 Crying can feel incredibly soothing or cathartic when we've got big feelings to deal with, but how can you make use of this fabulous tool if you're someone who's never learned to cry? That's what we're going to explore in this week's episode of Pookie Ponders. Let's dive straight in. So I'm a bit of a convert to crying. I didn't used to cry ever, but those of you who followed my story for a while will be aware that historically both my physical and my psychological health was a little bit shaky. I did a lot of healing in my thirties and one of the things that this involved was learning to cry. It's a tool that I now find really helpful, but it doesn't come as naturally to me as to some. And it's something that I've had to somewhat work at when I need it. So today I'm going to share with you some ideas to help you or someone who you're supporting tap into the joy, I guess, of crying. So the first step is to give yourself permission. So many people have learned not to cry. Perhaps you grew up in a home where it was seen as a sign of weakness. Maybe societal pressure tells you men don't cry. Maybe you're a parent or a teacher and you're just really used to holding it all together for other people. Whatever the reason, if you've got used to not expressing your feelings and in particular to not crying, the first step is to acknowledge and consciously let go of those old patterns. Give yourself permission to cry, say it out loud. Acknowledge that you'd like to cry and perhaps spend a little bit of time thinking, writing or talking about the past influences that have made you feel like you mustn't cry or you can't cry. Take a moment to explore these and question them. And if it helps you, try to come up with some reasoned arguments about why these points of views are not completely valid for you anymore. The next step in Boobgy's steps to crying, this is the strangest podcast, provoke the physical sensation of crying. So if you haven't cried in a long time, you might not really know what it feels like. So it can be hard to tap into the early physical sensations which can kind of allow crying to start because you just don't know when it's happening. So this might also be a problem if you are like me autistic and you might like me be really out of touch with your body. So I'm really oblivious to like tons of stuff that other people seem to feel deeply like pain and hunger and other subtle internal cues. So I wouldn't necessarily notice if a cry is sort of welling up and it's going to get sort of lost on me. So I needed to learn to tap into those physiological cues. I found a really helpful way to get in touch with what crying felt like was to take situations that prompted the physiological aspects of crying like eye watering and to get curious about how that felt. So really notice what happened when my eyes were watering. So things like chopping onions or walking in the wind or not blinking for extended periods of time or yawning are ways to get your tear ducts kind of activated. It's not going to tap into the emotional side of crying but it would give you the chance to get curious about the physiological sensations of what crying kind of feels like. When your eyes start to water rather than like blinking away the tears and holding it back which might be something you're really used to actually let the tears flow and just notice how it feels. How does it feel in your face and in your body in your brain? What does that feel like? Next we go beyond the bodily and we start to think about our brains and we allow ourselves to begin to explore some big feelings. So if you've had a lifetime of not crying I'm going to bet you've probably also had a lifetime of locking away any kind of like big or uncomfortable feelings and now is the time to start to change that. So you don't want to unlock every hard feeling that you've ever had all at once. Some of those might need some professional support but if there's something on your mind at the moment then maybe consider allowing yourself to begin to explore the feelings that might be associated with that rather than just numbing them off or blocking them out as you might normally be used to doing. At first I found it actually easiest to allow myself to explore big feelings that related to like situations that were objectively sad. So like the loss of a pet or the death of a friend. Things that no one could question that this is a thing that people would be sad about. I found this easier because lots of things that I might feel like sadness or other big feelings about were things that I might place like value judgments on myself and I might say well other people can cope with that why can't you or I'd feel ashamed or guilty or other like just there was just a mess of feelings around some stuff but if your dog's died at some point that's really sad. Everyone would admit that's really sad it's an okay thing to feel sad about so maybe that's the kind of thing it's a bit easier to explore big feelings about. You can't place any value judgments on yourself for feeling sad if a dog died. So once you've decided the thing that you're going to explore the feelings about and it might be a current thing or it might be a historic thing so the loss of a pet in the past is I think a really perfectly valid one or a person in the past though that can get bigger and deeper perhaps then explore your feelings in whatever way feels most comfortable. So this is about just actually for the first time allowing yourself to begin to feel stuff so you might write, you might draw, you might talk, you might sing, you might do interpretive dance, you do whatever you like, whatever feels good for you in terms of just beginning to explore those feelings and remember this is about the process not the product. You're going to try these feelings on for size they're going to feel a little bit uncomfortable at first a little bit like you're playing dress up because you're not used to feeling these things and certainly my experience of beginning to feel things in my 30s made me feel like a small child completely unable to manage feelings. The nice thing is as an aside here I found when I started to allow myself to feel the big hard stuff sadness anger and so on I also began to feel all the big joyful stuff love and care and hope and those kinds of things which were wonderful although it all felt very complicated and a lot when you've lived in an emotionally numb state for many decades so just just be aware of that notice the feelings try them on for size