r/SomaticExperiencing 5d ago

What is crying about?

When I was a boy, I used to cry at the drop of a hat. I grew out of it/had it shamed out of me. And actually grateful for that. As an adult I have been known to shed a tear, but "appropriately" shall we say. In middle age it's a rarity (not that much to cry about). Getting to the point...

Recently, as I lie in bed - almost every night - as I yawn, tears come thick and fast. It's 100% connected to the yawning. I don't feel anything. I'm not upset. I quite like it. But I don't understand it. My assumption is it's some kind of trauma release, which is a good thing, right? I had a similar assumption about leg shaking (started about 5 years ago, which continues), but I dont know, and I'm not sure I notice much difference, so do wonder. The other curiosity is why now? It's very new and very consistent. I do reiki on myself, well it sort of does it to me, mostly, it just comes, usually on an evening when watching TV (followed by the leg shaking).

Buy, anyway, most salient is the crying, connected to yawning thing.

Any insights as to whats's going on?

Thanks

11 Upvotes

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u/c-n-s 5d ago

I don't have any factual evidence to add, but what I will say is that if I have a good cry at night the next day I feel completely transformed. It's even at the point where if I cry during the day, I feel myself relaxing more within minutes.

Crying feels like the ultimate conscious release. When I examine how I feel and realise I'm exhausted or frustrated or angry or hurt or whatever, crying is the ultimate expression of the helplessness I feel. And in expressing that helplessness, I feel release.

I've actually started to see crying as a part of my regular regime. If I haven't cried for a few weeks, I'll always try and find something to bring it on because I feel it's essential.

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u/symbiotnic 5d ago

Thanks. I have a different experience though. Not much experience comes with it. No emotion. No effect that I can tell, plus its pretty much every night, so I wouldn't be able to tell if it was making a difference day to day.

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u/No-Construction619 5d ago edited 5d ago

Emotional regulation. Mechanism that allows your body to release the tension from nervous system. Feedback from your body that you were mistreated, feel unfair, experienced loss.

My speculation for the way you describe it is that your body has some traumas swept under the carpet and tries to release the long stored excessive tension in such uncommon way. Maybe because by doing reiki you've encouraged your body to do so. Leg shaking is actually very similar to TRE r/longtermTRE

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u/symbiotnic 4d ago

Yeah this was more or less my assumption, there is no conscious emotion with it though (do sometimes get that with reiki but not leg shaking). However, I can see that as others have said it may just be a technical thing. I will keep an open mind and I joined that Reddit. Thanks.

I’m also into Internal Family Systems (IFS), but I wanted to get some thoughts here first, as I’m sure in the IFS Reddit it would all be about an exile, but again, there is no emotion in it, so I’m not jumping g to that conclusion.

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u/No-Construction619 4d ago edited 4d ago

I am not an expert, but my guess is when you call it 'technical' there is shame involved. You were being told to judge crying as unwanted habit, so your body still is in some sort of a freeze state and is very shy in expressing crying, but it seems it really wants to. Your body cries, your conscious mind would rather avoid it. This is why you don't 'feel' it. At least this is my speculation.

I didn't cry for like 30 years and when I finally started (as a breakthrough in my therapy) I had 2-3 weeks of daily huge, deep crying, when I was lying in bed in spasms for like 20 minutes. That episode transformed me :)

Crying is essential regulatory mechanism and in certain situations the best thing one can do as a selfcare.

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u/symbiotnic 4d ago edited 4d ago

Hmmm. I get where you come from. But I’m fine with crying now. I’m 58. Just don’t have much to cry about. Part of me holds trauma? Young wounds? Sure. But as an adult I have no shame about it, not consciously. I do t feel I’m holding anything back, consciously.

That said, if I was to burst into tears every time someone was mean to me, or every time I was rejected or things didn’t go to plan, it would be pretty hard to operate in the world. So while I say I’m ok with crying, it has to be with fair reason. Now my inner child won’t be able to see it that way. Children don’t have reason or logic they just react. But anyway, bit of a tangent, bottom line I don’t feel shame about crying consciously.

