Learn to notice the difference between when your clients cry vs when they weep.

Tears are significant to a client’s healing. They represent a cleansing of suffering and shame. They bear forth validation of self-worth and a newfound freedom. Often it relates to the client’s ability to enter into their suffering and find or transform into a new life altering meaning. Tears are the actualization of that transformation. That is often why when my clients cry, I invite or challenge them to allow those tears to come and not wipe them away. The action of wiping away tears may be an attempt to avoid the pain or reinforce shame of being vulnerable. I would then ask, “If your tears had a voice, what would they say?” Helping my clients learn to attune themselves to their emotional experience, their values, their pain, and give them space to validate their emotions is the same thing as validating their self-worth. Tears represent saying, “I’m hurt and I’m allowing myself to hurt”. Once that’s an accepted reality you now have the freedom to choose how to transform your suffering. For interior freedom is learning how to consent or accept one’s suffering. 

Challenge or invite your clients to not wipe away their tears, for tears are healing, and see what happens. Many of our clients cry. Encourage and validate those tears. When our clients weep however…well that’s a whole beautiful actualization of healing on a different level.

Only a few clients have wept in my chair. Both times I was so greatly moved, my interior desire to want to give them a hug kicked in but knowing that their weeping was an actualization of healing. Because of that and because of ethical boundaries I gave them space to weep rather follow through with my impulse, however difficult it was. I remember these occasions vividly. The most recent one occurred when my client was processing and working through a narrative of worthlessness caused by particular events from the past and learning to change the narrative and core beliefs from the events. At one point in our session, I invited my client to try to notice her internal emotional experience in relation to her younger self. After revealing anger and discontentment through most of her story and processing due to how she was poorly treated, my client shared in a hushed tone that she felt like wanting to give her younger self a hug. Instinctually, I went ahead and invited her to take the pillow from the back of her chair and hug it, while providing a brief explanation that our bodies register validation and meaning derived from a physical action even though our logical brains are telling us we’re just hugging a pillow. She took a breath, looked down, hugged the pillow, and then…she began to weep. All those years of self-blame, shame, and hatred towards herself were being washed away for once. Through her weeping, she gave herself permission to love and validate her worth. She wasn’t hugging a pillow; she was hugging a version of herself that she used to hate but now was embracing. You can tell when someone weeps, their body shakes and it’s a cascade of significant amounts of tears. It sounds as if they are letting go. My client leaned into the pillow more, pouring forth love and self-compassion. In that moment my client found and experienced profound and transformative healing. While she wept, I felt so much awe and realized that in such great tragedy I got to witness my client’s miraculous transformation from shame and self-hatred to a profound and unimageable love experienced all through her willingness to weep, the complete surrender of shame and the complete renal of new life. 

Maybe that’s the kicker, weeping is the act of complete surrender. The surrender of our negative beliefs of our self-hatred and despair. A complete surrender that makes room for healing, love, forgiveness, and compassion. Love that is truly real. Not only did my client weep, but she invited me to experience her vulnerability at this moment. A gift was given to me by my client, a gift I greatly cherished, and I’ll never forget. It was in such vulnerability she encountered love, a love from being seen by another but more importantly from herself.  I believe that this is truly a significant part of the reality of healing, that in my brokenness, I surrender to the reality that I am seen, cared for, loved, etc. Therefore, my pain has meaning, I have worth, and now I don’t have to be enslaved by it. I am free.

 I came across this poem that I felt relates to many of my clients’ experiences regarding this act of surrender. 

 “She wept upon her cheeks, 

and weeping so, 

she seem’d to quench love’s fire 

that there did glow.” 

-Robert Herrick

Deep within each of our clients and in each of us is our divine reality to be love. By allowing others to cry and to weep we actualize such reality. Therefore, encourage your client to shed their tears and not wipe them away and give space to weep in complete surrender to their worth. There she wept, there she found true peace and freedom.