Читать книгу Tears to Triumph: - Dawn Marie Daniels - Страница 14

Yet again, I was crying on a friend’s shoulder about a guy. He didn’t call when he said he would, he canceled our date at the last minute, he disappeared for days—it was all or one of the above and not for the first time either. She simply looked at me and said, “I don’t like the way he treats you.” At first, I was angry and began to defend him, but the words died before I could get them out. She was right.

That night I had a good cry and took a look at my love life and my life in general. I decided that I was okay. It was okay that my cat was the only male in my life. It was more than okay that I had wonderful friends who cared about me. I had a job; I had a roof over my head. I decided then and there that I was done with men/boys/dudes/ guys. I was thirty-six years old and solo was the way to go.

When he called again, I summoned my courage or pride or resolve or something and said, “I don’t think it is a good idea for us to get together anymore.” He didn’t really put up too much of a fight. After we hung up, I felt so good and happy. Who knew that saying no could lead to happiness?

A few weeks later I was at the gym and a friend introduced me to Graham, who had just moved to town. I refused to be interested. But over the next few weeks, I couldn’t help but notice him noticing me. One night, when a few people from the gym went out for drinks, Graham included, I went along. We found ourselves at the end of the bar and talked late into the night—our conversation punctuated by good-byes to the other people we came with. We stayed until the bar closed and that night I kissed him. However, I refused to give him my number because I was convinced there was no point to it.

He can’t say “I’ll call you” if you don’t give him your number, right? Much to my surprise he did call me because he’d gotten my number from a mutual friend. And then, he called me when he said he would, he never canceled a date, and he let me know where he was going to be and when. I found myself not talking about him to my friends. I didn’t have to dissect every phone call, or interpret all that he said and did. I didn’t have to seek translation for our conversations. I trusted what he said and I trusted what I believed about him and the situation. Graham was different. I didn’t have to wonder if he liked me—I knew.

One night a few months later I was having dinner with two friends who asked me how it was going with Graham. I told them about our last date—bowling—which was a lot of fun, and then I started to cry. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or them. While Emily handed me a napkin to mop up my tears and Jenny patted me on the back, they both said, “What’s wrong?” My voice choked with emotion, I replied, “I don’t want to mess it up.” After all, the one thing all my failed relationships had in common was me.

But I seemed to have beaten my bad track record. Graham and I continued to see each other. I met his family; he met mine. We went to a wedding and a funeral and a beach vacation. We laughed and fought and enjoyed each other’s company. He taught me how to play video games and I introduced him to some great books. Time seemed to run together. Six months, twelve months, two years—we each changed jobs and lived and shared our lives.

Then, one night after dinner it happened. I didn’t really see it coming but I knew something was up because he had been acting strangely all day. He cleared his throat a couple of times and I steeled myself for it. Boy, was I knocked over when he said, “Will you marry me?” and he pulled out a beautiful ring. I could barely see it through my tears of joy. Who knew that saying yes could lead to such happiness?

So there I was, engaged at thirty-nine (long past my shelf date, or so I thought) and we got married surrounded by friends and family. At nearly forty-one, I had our wonderful child. Sometimes as I look back on it, it seems too good to be true. Not all has been easy, but life would be bland without a little seasoning, and tears can bring something to both our sorrow and our joy.

Sheila Curry Oakes is a former book editor and currently a freelance writer/editor. She lives in New York City with her husband and child.

All Systems Down: Emotional Reboot

As women we multitask and manage ourselves to a fault. The many women we have spoken to have mentioned that they had cried due to unhappiness, dissatisfaction with their lives, being overwhelmed, the loss of a loved one, a total sense of despair, loss of control, or the need for change or a breakthrough. One woman described her last experience before crying as hitting a brick wall. She cried, and when it was over she said she didn’t feel better or worse, just tired.

After speaking to many women about how they felt before and after they cried, we’ve found that crying was a form of an emotional reboot of sorts. While some women said that after crying they felt better and were able to go back to doing what needed to be done, others said they felt totally exhausted and went to sleep—crying allowed them the space to stop for however long they needed to and release. Our bodies tend to let us know what we need when we need it. The mind controls the body, and when stress levels reach a peak and all things converge to create the perfect storm of tears, there may be nothing you can do to stop the flow—and maybe you shouldn’t.

What Your Tears Say About You and Your Breakthrough

So let’s get down to it—do you cry? Do you cry at the slightest little thing? Do you hold your tears in and wait until you are alone to let them flow? Do you let it out and then go straight into strategy mode? Or you just can’t relate because you don’t cry at all because you just know it’s not going to change anything? The type of tears you cry may say a lot about how you can break through to the triumph that you so desperately want and deserve. We found that there are some characteristically identifiable tears we associate with stress and coping theories.