see what they look like see what they feel like and just begin to get curious about them try to name the things that you're feeling that might also be hard at first if you haven't done it before and try to get like just a bit of a sense of ownership but be kind to yourself about this it's tricky if you haven't done it before and it takes a little bit of getting used to like you may well have supported children in their emotional literacy they find it hard you're going to find it just as hard you're going to be like that five-year-old even if you're a 35-year-old or a 55-year-old or 105-year-old if you haven't been there and done the learning then you're doing it for the first time try if you can to resist the urge just to walk away or lock those feelings up in the way that you've always done in the past so the next thing you can try is like tapping into tear jerkers so it might be that tapping into something that's happening for you right now or in your past feels too big and too scary and too hard right now but you can instead tap into the feelings via others so things like sad books or films or music can actually be a great way to provoke and explore big feelings in a slightly safer way in a third person kind of way and and the other thing you can do here is talk to friends and find out you know many people will say that they've got like guaranteed tear jerkers like songs or movies that they always watch when they feel like they need a good cry and talk to your friends about this find out the things that make them cry what are their sad songs and as you're doing this just notice how these friends these people that you love and respect and admire talk to you openly about the things that make them cry notice the fact that they talk about crying and they admit that they cry and it's okay and that you feel okay about the idea of them crying and that perhaps this helps a little bit more with that whole giving yourself permission to cry too next we need to think about creating the right environment for crying this podcast is so bizarre anyway we're going to create the right environment for crying so if we're going to have a good cry going to hopefully have a good cry we've got to create the right environment because we don't want to be disturbed or distracted if we do finally manage to tap into those deep feelings and also we might be feeling somewhat like vulnerable or uncertain and we might not want other people to bear witness to that at first on the other hand it might be that the right environment for us is actually with someone that we trust so we're probably looking to be somewhere kind of calm and quiet and we might be completely private or we might be with someone who is going to be alongside us as we begin to explore this stuff so many of us but many people do learn to cry alongside a trusted adult alongside a parent or carer as a child and it might be that there's someone in your life who's able to kind of somewhat emulate that role for you in this moment if you kind of need them to. It can help to have someone who's happy to cry alongside you if they're happy to do that. Just explore have a look within your kind of really trusted network and it might be that there's someone there who's able to literally be that shoulder to cry on or you might choose to do it your own but have a think about where's going to feel safe where's going to feel possible where you're not going to feel kind of worried that you're going to be interrupted. You need to think as well about timing so whether you end up crying or just going deep with those feelings if you're exploring this stuff and it's new to you it can be quite difficult to transition from the big difficult deep stuff and maybe the crying just back to where you might need to be to get on with your day to day life so think about when it's happening and what's going to be expected of you next and make sure that you're not going to have to like rapidly put on a brave face again in order to face the world because that's tricky. You will get to the point where you can switch more readily between those different kind of modes but at the beginning it is much much harder because you're not used to doing it yet. Next tip is to use bridges to crying and to build an association so as you become a little bit more open to the idea and the sensation of crying using the ideas that we've already sort of talked about it can help to mix together some of these ideas that we've been exploring so that you can kind of build a bridge to like crying event if you like. So you might set yourself up in a situation where it feels safe to cry and where you've got time you're not going to be hurried into something else. You might have a particular topic that you want to kind of emotionally explore that you've given yourself permission to explore and you might still find that you're sat there dry-eyed so you're doing all the right things but you're just sat there like yeah crying's not happening. This is where the bridges come in so we need like bridging to help us get to the crying so we can take steps to provoke the act of crying like physiologically so using things like chopping onions or walking in the wind or not blinking just to get the tears started and we can also do other things like get ourselves in the mood by replaying weepy scenes from a movie or putting on a piece of music that feels emotional like basically pull out all the tear jerker stops to kind of try and provoke those feelings and try and provoke the physiology as well and as those like physical sensations and the deep feelings that you're allowing to happen start to kind of bridge and build melt together try and lean into the feelings both the physical like the physiological feelings of the tears that the onion for example might provoke and the psychological feelings that the deep feelings might provoke and just try and be brave enough to kind of lean into that and allow the tears to begin to flow and hopefully the bridge of the onion etc allows the feelings to find their way through those tears which are first just a physical response to the onion or the wind and but then perhaps take on a bit of a different meaning as you are able to lean into how you feel these sort of like crying triggers can be really really helpful for those of us who might find crying a little bit harder because it can feel hard even once we've given us our permission even once we recognize the benefits and even once we know a good cry is going to really help right now we can't just do