Hello, everyone. I'm glad you're here. I'm Emma McAdam. I'm a licensed marriage
and family therapist, and I make mental health education videos. Now sometimes I get asked "Do
you cry in session?" You know, "Do you cry with clients?" And my answer is "Yes, of course I do."
I am one of those people where there's like this direct, hardwired connection from my emotions to
my tear ducts. I think I'm a highly sensitive person, and I cry easily. I remember one time
when I was in elementary school, we watched a movie about a girl and her horse, and she
loved the horse. And when the horse died, you know, I sobbed so much in class that the teacher
had to ask, you know, like "Are you okay? Like do you need me to call your mom or something?"
And then I can think of another time - you know that scene in world war z when the dog dies and,
you know, I ugly cried, like snot, like in the theater, right? Like I I've just gotta say,
I pretty much hate books and movies with animals because they always die and that makes me sob.
Like like whose idea is it to make kids read, you know, Where the Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller
and all the other books where the dog dies? Like this is not okay. Okay, so back to me crying.
I am so good at crying that I even got an award for it at work once. We were having this special
naming ceremony. My boss honored me with the name Weeping Heart Seeker, which kind of has a
double meaning. Like I'm seeking out people with weeping hearts, but absolutely referred to the
fact that I like weep with them. Now, I had good parents. My dad told me that I had a tender heart,
and it, you know, it sounds like praise coming from him instead of shame, but crying in public is
kind of embarrassing, you know. In common culture it's seen as a weakness and it it
makes people uncomfortable. You know, you hear people referring to themselves, like if they cry
it means they "broke down." Or if people cry in public, you know, they always apologize.
So I taught myself not to cry in front of people. And as a child you can learn
to force yourself not to cry, you know, out of shame. You know, it's not cool to cry at school.
It's not cool to cry in front of friends. So as a kid I taught myself to hold it in.
But but forcing yourself not to cry comes at a cost. Like you have to do something to suppress
that emotion, to like stifle that feeling. So I mean, I mean on a basic level, trying not to cry
when I feel sad gives me a headache because you have to like scrunch your face and like squeeze
it. like if you've ever seen like someone - you know, Lionel Messi, he just had to kind
of retire from playing soccer for Barcelona, and you can see him as he's starting to get emotional,
he scrunches his face really tight. And you see people do all these weird things with their faces,
like where they're kind of moving their mouth and lips a lot when they're trying not to cry. Um
so you have to like clench your face to make those tears not come out, and that gives me a
headache. Now, I've found that for me just letting the tears flow gently and without struggling
makes crying not that big of a deal, like it's not that exhausting for me. It's just like
this outward expression of empathy. I mean, people talk about crying using words like
"I broke down," or they apologize, you know, "I'm so sorry for crying." But I see my ability to feel
as a gift and and as one of my strengths, and crying is one of the ways I express that strength.
And when I drop the struggle against it, I'm actually a lot more resilient and mentally
strong in the long run. I have emotions all of the time, but they don't generally drag me down;
I bounce back really quickly. Even that video where I cry and I talk about my friend dying,
right after I filmed that video, you know, the tears stopped, and I took some deep breaths,
and I felt clear and light again. Now of course emotions come and go in waves; they don't just,
you know, magically disappear, but they're so much lighter when you let them pass through you
instead of suppressing them. And and it's like burying them inside of you or carrying
them in a backpack, like stuffing them into a backpack that you carry around
or just like feeling it and letting it move on. So suppressing crying comes with an emotional cost.
There's, you know, a few ways to trick yourself into not crying. There's, you know, trying not
to care, letting yourself go numb, trying not to think about the thing that's making you sad
or getting angry instead. You'll see this commonly with boys who have been shamed for crying. They'll
get mad and they'll storm off or isolate instead of crying. But in the long run, if you build
walls around your emotions, if you suppress them, then you lessen your ability to care. You lessen
your ability to connect and to feel happiness and joy with, you know, your successes or
your clients' successes. So as a therapist, this makes it harder for me to connect with people and
harder for me to enjoy my work and to feel the joy that comes from the progress that we make,
and and this can lead to burnout and depression. So for me, I've made a conscious choice to
allow myself to cry with my clients because it's better than the alternative, which is numbing to
them. I think there's this misconception that there's one group of people who are the healers
and one group of people who are the sick; the there's the people who have it all together
and the people who are messed up, but I don't believe this, you know. We're all in progress,
and it's not like I have all the answers, and it's not like I'm perfect and that's how I got
to be a therapist; it's that I've studied and I've practiced and I've found some ways to guide
people through their own journey, but I'm far from immune to emotions. So I think it would be
really hypocritical of me to tell my clients, you know, "It's okay to cry. It's okay to feel" if I
didn't allow myself the same privilege. So in some ways I hope that I can create, you know, a space
where it's really okay to be vulnerable and emotional in order to helpfully process emotions.
So yes, I allow myself to cry in session with my clients because it's authentic, because it's
a sign of strength and not weakness, and also because I personally believe that uncomfortable
emotions aren't bad, that they all serve a function. Now, in other videos I've talked a bunch
about the sympathetic and the parasympathetic states of the nervous system. And sympathetic
means a couple of things, you know. It's a word for the activated state of the nervous system, the
fight/flight/freeze response, but it's also a word for connection, for for sympathy. So if I yawn,
some of you out there are going to yawn in response, and that's because we're wired to
mirror each other. Ever since we were babies we were wired to mirror each other's emotions,
and this is a huge source of connection. Tears are an outward sign of inner pain. Why do we
need an outward sign? Why does sadness make our tear ducts open? It's so that we can communicate
and connect and support each other. So if my if my client is telling me about his wife divorcing him
or the loss of their child or the pain of depression, sometimes I cry with them. And
in a way, because we're mirroring each other's nervous system and we're mirroring
each other's emotional response, I can help create a state or an environment
where I can help them regulate their nervous system as well by me having a regulated nervous
system. I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail in this video on that. When I do cry with them, I do
wonder if it sometimes freaks them out a little bit. Like they think "Oh no, like my therapist
can't even handle how awful my situation is," you know. They think that I'm like that they're
hopeless or something like that. But I try to be frank with them and just tell them like "This is
one way I process through my emotions instead of stuffing them and going numb and burning out."
Now that being said, one of my good friends who is also a therapist, she is just not a crier. She
just does not cry easily. It's just not her thing. And so I'm not saying like that if your therapist
doesn't cry with you that that means they don't care. I am I'm not saying that. They might care
deeply but their tear ducts just don't fire off like mine do. So, you know, to each their own.
Everyone processes emotions in their own way. So there you go. Do I cry in session with my clients?
Yes, I do. What do you think about crying? Does it help you? Do you let yourself cry?
Would you like it or not if your therapist cried with you? Tell me all about it in the
comments. Also, I wanted to let you know that I've recently worked with an amazing therapist,
Amy Harmon, to create a course on body image. You know, how to heal your relationship with
your body and stop abusing yourself and stop comparing yourself to others and really come
into a sense of confidence and compassion for yourself. So if you struggle with body image,
I've linked to the course in the description. So thank you for watching, and take care.
you