Emotion Focused Tears

These types of tears are a result of our emotions. These tears help us to free ourselves from the things we are feeling at the time and move on to reaching the answers we need to remedy our situations.

Release Tears are tears that allow us to release the pain, anguish, or sorrow we may be feeling. Just getting it out, so to speak, is the way that we found these tears to work in our lives. The tears can be associated with a catharsis, a new beginning, and a fresh start. It was by far the biggest response that we got from women who said that they cried. People shared with us that they felt like crying gave them an “emotional release,” that it “released powerful emotions and made way for new ones,” and that it was almost a “physical release” of emotions that helped women to let go. Lorna Lightfoot-Ware of Freeport, New York, told us, “Crying is the physical release of emotion. Rather than yelling, getting sick, or losing sleep, crying helps to wash away some of the toxic and negative feelings.”

L. Danyetta Najoli, a life coach from Cincinnati, Ohio, knows a thing or two about release. She has devoted her life to helping women find their true selves by releasing whatever it is that is blocking them from their goal. “Crying is a release of emotions, whether happy or sad, that allows you to be fully alive and present with your feelings.” Her identification of release tears, similar to that of many other women in the survey, shows us how crying can serve a very real and useful purpose. It helps us start fresh, with a blank slate, washed clean by our very own tears.

Sympathetic Tears are shed for situations that cause us to empathize with another person’s situation. The clichéd image of a woman crying at a Hallmark commercial may come to mind. But it is a little bit deeper than that for these tears. You may identify with or have cried for the people who were stranded in New Orleans with no food, water, shelter, and no way out.

We interviewed one woman in Alabama who had lost her life fortune, witnessed her business going through bankruptcy, and suffered her own personal setbacks. She shared these details slowly and with some feelings. But when she started talking about her husband’s pain and her son’s adjustment to their life, she couldn’t help but cry. She didn’t cry for herself, she cried for her son and her husband. She said it was because she felt for her husband; “he had worked so hard for his dream, and now it was gone.” She didn’t cry when she talked about herself or having to work harder or having to feed the dogs that used to live on the lot at their business. She didn’t cry when she said, at this point, she was the only person in her household working. She cried when she thought of someone else’s pain.

Secret Tears are those shed alone—these are the times when even your closest friends don’t know you cry. The reasons vary, but we would rather talk about the situation than share that we cried about it. These tears may be private and we don’t want to share these feelings with others just yet or at all. In these circumstances we may be ashamed of crying or think that someone may think we’re weak for crying and would rather do it alone than be talked about for crying in public.

Later in the book, you will be introduced to Mary Beth Armstrong, a devoted wife and mother of two grown boys. When she received advice that told her that she had to stay strong and not let her family see her cry after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she tried to oblige. It is noble to spare our family, children, and even coworkers our pain. But over time, these secret tears need some release, and as you will see in this book, they sometimes find it in the most unlikely of places.

One woman shared in the survey why she shed secret tears:

“Because I feel that it may exhibit a sign of some weakness and emotional instability, and as a black woman we are expected to be strong, so it would appear to be out of character for myself, a black woman, to cry.”

Adrian King, a financial aid officer at a New York college, said that she would never let her coworkers and subordinates see her cry. Not that she is opposed to crying, but for so long she has been the resourceful one, the one that other people rely on, and she would not want to let them down. That is the burden that secret tears carry.

The next two sets of Emotion Focused Tears occur because of something that either has happened to us or something that we have done.

Remorseful Tears fall when we know we’ve played a role in the problem that caused the tearfulness. Remorseful tears tend to serve as a breakthrough when we just can’t take the guilt or hide any longer and just cry about what we did wrong. Remorseful tears can arise for something that we had little or nothing to do with, but yet we still wish we could change things. All of the people who have ever watched a flood or witnessed someone in peril and cried because they wished that there was something, anything they could do—those are remorseful tears.

Bonnie, a UC Berkeley student, cried because she felt so much guilt that she didn’t feel she had time to listen to the story of a family that had lost everything to Hurricane Katrina. She was going to gut houses in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, and at the time, that seemed like it took precedent over one story of one family. She went back the next day to speak to the family and give them their time to express their loss and time for her to share her tears of remorse.

In our survey, we read about remorseful tears, and some of the simple words that these women used to describe their feelings are best described by sharing their own words with you. When we asked them, “How do you feel when you cry?” those who experienced tears of remorse shared the following feelings with us:

“Angry and defeated.”

“Filled with anxiety, like I would explode.”

“A mess!!!!”

“Bitterness building up in my throat.”

“Confused, regretful.”

