In "Weeping and Crying", host of “The Positive Mind” radio show and founder of the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy, Armand DiMele, along with special guest Roberta Maria Atti, offers a great talk on how scientific research has shown that there is strong and consistent evidence that crying is linked to significant health benefit. Following is an excerpt from this fascinating program.
Now listen to this. You know you heard about people laughing on the outside and crying on the inside? You know, crying on the inside, you cry a lot more on the inside than you do on the outside is what our research shows. That when you cry on the outside there is a certain amount of water coming out. A certain amount of this lacrimal fluid coming out which is fed by water. And you are aware of it. And on the inside there is an enormous amount. I don’t know what the ratio is, but I know it is bigger, and so that stuff coming out of your nose is also tears. And I also have noticed that when people do not want to cry outwardly, let’s say that they are embarrassed, sometimes the inside crying is increased so that people may say, “Oh, I have a lot of mucous in my throat.”
So one of the signs of people inhibiting crying -- which we are going to go to in a couple of minutes -- is an increase of mucosa inside and something else. They think it is mucous. In fact, mucous formation, or people who think they sometimes have sinus drips, really may be crying on the inside, you know? And it could be all that it is about. And what they do is in part is alexithymic because they disconnect from the awareness of the process, so it may be happening without them knowing that indeed they are weeping.
So people that don’t cry may in effect cry and then people who don’t weep -- there are some people who never weep -- they would easily weep on the inside and that could be interpreted in any number of ways because remember again, weeping on the inside without it coming out of your body could easily be filled with an enormous amount of bacteria that doesn’t belong down in your throat. And you could think that it is a form of an allergy for instance. You could say, “I have allergies” and you really could be crying. You could be sad. And a good cry may actually get this stuff out of your body and you could feel purged of that thing which you thought was your allergic reaction. It’s a theory, but we’re going to teach you more about this and you’re going to find a lot of evidence for it.
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