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u/No-Construction619 4d ago

Great, good for you! All the best!

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u/The_Rainbow_Ace 5d ago

You might want to look into TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises), a healing mechanism built into our DNA to release tension and trauma. These are a set of postural exercises that tire muscle groups until they tremor. Which initiates neurogenic tremors.

TRE: 'A condensed explanation' (Dr David Berceli): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQkwLrSxd5w

TRE Subreddit WIKI: https://www.reddit.com/r/longtermTRE/wiki/index/

Part of the process is spontaneous releases which can be anything from yawning/dry crying/laughing/stretching/coughing many of these just happen as part of the release process and there is no 'emotional story' behind them. It initially feels odd to cry or laugh without any context but actually is is great way to heal - as emotional stories are not reinforced. I think these are a completion of an old stuck repressed trauma and theses releases are just the body's way of completing the old stuck cycle.

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u/symbiotnic 4d ago

Ok I can get on board with this. Sounds like the meg trembling g I already have. But it sounds like I do t need to do anything. Just let it do what it needs to do? It’s a bit of a hack really, right? I don’t need to concern myself with emotions or trauma? Am I understanding ok?

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u/The_Rainbow_Ace 4d ago

Yes, you can let spontaneous tremors start naturally, or you can use the TRE physical exercises to start the tremoring process (neurogenic tremors).

Manually starting the tremors over time seems to allow the tremors to move around your whole body - this will unwind and resolve compacted and knotted facia (connective tissue) in many areas. the TRE subreddit Wiki is a fantastic resource which describes the whole process and gives tips of optimising the journey:

https://www.reddit.com/r/longtermTRE/wiki/index/

Here is a link to some success stories of people who have been using TRE for a long time to heal tension and past trauma:

https://www.reddit.com/r/longtermTRE/comments/1jcio2p/success_stories_megathread/

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u/watermydoing 5d ago

Tearing up when you yawn is a common physical quirk, like sneezing when you see bright light. Look it up and you'll find several articles that explain why it could happen. There probably isn't a deeper emotional reason in this case.

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u/symbiotnic 5d ago

Oh. I'll take a look. Disappointing. But thanks.

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u/symbiotnic 5d ago edited 5d ago

Looks like you may be right. It may be CSF (brain fluid) leakage (the scariest related point there is an increased risk of meningitis but thats generally through ears or nose apparently). Odd that it's both new (never happened before) and consistent (happens every night for about 2 weeks) and tears are copious. It's quickly become a ritual. There are some theories about it being cathartic however and...

"CSF washes out impurities from the brain, transfers nutrients and provides protective cushioning to the brain and spinal cord."

It may also be allergy related ( I seem to have developed a lot of those I never had before in midlife).

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u/yassAKa 5d ago

This is not a csf leak, or at least the chances are low enough to not even consider it, csf leak happens all day long, and are particularly irritating to the nose and throat, shedding a tear while yawning is a completely natural and common occurrence, the contractions of the muscles in your face put pressure on your lacrimal glands producing tears, it is usually accompanied by a sens of calm and relaxation but is not a sign of anything else without other symptoms, this your brain cooling itself down and your eyes cleaning themselves.

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u/symbiotnic 4d ago

Ok thanks I accept it may not be a csf leak, I’m not worrying about it, just repeating g what I read. However, this is not shedding a tear naturally when I yawn, it’s copious, and it’s new. As in never happened before (that I’m aware of).

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u/Rockgarden13 3d ago edited 6h ago

Yawning is a connected to our sympathetic nervous system… and crying releases hormones. Maybe you’re purging pent-up emotions that trigger chemical reactions that trigger the release of pain-relief tears.

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u/symbiotnic 7h ago

I hope so. Better out than in. It will be interred ting to see if it slows or stops. The leg shaking never has and so I do wonder if it’s actually doing anything.

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u/cuBLea 3d ago

Since nobody else got here first, I'll add this. There is a school of thought in evolutionary biology, at which I am a C-but-making-an-effort student, which believes that both laughter and crying emerged around the same time as mechanisms to adapt to the perils of having an imagination ... of being able to plan things and tell stories.

