when I was 8, a good headbump or playground injury would make me cry in pain. Now, in my 30s, I’ve had some of the worst injuries of my life with no crying response.
In: Biology
Crying is more than a pain response, consider it a signal to the tribe of distress. Thinking of crying in this way helps break the association of “sadness”. People cry when they’re hurt, angry, scared, laughing, and they can be sad without tears.
So as a child you cry to get attention, a baby cries when it’s hungry, when it’s uncomfortable, when it feels like it because it has no means of self, so it is constantly distressed. The cry gets a parent’s attention.
Parents try to condition their child out of crying all the time, self-soothing for example, so now the sligkty older child is finding other was to cope with duress, it’s building an inventory of self-care.
A bit older rhe child begins socializing with peers, it has some self-care skills, maybe it can speak words, or indicate what’s wrong without reverting to the basest means of communication. However around this time they learn self-policing.
Where as before if they cried mommy came to the rescue, now if they cry Billy calls them a cry baby and steals their lunch money. So crying becomes less of a go-to response. Now instead of crying the kid can recognize the scrape isn’t that bad, and instead of crying goes “Ouch, my knee” and then a teacher comes over, tells them it’s ok and gets them a band aid. All better.
Carry that through, to an 8 year old, they’ve spent 4 years seeing crying gets you ridiculed, they have the ability to speak, gesture and express, they have some ability to contextualize a crisis on a scale of 1-10, a minor scrape, is a 1, Grandfather dying is a 9, they know somethings are appropriate to cry about and others aren’t.
As a teen, crying is an aberration, a last resort, a primitive communication, and there’s enough social awareness to recognize when they cry they may get sympathy, ridiculed, infantililized, etc… so it becomes even more reserved to say nothing if being better able to contextualize duress.
Once you’re an adult that’s all baked in, and you’ve been through enough shit that your body doesn’t go meltdown crisis mode anymore, you’ve scraped a knee, broken a bone, mourned death, been heartbroken, etc… and despite all that you’re still going so you can cope with the crisis, and you can call for help, reach out to a support network, actively rather than crying, wailing, and hoping someone comes to your rescue.
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