Why You Cry But Don't Heal.

The body has natural ways of dealing with emotional energy. We naturally cry, scream, shake, laugh, etc., as a way of processing the emotions moving through us at any moment. This seems fairly intuitive and obvious to most people, not requiring much explanation. However, people often ask me, ‘Well, Benjy, if crying is a form of purging and I cry all the time, why don’t I ever really feel better? Why am I still stuck in this loop?’

The problem is fear and resistance.

When you are stuck in a state of fear and crying because you’re resisting the intensity of the emotions, no real purging can take place. The body can’t release the emotional energy while stuck in fight-or-flight mode. We need to let go, feel safe, and allow the emotions to be truly felt while we cry for this to work.

Over time, we have built up defense mechanisms that prevent us from releasing emotional trauma energy.

We have come to associate the emotions trying to be purged as threats because they remind us of times when we didn’t feel safe. And that’s ultimately what this comes down to: feeling safe.

This is why, when I work with my clients, we spend time learning to relax the nervous system, get out of fight-or-flight, and let our bodies, hearts, and subconscious minds know that the emotional discomfort we are experiencing doesn’t mean we are in danger.

Until you can make that shift, you can cry all day, every day, and you’ll never really get out of that looping cycle.

The emotions make you feel unsafe, you resist them, you cry out of pain and fear, and that pain and fear makes you feel unsafe, so you resist the pain… and around and around we go.

But when you start to fully understand what the discomfort really means (that it’s simply what it feels like when your body is purging) and you start to train your nervous system to relax into that experience, then we can finally start developing the tools and skills to turn your bouts of crying into moments of genuine release.

And when that happens, you start to see how good it can feel to cry.

Your bouts of crying won’t be because you’re so afraid. They will be because you are finally ready to let go of the emotional energy you’ve been holding onto.

This is also why we don’t need to find or analyze trauma to heal. You just need to get out of your way and let your body go through the purging process it’s been trying to help you through this whole time.

Emotional healing can be that simple.

Feel safe. Stop the thought cycles. Settle into the emotional experience, and let your body do what it needs to do.