emotions
Te book explained how babies have a natural inborn mechanism for recovering from stress and upsets: crying. Solter explains that there are two reasons babies cry and how distinguishing between the two makes all the difference. Te first reason, the most well-known one, is that babies cry simply to get their needs met. Tey can’t use words, and so crying signals their need for food, warmth, closeness, and so on. Te second reason is that babies also cry to heal from stressful experiences such as a difficult birth, medical intervention or just the everyday stress of being in a new, stimulating world. Reading about the healing power of tears
was a revelation to me. I thought about all the things that had helped me heal and how they had all involved tears. I remembered how in creative writing classes I’d taught, participants oſten wrote personal stories about their life and then started crying when they read their work aloud. I remember how I oſten cried aſter having
deep-tissue massages, which always leſt me feeling emotional as well as physically relaxed. Tey helped me get deep into the emotions stored in my body. One of my friends trained in a type of
energy healing called theta healing, and she practised with me as part of her training. Aſterwards, I would oſten spend a few days at home writing, and crying. It was powerful and exhausting, but I always emerged feeling happier aſter moving through all my feelings. Instinctively and intuitively I had found
my own path to healing without even realising I was seeking my own tears. Tis was the antidote to all my fears about parenting. It seemed amazing that there was a way we can bring up children so that they don’t have to carry emotional baggage. We can help them to heal while they are still young so that they won’t need to do so much soul-searching as adults. When I next went to babysit the boy I
talked about earlier, he was recovering from flu. He had a Technical Lego set for age seven and above, and had started building a helicopter. He could actually follow most of the instructions to make it, but, from time to time, he would get stuck and need my help. Ten we arrived at a step that neither of us could work out. Perhaps it was my ‘pregnancy brain’, but no matter how hard I stared at the instructions I couldn’t understand what to do. He kept asking me over and over to help him, but I gently
explained that I couldn’t. He started to cry and tantrum, stamping his feet. I stayed with him for a few minutes. Ten, as suddenly as he started, he stopped crying. He sat down again, and constructed the Lego himself. Tis was such a wonderful example of
how crying clears difficult feelings out of the mind so that we can think clearly again. When the boy had finished crying, his frustration was gone, so he could think clearly – and even better than he had done before the upset began. If I had listened to my urge to persuade
him to stop and do something else to distract him, I would never have witnessed what happens when we simply connect and listen, without trying to resolve the situation. What a wonderful lesson in confidence and independence that even without an adult to help he could still work things out for himself.„
MODERNMUM 65
“Reading about the healing
power of tears
was a revelation to me”
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