Should you be worried about crying very often? What does this reveal? We posed the question to Véronique Kohn, psychologist and author of numerous books, the last of which When the fear of losing the other… makes me lose him! (Tchou editions)
The article below is the transcript of the interview from the video embedded in the article.
A loss of lucidity
When I cry, what does that mean? It is a phase of emotional overflow. I’m jamming my thoughts and I can’t reason lucidly. So my nervous system is completely unstable, drowned in emotions. I reason badly. I can’t step aside to identify what the real problem is and so if I don’t identify the problem, I can’t find the options. Hence the interest of being accompanied. We therapists will try to stabilize the person.
Diving into the negative… and depression
The therapist will begin by seeing: So what increases the stability of the person, what makes them feel a little better? Is there an entourage? Are there things that can help him like this? This person does not voluntarily maintain this process of emotional overflow, but how does he organize himself to maintain it? She continues to ignite on it and often it is with thoughts. There are stable profiles, unstable profiles, therefore unstable profiles will have a greater tendency to go into depression. And depression is effectively a drowning of the negative. I tell myself that there is nothing more that is interesting. I suck or we suck. The world is useless, the world is worthless, the person is at an impasse and their emotional world is aggravating and inflaming their terrain. SO need to increase stability and we’re going to help what I said so that she can find the little things that make things a little better.
Replace a negative emotion with a positive emotion
What we can try to do, as a therapist, is to encourage the person to put one emotion in the place of another. And the screen emotion is what I show to the world. For example, whether I’m a girl or a woman: I learned that crying gets attention and that I get what I need for example, and that it worked much better than if I started screaming, getting angry, exploding with rage. So I will rather use this emotional strategy than that of anger. Because this strategy is rewarded. And so, I often cry instead of getting angry. Or it can be: I cry instead of showing that I’m afraid. But it’s often in place of anger. In general, sadness is often put in place of anger while I’m bursting with rage, I only want to kill you.
Sadness is often put in place of anger, while inside, I’m bursting with rage.
Anger is knowing how to say no
But in fact, I am not able to touch this emotion. It is prohibited or evaluated as uninteresting and unproductive and as such, I will only be able to contact sadness. But this sadness is actually false. Anger is knowing how to say stop. “I do not agree with you”, it’s affirmation, it’s positioning oneself. If I’m overwhelmed by my tears, it’s because I don’t know how to position myself in life. I don’t know how to say: that yes, that no, that yes. And that is really no. And stop that. Because anger is verticality, it’s masculine, it’s good, no.