Health Leader, Shedding Tears: Healing Waters

STORY BY

Drs. Blair & Rita Justice

Consider these two well-known wisdoms:

"April showers bring May flowers " and Sir Henry Maudsley's "Sorrows which find no vent in tears may soon make other organs weep."

They are more connected than you think.

The first adage promises that after the dark, wet days, flowers will bloom and life will resurrect from the death of winter. The second tells us what researchers are now learning: that tears can do for the body what spring showers do for the earth. Weeping can heal us.

Tears come easily for some. Others stay dry-eyed, no matter the depth of pain. For some, crying means weakness, shame, "being a baby."

Maudlin, which has "weeping, tearful, lachrymose" as its first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, has as the second definition "tearful sentimentality; mawkishly emotional; weakly sentimental." But the need for tears is no less for the stoic than the lachrymable.

When the Whole Body Weeps

The renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Karl Menninger, wrote in his book, The Vital Balance, "Weeping is perhaps the most human and most universal of all relief measures."

Way back in 1949, the pediatrician C.M. Riley described a group of children who were unable to shed tears and had an abnormal reaction to mild anxiety. These children, when stressed, showed "transient extreme elevation of blood pressure, excessive sweating, salivation to the point of drooling, and the development of sharply demarcated erythematous [reddish] blotches on the skin..."

It is as if the distress in these children had to be expressed in ways other than tears, through other weeping organs, and those other ways just weren't sufficient.

The Chemistry of Crying

Many things happen in the body when we cry. Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist had a remarkably precise assessment of the effects of crying: "It opens lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper."

Tears contain ACTH, a stress hormone, and leucine-enkephalin, an endorphin that modulates pain. Crying has the effect of balancing the stress hormones in the body.

Research has shown an association between tears and attitudes about crying with various stress-related illnesses and even longevity. People suffering from ulcers and colitis, two conditions aggravated by stress, were found less likely to have positive attitudes about crying and tears.

One study found that widows with acquaintances who made it easy for them to cry and express their feelings were healthier than widows who experienced less encouragement from others to weep and discuss their feelings of grief.

Shared Tears

But much also happens in our minds and souls when we clutch someone in shared grief. When Rita chose the theme of "tears" for this issue, no one knew we would be clinging to family and friends as we wept over the sudden death from a massive heart attack of her brother, Paul. The shared grief of tears heals us at all levels in a way words cannot.

Albert Richard Smith wrote, "Tears are the safety valves of the heart when too much is laid upon it." Losing loved ones is too much for the heart sometimes, and the safety valve of weeping saves us from having to make other organs weep. Give thanks for the tears, the "healing waters," and let them flow.

Sadness: A Survival Tool

Sadness is what neurobiologists call a "primary" emotion - meaning it is basic, and across evolutionary time it has served our survival. In the brainstem, where basic emotions are rooted, there are nuclei and pathways that switch on and off for crying.

Sadness is considered among our "social" emotions. How so? Why would being sad and crying serve social contact and protect us against extinction? A sad face and tears signal to others that we need comfort and support. We wouldn't be here as a species if we didn't bond and band together.

When Men Used to Cry

But innate motivations can be overridden, even reshaped neuronally, by culture. We can be rewired by society. Research on the natural and cultural history of tears (Tom Lutz, author) shows that throughout most of our history, men have wept as freely as women. Homer's Iliad tells of the Greek warrior Odysseus weeping in almost every chapter. As late as the 16 th century, sobbing openly at an opera, play or symphony was considered appropriate for men and women.

After the Industrial Revolution, crying became a private matter. Males learned to keep their tears to themselves, particularly at the work place. Manliness - meaning stiff upper lips and dry eyes - became the norm. And, since brain plasticity means neuronal synapses can be reshaped by learning, some of the differences between male and female brains come from what culture teaches us to do.

One study on the subject reports that 94 percent of women have emotional tears during a 30-day period compared with 55 percent of men. But the majority of both women and men report they feel better after a good cry. Although there is little evidence that shedding tears per se lowers the risk of disease and early death, crying may tell us something about the willingness of men versus women to disclose and talk about feelings.

Shut Down, Shut Out

"Opening up" is hard for most men, yet solid research shows that those who self-disclose increase strength of their immune systems and have more social support, which lowers the risk of illness.

Women are better at bonding and self-disclosure. Women, particularly married women, live longer than men, particularly unmarried men.

James Lynch at Johns Hopkins Medical School has done extensive studies on the medical consequences of loneliness, particularly in men.

Dean Ornish of the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco has added high mobility (frequent moves), short marriages and job-hopping to the psychosocial factors that clog arteries.

What has all this to do with tears? Crying comes when we deeply care about something, someone. Crying comes out of its corner when intimacy is a hallmark of our relationships. The test for intimacy is our willingness to open up, to confess fears, failures and make ourselves vulnerable.

The French writer Jules Renard asked: " What happens to all the tears we do not shed?" The answer is they don't go away. Holding back the tears and crying is just as stressful as carrying around our invisible bag of shadows.

Moved to Tears

Not all crying relates to relationships gone sour or self-esteem that went down the tube. The brain is also built to respond to art, music and literature. Read what master poet T.S. Eliot had to say:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

UPDATED: 4-26-2004