Entry 07

 Johnnie Ray said, “It’s no secret you’ll feel better if you cry.”

I have always been a crybaby. Since I can remember my emotions both joyful and wretched are often strongly enough felt to bring tears to my eyes. It took me a long time as a child to understand that some people loved me for the times I would cry and some were so discomforted by my tears that they would berate me, even to the point of violence. It took even longer for me to understand that neither reaction was my responsibility or even any of my business.

I learned to swallow my tears when expressing them felt unsafe. Except in times of extremely intense emotion it usually worked for me, though swallowing them often made my throat ache. Swallowing is not accurate. Emotion was always an up from my belly experience. My throat hurt because that was where I learned to block the rise. It hurt like three strong fingers pressed on my esophagus. 

By the time I got out of the fifth grade at ten years old, I had experienced the most violent reaction by another to what became my last failure to block uncontrollable emotion. From that moment on, and for many years, I couldn’t cry if I wanted to. You couldn’t make me.

I tell this story not out of any need to rat out anyone involved or to garner any kind of sympathy for myself. I tell it because I know too well the kind of trouble and hurt men too often create in the world because they are so divorced from their emotional life that they don’t even have language to describe their feelings, even when they know they are feeling. 

Ask most guys how they are and they’ll tell you, “I’m alright.” Ask them to describe what they are feeling and you get happy, sad or mad. I also know that those same guys as young boys had an emotional life, until they were shamed out of expressing it. Emotional intelligence is like a muscle. If you don’t exercise it it atrophies. It can and will come alive again with regular workouts. 

Sadly that’s not as true when ET is shut down by trauma. Speaking strictly from experience, trauma needs to be understood and the ways in which it is remembered need to be identified and put into perspective before a person can feel safe revitalizing and expressing an emotional life. It is a process and might become a life-long practice, but in my experience again, it is worth the effort. Otherwise a guy is likely left with a life of happy, sad and mad. God bless him and those he loves if he gets hung up on mad.

I had a fifth grade teacher who saved herself hours of work correcting homework by having us correct our own papers. She would call out the correct answers and we would put an x on anything incorrect in our work. I was nine or ten and lazy but not stupid. I figured out that I didn’t need to do homework. I just stood a book on my desk to hide a blank paper behind and wrote down the answers. I was always a C+/- student and knew better than to suddenly start getting A’s. I got away with this until she got suspicious and came to my desk one morning, laid my book down and saw the half blank paper. She pulled me out of my chair by my ear, shaking my head and dragged me out into the hallway calling me liar and thief. She told me to face the wall and wait until the principal came. Principal never came but the teacher called my parents for a meeting. I caught hell again and, though I never cried through the whole ordeal, I did my homework everyday for two weeks. 

Somehow I felt I deserved recognition for having done so much homework and was feeling kind of pissed at receiving none. I stood my book up, like I was cheating again, and I put my finished homework paper on my desk. Teacher, seeing the book, came at me like a crazy person and pulled me up by my hair. I yelled at her, “My homework is done!” and immediately lost it. The injustice of it all was too much for me. The tear-dam in my throat blew and the hot tears were unstoppable.

That seemed to make her even more irrational and violent. I don’t know how long she shook me and raved at me but she finally ended with, “… and if you’re going to cry like a girl you’re going to play with the girls.” I spent the remainder of the school year in the mornings before school and on recesses every day trying to be invisible on the girls play ground.  

It’s still odd to me that on the same day, the first day of my thirty-year hiatus from allowing myself any serious feeling, I was also given the nickname crybaby dink. Though it only lasted with my pears through my sophomore year in high school, crybaby dink became a recalcitrant part of my self-image that also lasted into my forties.

This story is only one of many, some involving other teachers, but also the house I grew up in, the church etc. all seemingly designed to teach me to hide myself so well eventually, by the time I left my father’s house at 19, even I didn’t know for sure where to find me. I put a lot of time and energy over a couple of decades building walls and creating a narrative to protect myself and I did so long after I stopped being a child needing the protection. It all seemed to be working until one-day events conspired to strip all the defenses away and leave me exposed and in pain with no understanding of how to care for myself.

Therapy helped a lot, but the tears thing just couldn’t be talked through. Yes I was a child and she an adult. Yes I was helpless in front of her lunatic rage. Yes I was attacked by someone who should have been there to protect me. But. I stood the book up. I knew what I was doing. I set her up. It was my fault and always will be. 

By the time I was divorced I’d made a fair amount of recovery and personal growth but still no tears, which means not really any recovery or personal growth to write home about. The therapist I was working with then referred me to a colleague who practiced EMDR. 

There are many good books about EMDR and I am not going to try to write another one here. Most because I’m not qualified to write one but also because it would be a major sidetrack.Let me just say that my understanding is that your eyes and brain take in and record tons more information from an experience than your cognitive mind can process. Your cognitive mind lays down a few synapses for the bits of your experience it does process and those synapses become your memory of events. The rest of the full experience is archived, possibly never to see the light of day again. Somehow, through a repetitive left right, right-left back and forth eye motion while in a relaxed and meditative state EMDR allows the cognitive mind to relax it’s control of the memory and the larger stored picture to comes into play and allows a broadening of the narrative of the trauma to emerge.

In my EMDR experience of that fifth grade classroom, I was the adult me in therapy at forty-something I and I was watching from someplace nearer the ceiling than the floor at the back of the room with a wide angle view that took in everything and everyone in the room. I watched the child I had been in that classroom in 1963 stand immobilized with fear except for heaving sobs facing a dangerous raving lunatic adult probably three times its size behaving criminally towards the child and looking like she would attack at any minute. I noticed that the other children in the room to a one were not laughing at the child as I remembered, just unable to take their eyes off the teacher and possibly as frightened as the child is. 

That half hour session by itself ended a thirty-year drought for me. I haven’t stopped crying in the nearly thirty years since. I have other stories about men and their emotional lives. I’m telling this one first because I’m not sure how much past happy, sad, or mad I would have gotten without this experience. I sure as hell wouldn’t be a crybaby.

A note if I may… the images I was able to retrieve in EMDR remain as clear in my mind as if they were part of my original memory, which technically they are, if you know what I mean. 

Okay, just read the book.