Crying is the emotional equivalent of going to the toilet

Imagine needing the toilet and refusing to go.

Not for an hour. For ten years. Clenched, polite, carrying on with your day, absolutely not going to let that out in front of anyone.

You can picture how that ends. In days you’d be uncomfortable. In weeks you’d be ill. In years — well, nobody would let it get to years.

Except that’s exactly what most of us have done with our feelings.

Somewhere along the way we decided that emotions are a bit dirty. Not to be talked about, and certainly not to be shown. If someone cries at a table, the whole room goes still and somebody reaches for a tissue as if to mop up a spill. We say “sorry” when tears come, the way you’d apologise for sneezing. Sorry for what, exactly? For having a body that works?

I grew up scared of crying, because where I grew up, crying meant consequences. So I learned to swallow it. Every time something came up — the throat tightening, the eyes prickling — I’d take a gulp and push it back down into my stomach, and get on with things. I got very good at it. I could go years without a tear.

And my stomach, funnily enough, got worse and worse.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then. The tears aren’t the problem. They’re the solution finally arriving. When your body has been holding something — a grief, an old hurt, a hard week, sometimes just the weight of pretending to be fine — the tears are how it lets go. They’re a release. They’re your body doing the sensible thing at last.

Which is why, when someone cries in one of my sessions, I say the same thing every time: congratulations.

They usually laugh at that, which helps too.

Why you can’t cry

Some people tell me the opposite problem. They want to cry and can’t. There’s a full feeling in the chest, a pressure behind the eyes, and then a wall. Nothing comes.

That wall was built for a reason. At some point — usually young — you learned that crying wasn’t safe, or wasn’t allowed, or made things worse. Pull yourself together. Don’t be so sensitive. Stop that now. So a part of you stepped in to stop it, and that part has been on duty ever since, standing between you and your own release like a bouncer who never got told the club closed.

You don’t get past that wall by pushing. You get past it by making it safe enough that the bouncer can stand down. That’s slower and kinder than forcing anything, and it’s what the work is actually for.

What comes out, and what it feels like after

In my sessions people yawn, and they apologise for yawning. They cry, and they apologise for crying. They fall asleep, they fidget, their hands go hot. And every one of those is the same thing: the body finally feeling safe enough to let something move.

Yawning is a release. Tears are a release. That deep breath that comes out of nowhere is a release. The body has half a dozen ways to go to the toilet, emotionally speaking, and we’ve been apologising for all of them.

What it feels like afterwards is the part nobody tells you. Lighter. Quieter. The shoulders a bit lower. Not because you understood something new — because something that had been stuck for years finally left.

I love crying now. I mean that. Something comes up in a film, in a conversation, in a quiet moment on my own, and I let it, and afterwards I feel like I’ve put something down that I’d been carrying so long I’d stopped noticing the weight.

If you’ve been holding on — years of holding on — none of that was a character flaw. Somebody taught you to clench, and you learned it well. It’s not your fault. But you’re allowed to stop now. Your body has been asking.

Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online. We breathe, we relax, and things come up — and nobody apologises. If you’d like somewhere safe to let go of what you’ve been holding, come and sit with us. Try a session and see how you feel afterwards.

— Adam