it on command it can be a bit harder for some of us so sometimes we make a style with a satsang or an onion or a walk in brisk cold wind in order to try and then move on to working through our own stuff next tip is to practice practice crying so like any skill and I do think crying is a skill um practice is going to help it's going to take a little while to master particularly if you've spent all your life specifically not crying blocking off the feelings it's going to take a little while to get to grips with this um but that's okay if the actual physical act of crying is taking a while to to master don't stress this is a little bit like uh trying to go to sleep where the more that you worry about going to sleep the harder it is to sleep this is like such a natural deep act crying um that the more that you think about it and put stress on yourself then kind of in a way the harder it might be for it to come to you and actually just allowing yourself to feel the feelings even if the actual act of crying doesn't happen is really important step so be forgiving of yourself accept that this may take time and many sort of sessions if you like um in order for you to really begin to get the hang of it but do practice if you can so one thing just to remember here is that it took many years for you to learn to lock away all those feelings so effectively like completely overriding what is a very natural process so it might take some time to begin to unlearn all of those blocking mechanisms as well just remember that and don't expect to like overcome this and change everything in a day but practice is going to make it more easy to access both the physical and psychological side um of crying and it can also help you to begin to like better marshal the underlying feelings in a healthy way so that you become more able um to move between um like happy and smiley and brave face on for the world state and deep emotional crying state at the beginning it can be really really tricky um to move between those different states but practice will make it a little bit easier and then finally like building on the practice idea find some good times to cry have a think have a think about when you can build this into your regular schedule I've become like a parody of myself at this point I love a bit of routine I like a bit of routine with crying too um oh so it like there can be moments in your day in your week when it might be more possible to have a cry when you might practice um you can coincide this with times when like tears may just happen anyway so um I for example find that in the shower or um when I am out for a walk or a run and it's cold and the wind's on my face and it causes your your tears to to flow naturally these can be good moments to have a bit of a sob I kind of like the symbolism of a cry in the shower or in the wind where the tears get kind of washed or blown away and it feels to me quite cathartic that I'm like letting it go and it's leaving um that works for me it may or may not work for you but kind of these are times when you have a finite period of time like your shower or your walk your run would not last forever and so you can lean into those feelings and then move on with your day um and their times when tears might be naturally happening anyway or at least they're not going to be noticed or sort of seen um and so it feels somehow I don't know easier better okay um to to have a little sob in those moments and it can just be a nice time to to kind of practice feeling the feelings going there and then moving on and noticing how it feels to be able to go deep to feel the stuff and then to step away and to carry on with our other things and the rest of our day as and when we need to I don't know I found that like finding times to practice regularly did really help particularly as I was first beginning to develop those skills okay so wrapping up crying I'm not sure I would have predicted I'd ever talk about crying for quite so long but one of my patreons asked me for some advice and as someone who has relatively recently learned to cry and still has to override my natural urge just to button it all up I thought I had a few ideas to share here I can really see the importance and the benefits of crying it's something that really helps me to regulate and to manage big feelings sometimes it's also quite a good way of um and this isn't as manipulative as it sounds but of other people seeing how you're feeling sometimes you can be really good at masking everything and when you have a good cry everybody realizes that maybe you need a little bit of support right now I did this recently on a paragliding trip it wasn't a calculated thing I just run out of being able to cope anymore but I was really struggling with food really struggling with the social side of things and went into a kind of bit of a panic and had a really big cry the really big cry did two things it helped to relieve a lot of the internal pressure that I was carrying but it also was a really good signifier to the people around me who care for me and loved me and wanted to help me that I was maybe coping even less well than it appeared and so they need to step up and give me a hug and help me and work out how to make the next days feel more manageable that was nothing to do with the paragliding by the way love that bit all the social stuff around it still working on how to make the next trip a little bit better in that regard anyway so love a good cry it can really help can be a good social signifier too it's a really natural thing to cry it can help us to feel better and it's not something I believe that should carry any shame or stigma so let's embrace the tears in fact if you're listening to this then please come on social media and talk to me about crying talk to me about why you think it's okay to cry in times perhaps when you have cried and the things that are tear jerkers for you I hope there were some helpful ideas in here for you if you liked what you heard today please subscribe and share my work you can support my work further by joining me over on Patreon where you'll get early access to all of my resources and the chance to influence what I work on next or you can invite me to speak at your next event or in your setting either virtually or face to face thank you so much for listening and for everything you're doing for the children and young people in your care this has been pookie ponders with me pookie knightsmith until next time stay curious stay compassionate and keep pondering