where no one could shame him. For three months the fake crying produced no real tears. Then the floodgates opened and he cried for days—years of tears finally moving through.
The lesson is that the emotion has to actually flow; you can’t substitute insight, willpower, or a to-do list for the felt experience. Notably, he also discovered the process wasn’t the dreaded loss of control he feared. He could stop any time. Checking in hour after hour, he kept finding he felt better than before, which is what let him keep going. Feeling the emotion all the way through, rather than managing around it, was the only thing that worked.
“It wasn’t like I was taken over by it, but I was getting years of tears out of my system.”
Related Concepts
- You can’t make yourself feel emotions by trying
- Fully felt and unresisted, every emotion becomes a virtue
- Feeling and expressing emotion restores connection
- Transformation requires experience, not information
- Feeling your life produces clearer decisions than figuring it out
- Loving an emotion transforms it; trying to get rid of it doesn’t
- Trying to feel your feelings is as much resistance as trying not to feel them
- Every emotion is a signal pointing toward an action or a need