Why Do I Cry at Things That Do Not Seem Sad?
The Pattern
Someone holds the door open for you and you tear up in the parking lot. A line in a movie about a parent reading to a child collapses you. You cry at commercials, at the small kindness of a colleague, at the warmth of a stranger. You are not oversensitive. You are a person carrying unwept grief, and the body is using every available door to let some of it out.
Origins & Context
Pete Walker's work on emotional flashbacks describes the way unprocessed grief from childhood gets activated by present moments that resemble what was missing. A small kindness now triggers the longing for the kindness that was not there then. The tears are old.
Francis Weller's work on grief describes the gates through which unwept loss eventually returns. The body, given any opening, will use it. Bessel van der Kolk frames this as the body finally being given permission, in a safe context, to discharge what was once held to keep functioning.
The tears were not about the moment in front of you. They were about a moment that did not happen for you.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You watch a stranger help an old woman across a street and you are crying before you understand why. You read a poem about a mother brushing her daughter's hair and the wave hits you. You realize after the fact that the tears were not about the moment in front of you. They were about a moment that did not happen for you.
It shows up as the embarrassment in public spaces, the quick wipe of the eye, the apology to a confused friend. You explain it as being tired or hormonal. You are usually neither. You are a body finally allowed to grieve in small installments what it once had to swallow whole.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Emotional Flashback (Pete Walker), the present-day activation of unmetabolized grief. Francis Weller frames it as the Long-Held Grief that must eventually return. Bessel van der Kolk names the physiological process as Trauma Release through autonomic discharge. Peter Levine's somatic work names the tears as a Completion of an interrupted nervous system cycle.
Related entries in this library: Emotional Flashback, Complex Grief, Inner Child, Body Keeps the Receipt, Grief of Adaptive Selves.
Nikita's Note
I used to be embarrassed by these tears. I thought they meant I was unstable. Then I understood. The tears were the body taking out the trash that had been sitting in the corner for thirty years.
Now I let them happen. I do not apologize. I do not explain. I let the body do what the body knows how to do. The grief has been waiting a long time. It deserves to be received without being managed.
From the work
The tears were not about the moment in front of you. They were about a moment that did not happen for you.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.