Mournful Tears are the tears that we are most accepting of and empathetic toward. These tears come with the loss of a loved one or the metaphorical death of something important in our lives. Losing a loved one is a long-term grief process that is almost impossible to fully recover from. It is said that time heals all wounds. But does it really? We have found, as Lorissa McMillan from California told us about the loss of her mother, “You never get over it. Somehow you get through it, but you never ever get over it.”

Women that have experienced mournful tears described their feelings this way:

“Weak, shaky.”

“Heavy.”

“Lost, alone, confused, and abandoned.”

Problem Focused Tears

Problem Focused Tears tend to be tears that are focused on solutions to life’s problems. We cry these tears when we are more likely to think our way through it, come up with a new plan, or talk ourselves out of a sad place.

Angry Tears come when we are in situations that move us to aggressive measures. Many women described situations where they may have cried during an argument not because they were sad, but because their significant other just angered them so that they were moved to tears. They so badly wanted to change the situation, but in the midst of the anger, they had no way to release the aggression but to cry (or throw something). And sometimes we need to let off a little steam.

Alethea Bonello from Riverdale, Georgia, explained angry tears this way: “Crying is your body’s ‘pressure releaser,’ like on a pressure cooker. It allows a little steam to escape so you can focus on the challenge at hand.”

Frustrated Tears come when we are fed up with the situation we may be in at the time. One woman described how she hated her job so much that she would sneak off to the bathroom and just cry out her frustration to the Lord. She said she felt like there was nothing she could do about her job at the time because she couldn’t move on until she had something else in place, but her crying in the bathroom when things really got rough helped her cope with her situation. Patsy Turner, a medical professional from Helena, Alabama, put the feelings of frustrated tears into words: “Crying for me is when I’m so emotional that words can’t express the level I’m on.”

Breakthrough Tears are ones we most associate with joy. These tears are shed when we have a breakthrough moment of any type. Win the lottery—cry. Have a baby—cry. Finish that doctorial thesis—cry. These are the tears we have spoken to women about over the years who have had those successful breakthrough experiences and they just can’t hold back these tears. We can have breakthrough tears with our own triumphs or the triumphs of others. That emotion we feel when someone else gets the big prize on a game show, when a talk show host shares the story of someone’s triumphant journey, when our own children graduate from college, high school, or even kindergarten. Our breakthrough crying is our turn to jump for joy and let out that little cry while we do it. Gwendolyn Jones of Missouri City, Texas, had a beautiful take on how she sees tears. “It’s a weeping in the spirit; a cleansing and a renewal of the soul, mind, and body.” Now if that isn’t a breakthrough, we don’t know what is.

You Can’t Make Me Cry!

Ninety-five percent of the women in our survey said that they cried in the past twelve months. Of those women, only sixty-three percent of them would consider themselves women who cry. Twenty-six percent of the women said that they would not consider themselves women who cry. Is there anything wrong with that? What if you don’t cry? In the movie The Holiday, Cameron Diaz’s character hadn’t cried since the death of her parents when she was a child. Her inability to cry in the movie was related to her inability to let go. At the end of the film, Cameron’s character cried for the first time when she realized she was in love and that if she didn’t let go she would lose that love. Although this is a Hollywood example, is it far from what we experience in life? Many of the women we spoke to who said they didn’t cry during trying times said it was because they felt like they didn’t want to lose control, be embarrassed, or appear to be weak and unable to deal with their own lives.

Many researchers conclude that people who hold back tears or feel they are unable to cry use the inability to cry as a defense mechanism. Even with the best defenses, those who declare themselves proud non-cryers have to let whatever situation they are dealing with manifest itself in another way. One proud woman we spoke to who said she hasn’t cried in years over anything did say whenever she feels down or stressed, she eats. When we interviewed her, she actually had to take a moment and reflect on her own pattern and said she had to end the interview because she felt like crying!

Some dream experts say that if you can’t cry in the light of day, you may just cry out in the night. The worry about your finances that you experience during the day and are unable to release can manifest itself in a dream. You may find yourself crying in the dream about the loss of your dog, but dream experts say it is likely that you are crying about your finances—they only look like a dog. Somehow your mind needs to release the negative emotions that you are feeling, and if you consciously don’t allow your mind to take a break, unconsciously your mind is so powerful that it will take over and do what it needs to purge itself. You can’t keep your guard up all the time, and the tears will come tumbling down sooner or later. Tears have been shown to have cleansing positive properties and can help stabilize our bodies after a traumatic event. Tears not only serve a physiological purpose, they have an even bigger purpose in helping to shape our lives.

Tears to Triumph

No matter if you shed tears or not, we know that there is triumph for everyone. How you use your tears and trials to create transformative breakthroughs for yourself is what matters. Remember, we must use our tears for a purpose. Cry if you need to reboot and consider new ways to look at and change the experiences in your life.