Hello and Welcome Back to The Therapist Diaries,
I was driving home from the airport last week when Fergie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry came on the radio. Now, anybody who knows me knows this song is absolutely one of my jams. The volume immediately went up, I was singing dramatically at the top of my lungs, and for those four minutes you would genuinely think I was going through the most devastating heartbreak known to mankind, despite being perfectly happy and emotionally stable moments before.
As always, the emotional performance ended exactly when the song did, but this time, somewhere between the chorus and my Oscar-worthy solo performance, I started thinking about something that has come up repeatedly in sessions with clients recently.
Crying.
More specifically, crying when you really do not want to cry.
It's something I’ve always done, and something so many of the young adults and women I work with do. It's as though any strong emotion swings open the floodgates. Sadness, frustration, anger, embarrassment, relief, happiness, stress… sometimes it feels like our eyes are running their own independent operation entirely outside of our control.
And honestly? Most of us find it incredibly frustrating.
It’s important to say that this is not exclusively a female experience. I’ve worked with plenty of boys and men who cry when emotions run high too. Human beings cry. Full stop. But I do notice it tends to show up more openly in girls and women, and there are probably a few reasons for that.
Part of it is biological. Hormones such as oestrogen are linked to emotional processing and may make crying more likely, while testosterone can suppress tears and emotional expression. But biology is only one piece of the puzzle. Social conditioning plays a huge role too. Girls are generally given far more permission to express vulnerability openly, while boys are often taught , directly or indirectly, to hold it together, toughen up, or channel distress into something more socially acceptable like anger, humour, or withdrawal. So, it’s not necessarily that women feel more than men. It’s often that emotions are expressed differently.
Crying, despite how inconvenient it can feel, is actually a very normal and healthy human response.
We tend to think crying only belongs to sadness, but that simply isn’t true. We cry when we’re overwhelmed, angry, relieved, anxious, touched, embarrassed, emotionally exhausted, deeply happy, or emotionally flooded. Tears often arrive when feelings become too big, too messy, or too difficult to organise into words. In many ways, crying is the body’s pressure release valve.
Which brings me to one of those couple therapy questions that you can almost count on appearing in session...
But crying during conflict is incredibly common, particularly for people who feel emotions intensely or who become physiologically overwhelmed during confrontation. Arguments trigger stress responses in the nervous system. Your heart rate increases, adrenaline kicks in, your brain starts scanning for danger, and suddenly your body is trying to manage far more emotional information than it comfortably can.
For some people, that overload comes out as raised voices or anger. For others, it comes out as shutting down completely. And for many people, especially those who are sensitive, anxious, conflict-avoidant, or emotionally expressive, it comes out through tears.
The frustrating thing is that tears are often misunderstood in arguments. People assume crying is manipulative, dramatic, or designed to shut the conversation down and so it's often met with statements like "oh here we go again" or "I can't deal with you crying again." In reality, most people crying in conflict situations are desperately trying to stay in the conversation. They are overwhelmed, not calculating. And look, while I understand that constant emotional intensity can be difficult for others to navigate, comments like this can create enormous shame around emotional expression, especially expression that people don't have much control over. So just a heads up, if you're going to come to one of my couples therapy sessions and make a statement like that, you better be prepared to do some serious cognitive reframing work because I don't let that stuff float by.
After hearing these comments enough times, many people start apologising for crying before they’ve even shed a tear. They tense up trying to stop it, which usually makes it worse. They feel embarrassed for having a physical emotional response they cannot entirely control.
In the same way that I frequently tell people that "No." is a full sentence... I'm going to teach you a new motto... crying is NOT a character flaw.
That does not mean every emotional reaction is healthy or that we should never learn emotional regulation. Of course we should. But there is a difference between learning to manage emotions and learning to suppress them out of fear that they make us “too much” for other people.
If you are someone who cries easily, it can help to understand your own patterns. Are you bottling things up until they explode? Are you avoiding difficult conversations until emotions become too intense? Are you exhausted, stressed, anxious, or carrying emotions you haven’t processed properly?
Tears are often information. They tell us something important is happening internally.
And contrary to what many of us were taught growing up, crying is not weakness. In many cases, it is actually evidence that the body is trying to regulate itself. Research shows that emotional tears may help reduce stress hormones and activate calming mechanisms in the nervous system afterwards. That strange, exhausted feeling after a good cry? That’s your body coming down from emotional overload.
So, while we love the song, it's important to know that “big girls don’t cry” is probably one of the biggest lies ever written into a pop chorus. Big girls cry. Little girls cry. Men cry. Teenagers cry. Happy people cry. Angry people cry. Burnt out parents' cry in supermarket car parks. Dads cry during Disney films and therapists cry to songs they dramatically overperform alone in the car.
Human beings cry.
And maybe instead of asking ourselves how to stop crying altogether, we should spend more time asking why we’ve been taught to feel so ashamed of it in the first place.
Signing off, a very happy, and very tearful Therapist
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