Why Humans Cry
Clients apologize to me for crying with surprising frequency.
The apology often comes almost simultaneously with the tears. Someone is talking about a parent, a marriage, a failure, a loss, or something they have never said aloud before. Their eyes fill and, before they have fully registered what they are feeling, they say, “I’m sorry.”
I usually ask what they are apologizing for.
The question can produce a long pause. Most people have not consciously decided that crying requires an apology. They have learned, somewhere along the way, that tears create a problem for other people: they are embarrassing, excessive, weak, manipulative, unprofessional, or evidence that someone has lost control.
Humans produce three broad categories of tears. Basal tears continuously lubricate and protect the eye; reflex tears respond to irritants; emotional tears accompany states ranging from grief and frustration to relief, tenderness, awe, and joy. Humans are the only species currently known to shed tears in response to emotion, although other animals certainly produce distress vocalizations and display complex emotional behavior. Why humans cry in response to emotion is still up for debate.
Tears Can Be a Way of Communicating Without Words
Crying begins before language. An infant has very few ways to communicate hunger, pain, fear, discomfort, or the need for contact, and crying recruits another person’s attention quickly. That communicative function appears to persist into adulthood, although adult crying is considerably more complex.
In a large cross-cultural study involving more than 7,000 participants in 41 countries, people shown faces with visible tears reported a greater intention to offer support than people shown the same faces without tears. The researchers found that tearful people were perceived as more helpless and warmer, while observers also reported greater feelings of connection and empathic concern.
This may help explain why crying in front of another person can feel so exposing. An emotion that might otherwise remain private has become visible, and the person crying temporarily loses some control over who knows that they have been affected. For someone accustomed to deciding carefully what other people are allowed to see, that loss of control can be deeply uncomfortable.
Crying Does Not Necessarily Make You Feel Better
The familiar idea of “having a good cry” contains some truth, although the physiology is more complicated than the popular explanation that tears flush stress chemicals from the body.
Studies of crying and mood have produced mixed results. Laboratory studies have sometimes found increased distress and physiological arousal during and immediately after crying, while retrospective studies often find that people remember feeling better afterward. Researchers have therefore become interested in the circumstances surrounding the crying rather than assuming that tears themselves reliably produce relief.
One international study of more than 5,000 participants found that improvement after crying was associated with receiving social support, experiencing some resolution of the event that prompted the tears, and reaching a new understanding of what had happened. Crying accompanied by shame or active efforts to suppress it was less likely to be experienced as cathartic.
People may feel relieved after crying, or they may feel exhausted, embarrassed, angry, or no different at all. Tears tell us that something has happened emotionally; their presence alone cannot tell us what the experience means or what the person needs next.
Why We Cry About Good Things
People cry at weddings, graduations, reunions, concerts, births, sporting events, acts of extraordinary kindness, and moments of beauty. Parents cry when a child leaves for college and again when the child comes home. Someone can cry after receiving news they desperately wanted.
These experiences complicate any theory that treats crying simply as a response to sadness. What many crying episodes have in common is emotional significance: something important has affected the person strongly enough to exceed their usual capacity to contain or organize what they are feeling.
That is one reason I pay attention when someone is surprised by their own tears. A person may be describing a professional disappointment in relatively measured terms and suddenly begin crying. I do not assume that the tears reveal some hidden truth the person has failed to recognize; I become curious about what changed at that particular moment.
Perhaps the conversation touched humiliation rather than disappointment, or the loss evokes a parent whose approval mattered enormously. The person may have been frightened for months and only now stopped managing the fear long enough to feel it, or may simply be exhausted. Losing the job may also hurt more than they had allowed themselves to acknowledge.
The tears do not provide the interpretation. They give us a reason to pay closer attention.
Why Some People Apologize for Crying
The apology interests me because it usually has a history.
Some families respond comfortably to emotion. In others, crying is mocked, ignored, punished, treated as manipulation, or met with so much anxiety that the person crying learns to take care of everyone else’s reaction. Children pay close attention to these responses, and the lessons can also come from school, sports, work, gender expectations, cultural norms, or relationships in which showing hurt has carried a cost.
By adulthood, the original lesson may no longer exist as a conscious thought. A person simply feels embarrassed when they begin to cry, turns away, starts laughing, changes the subject, insists that they are fine, or apologizes.
If someone apologizes for crying with me, I may ask what they imagine the tears are doing to me. Do they think I am uncomfortable? Do they feel they have lost control of the conversation? Are they worried I will see them differently? Does crying create a sense of weakness, dependence, or exposure that they find difficult to tolerate?
Those questions often tell us considerably more than immediate reassurance that crying is acceptable.
Crying and Control
For people who are highly practiced at composure, tears can feel particularly intrusive because they do not always submit to conscious control. You can choose your words carefully, decide what to disclose, keep your voice steady, and construct a coherent explanation of an experience, yet you cannot always decide whether your eyes will fill while you are doing it.
The ability to cry is not a measure of psychological health, and there is no ideal amount a person should cry. Some people cry readily; others rarely do. Depression, trauma, medication, temperament, culture, learned inhibition, neurological conditions, hormones, and individual differences can all influence crying.
Clinically, I am less interested in how often someone cries than in what happens once emotion becomes visible. Can the person remain with the experience long enough to understand it, or do they immediately move away from it? Do they become embarrassed or angry with themselves, begin explaining, worry about taking up too much space, or shift their attention toward reassuring the person sitting across from them?
Those reactions can tell us something about a person’s relationship with vulnerability that the tears alone cannot.
What Tears Can Tell Us
I do not treat crying as evidence of a breakthrough or the absence of tears as resistance. The more useful question concerns the experience that produced the emotion and what the person does with it once they become aware of it.
Tears may accompany grief that has been postponed because there was too much to manage, anger that has been difficult to acknowledge, relief after prolonged uncertainty, shame that has remained private, or the recognition that something important cannot be repaired. At other times, a person is simply moved.
When someone apologizes for crying, that small apology may tell me more than the tears themselves. It raises questions about what they learned emotion costs, who they have been permitted to need, how much of themselves they allow other people to see, and what they believe will happen when composure gives way.
Those are questions worth staying with.
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT provides individual and couples therapy in Hermosa Beach and online throughout California.
