I have recently discovered for myself that tears really do 'cleanse.' One of my New Years resolutions was to not allow work to give me stomach pains...or any kind of physical pain, really. Well, I've never really been too good with resolutions. It's probably bad luck to begin with that I usually don't even get around to making them until around the 3rd or 4th of January.
So, just give it a few weeks and around the 3rd week of January (I did really good the first couple of weeks....I did), I not only found myself with the normal chest pains and stomach aches, but I found myself bursting into tears on the way home from work. Yes, tears. Never even really saw them coming, but it's like all day my body was just waiting to release the unbearable amount of stress I was feeling. As I cried, I even kind of laughed at the same time. Let me tell you, it was all soon followed by some really loud singing and banging on the steering wheel.
Might sound extreme. Ask me to recall the specific events that brought this stress on, and I can't. Maybe this is an indication that it was never worth stressing over in the first place, I'm not sure. But who are you to judge?! :-) It's really the same types of things work-related, day in and day out. Perhaps the bigger problem is me allowing things to stress me out so much (but again, who can really be the judge of whether or not I'm overreacting other than me? I have high standards...for myself...for others...for the Air Force). I don't think my problem is dealing with the stress. Because my body took care of that real quickly.
So quickly, in fact, that it intrigued me. This was not an expected cry, like other types of emotional tears...like ones you expect when someone close to you passes away, for example. I've never questioned those tears. These were formed from frustration...anger, even.
A couple weeks later, it happened again. I decided to do some reading on stress, tears, the different types of tears and their makeup.
There are Basal tears, the ones that continuously keep your cornea wet. Kind of boring. Then there are reflex tears, which wash away irritants or foreign objects that get in your eye. And lastly, there are 'crying' tears...associated with a range of emotion and sometimes even accompanied by all kinds of other exciting physical symptoms.
If the chemicals/proteins associated with stress did not discharge at all, they would build up to toxic levels that could weaken the body's immune system and other biological processes. But the body has its own mechanisms of coping with this stress. The chemicals are secreted when we sweat and when we cry.
Inadvertently in crying the person is aiding the emotional processing of the hurt experience. It means they are mentally facing and accepting the event that has upset them and allowing the natural response of crying to occur. This allows emotional processing to proceed, weakening the power of the thoughts to upset them (possibly through exposure and habituation). Each time upsetting thoughts are faced and reacted to, their power is weakened so that gradually emotional hurts become less painful. ~ Roger Baker
After each 'episode,' I felt relief. I was winning! (I got that from my older, wiser brother, Brandon). I could get on with starting all over the next day. Maybe a couple more weeks of BS (I'm sorry, toxic proteins) would build up and I'd have to get rid of it again.
So, I know that I have tears to battle the 'pain.' They are on my side. And people look at tears as a sign of weakness. Ha! I think not. They are weapons. Let them work for you. They work for me. (I must have a lot of toxins building up, because I sweat a lot too when I workout...)