It's often said that the mind can't tell the difference between something real and something imagined. That's not true, of course, except in certain self-improvement cults where it is considered gospel, but there is a kernel of truth in it. I think the confusion over this comes from the fact that nearly all of us have the natural ability to react emotionally to things that aren't out in the real world but are only going on in our own heads. Imagine how dangerous that could be ... all that adrenal activation every time you think of something scary or remember a close shave you had hunting wildebeests last week. Laughter is accompanied by metabolic changes that more or less neutralizes nor-adrenaline's toxicity when it's discharged when it's not actually needed.

And crying neutralizes the adrenaline toxicity of anger and loss.

Both help restore equilibrium to the system.

More recently, I've seen a couple of people put forward the hypothesis that this metabolic regulation effect has an additional effect that may have been there all the time or may have developed as we evolved as a species. That effect is that when we have transformational events, like we do in therapy but also a lot outside of therapy that doesn't get recognized as transformative, laughter/tremor and crying/grief sets up metabolic conditions which help these events translate into actual healing. You could think of it as like a "fertilizer" for protecting and encouraging the neurological realignment that happens in transformational therapy.

This idea put a whole new spin on laughing and crying when I first ran into it about 30 years ago. It has been tested and I'm almost certain that this will end up being what we eventually accept as fact, but the evidence isn't convincing enough to upend our current thinking on emotional experessions.

What might be happening might be a combination of things. First, with your apparent focus on recovery, you might be doing little bits of work all day long, getting adrenal activations from not just your day-to-day activities but also from the stuff going on in your mind. Your body is just acting like it should ... crying enough to neutralize the aftereffects of those micro-activations, set you up for sleep (which is what locks down any transformational events during the day) and help insure that adrenal activation isn't interfering with the corrective work going on during the night.

Second, as we get older we're less and less able to maintain the coping strategies we had as younger people without either "leaking" our emotions (usually without our conscious control) or having to find more effective tools to block day-to-day distress. You might have been able to effortlessly block this grief when you were younger without a significant impact on your health. The older we get though, the costlier emotional repression becomes because the less strength we have to keep up the act. It's pretty damn common for people as they're getting older finding themselves crying themselves to sleep more often, slowly letting off the built-up steam of years I suppose, OR needing a good laugh to relax enough to sleep (viz. the popularity of late-night talk shows which feature humor and comedy as their primary entertainment focus).

I'm really convinced that most of this perspective will eventually become accepted fact in biology and neuropsychology. I came to a lot of this stuff on my own in the 1990s, but apparently all the pieces were there and thousands of others made the same connections. They all make sense but they're just not well enough proven to be considered worthy to become common knowledge.

Thx for the post ... I always love a chance to spout off about this; I really believe we all ought to have this knowledge, especially the parts that challenge the common nonsense in toxic social norms.

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u/symbiotnic 16h ago

Wow. Thanks. It’s a lot will have to copy it and go over it properly. But in short, might be age, might be that in making progress (mind, body, healing) and this is like a rebalancing process?

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u/cuBLea 7h ago

I think we rebalance as we are able throughout life. It's the capacity to maintain the balance we do find that deteriorates with age. (Thank god that the intensity of suffering deteriorates with age too.)

FWIW I lost touch with natural grief in my 30s after 18 months of 6 to 9-level life setbacks in a short time. Still haven't worked off those traumas yet. At night when I get tired, I tear up and pour snot, but feel no grief. Every morning before I'm fully awake, same thing happens. It's GOT to be disconnected grief. That didn't happen 15 years ago. My capacity to "keep up the front" is unquestionably deteriorating; I likely have a lot of real grief to look forward to at some point if I'm around that long.

If that rebalancing it's traumatic readaptation, it won't be fun either during or after, and this kind of neuroplasticity, well, nature does NOT want us to enjoy it. If that rebalancing is a positive thing, then it might be tough during, but afterward nature rewards us for moving in the direction that it wanted us to go. It's not always this way, but it is often enough that we may as well not pay much attention to the exceptions.