A Helpful Cathartic Cry

Are you more likely to wear your emotions on your sleeve or keep it bottled up? One of my strengths that is also a weakness at times is my ability to not show too much emotion. I am much more likely to show emotion in my writing than you’ll ever see out of me in person. The ability to disguise my emotions can be a gift when it comes to a lot of situations, as outbursts and yelling can be inappropriate and upsetting to others (believe me, I’ve experienced it plenty of times). On the other hand the challenge of holding my emotions deep inside causes the pent up feelings to build up in an unhealthy way.

This may sound silly to some but I discovered how cathartic a good scream session could be only recently. I see why small children cry out because most times they find some sort of resolution from doing it. I believe this learning can benefit others so I thought it would help to share a few scenarios where a good scream session helped me process the situation. There were two incidences that come to mind where I was injured and my natural instinct was to scream out in pain. This may sound like a given, but the fact I’ve never had an injury at this level caused me to feel a depth of emotion and physical pain I had been fortunate to avoid my entire life. The first injury occurred as the result of a car accident. My injury came from someone else’s neglect and I was ANGRY.

For a good while, I had witnessed their erratic driving in my rear-view mirror, probably as a result of their frustration with the stop and go traffic and their rush to get home from Spring Break. When the BMW ended up rear-ending my car as I was sitting still on the interstate I got a serious case of whiplash and an even more obvious case of primal screaming. Letting my frustration with the situation out before the other driver approached me after the accident actually helped me not to lash out. I wanted to punch her in the face at the time, but opted not to. To be safe I name sure she went back to her vehicle and let the police deal with the situation.

Just three months after the car accident, while still seeing a chiropractor weekly, I injured both of my feet during the process of moving out of our home we had recently sold. I was MAD at myself because I managed to drop a very heavy wood beam from our workshop on both my feet, causing some gnarly bleeding, bruising and swelling (and surely a few broken bones). I dropped the beam because it was too heavy to lift. Leave it to me to not realize I was standing too close to the drop zone. When the pain first hit I lost the ability to stand and I remember just lying down on the asphalt driveway outside the workshop and screaming in pain. I don’t even think the physical pain was what was driving the emotions to the surface because my feet were numb. The actual emotion was the result of the built up sadness, frustration and confusion from the big life decision we had made to sell our dream home. The day before this crippling incident we had closed on the sale of the house, but the process had not been as smooth as the control-freak in me wanted it to be.

The decision to sell the home we loved and that I had personally designed with the help of an architect was months in the making. While it was a hard decision, it was best for our family and our future. With our two older kids turning 18 and 21 this year, the home was bigger than we needed and way too much upkeep was needed for it to be our forever home. We had already purchased a beautiful property in the same county and started to build our next dream home on a smaller scale. When the house went on the market in May of 2023 we got two offers within 3 days of the listing going live. Our realtor, Dee Dee, was pretty awesome through the whole process if I do say so myself. The offer we accepted asked for a closing in four short weeks. We would be moving quickly and not into our next home, but into our camper that was already situated on our new property. With a six bedroom house and a 1600 square foot workshop to pack up, we moved our possessions to five storage units in three different counties because storage space was not easily available. The process of moving is emotional, packing up most of your stuff and putting it in storage for a year is emotional and saying goodbye to a dream home is even more emotional.

That house was all our 10-year-old daughter knew. Our two older kids would have different living arrangements  from us for the first time in their lives after we closed that door for the final time. We gave up a lot but we gained so much more. The day before we were set to close on the house and move on to our next phase was one of the most frustrating days I had experienced in a long time. Our inspection checklist had an unresolved issue that was still being negotiated at 10pm before a 9am closing the next day. I clearly recall standing in the driveway of our empty house with my husband, our 3 kids and our daughters boyfriend. I was feeling emotionally drained. Something inside me couldn’t take the back and forth phone calls anymore. Our realtor was doing all she could as we dealt with a difficult process from the other side. When asked to bring a cashiers check to closing to resolve the final open issue and realizing there was physically no way to be at the bank and at the closing at 9am, I wanted to say “let’s just cancel the whole thing!” I was done. I didn’t even want to sell the house anymore. I wanted to stop the pain and go back in time. That’s not what happened. I started to cry, and it was the ugly cry where you wished no one else was around. But I needed my family there and I am so grateful they were with me. Next thing I knew I was screaming. I was letting out the months of pent up feelings and making it clear that I was not ok. When I ran out of tears and screams I felt so much better. The emotional release was not from physical pain this time. It was from a much deeper emotional pain that I had let build up for way too long. Writing about these experiences has been such a good release for me and if sharing it could help someone else then it's worth it.