Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science Of Crying: Evolutionary Roots, Benefits, And Why So Many Of Us Are Uncomfortable With It | Benjamin Perry (Co-hosted By Dr. Bianca Harris)

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Reverend Benjamin Perry, is the author of Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter. He’s the editorial director at Garrett Seminary, Consulting Minister for Public Theology at Middle Church, and editor of the Queer Faith photojournalism series. He has a masters in divinity from Union Theological Seminary. In this episode we talk about:Why Doty got interested in this subject, and the rather extraordinary exercise he put himself throughThe gender differences on this issueHow vulnerability can be misused or weaponizedThe issue of interpersonal relationships when it comes to tears (Bianca and Dan delve into this in regards to their relationship)How we replay childhood patterns in grownup relationshipsThe deep connection between crying and shameThe messages we share with our children about cryingHow we can reconnect to the emotional parts of ourselvesRelated Episodes:#361 Why Men Armor Up | Daniel Ellenberg#441. A Thing Most Men Won't Talk AboutVulnerability: The Key to Courage | Brene BrownThe Science Of Speaking Up For Yourself | Elaine Lin Hering (Co-interviewed by Dan's wife Bianca!)Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/benjamin-perrySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How how we doing? Question for you, do you cry or are you like me not a crier? And if not, why not? What's that about? Today we're going to talk about the science of tears, the evolutionary roots, the benefits,

and why so many of us are so uncomfortable with crying. This is a loaded issue for me personally, both as an individual and as a husband, which is why I am conducting this interview jointly with my wife, Dr. Bianca Harris. Our guest is Reverend Benjamin Perry, author of Cry Baby, Why Our Tears Matter. He's the editorial director at Garrett Seminary, consulting minister for public theology at Middle Church and editor of the Queer Faith Photojournalism Series. He has a master's in divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

We talk about why he got interested in this subject and the rather extraordinary exercise he put himself through in the process, the gender differences on this issue, the connection between crying and shame, He got interested in the subject and the rather extraordinary exercise he put himself through in the process, the gender differences on this issue, the connection between crying and shame, how tears can be misused or weaponized, and much more. We'll get started with Benjamin Perry right after this. But first some BSP.

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Thank you, happy to be here. I'm hoping to make you cry on Valentine's Day, so that would be great. You picked an odd day to talk about crying, Dan. Right, we are recording this on Valentine's Day, so we would be great. You picked an odd day to talk about crying, Dan. Right. We are recording this on Valentine's Day, so we'll see who cries first. So Ben, let me start with you. You have a very interesting history with crying.

Can you walk us through the story? Yeah. It starts with an experience I had when I was 21 years old, fresh out of college in just beginning seminary. I had a professor who at one point broke us into small groups and invited us to share with each other the last time we had wept. Seminary has some interesting assignments. And all of the people in my group shared these beautiful experiences, crying, weeping, these

moments that really affected them, moved them, changed them. And as the conversation was going around, I realized I had nothing. I couldn't remember the last time I had cried, and certainly it was some time when I was a small child. And so in that moment I realized that I had been living inside this paralyzing numbness for a decade. And going to school, trying to be someone who offers emotional support for people, but also just trying to be a complete person, I had this watershed moment where I realized there was something broken inside of me and something that I needed to attend to. And so that night I went home and I decided that I was going to cry. And I remember thinking it was going to be really easy because it's crying,

everybody cries. And I sat down and for hours it felt like I tried one thing after another and I just could not get myself to cry. And finally, I pushed myself to the emotional brink. It really took me thinking about what would I say to my parents if they were dying? At the time, I wasn't out to them. There were a lot of things I hadn't said. and so I had this moment where all of a sudden this dam burst within me and I started weeping. And it felt amazing. In the book I talk about it a little bit because I then decided to weep every day for it ended up being several months. And I can talk about it in hindsight as if that was an intentional decision from the get-go, but what really happened was I just felt alive for the first time in a very long time. And so the next day I said, you know what, that was great, I'm going to do that again.

Yeah, for months I would just make myself cry every day. And what I noticed over the course of those months was I just completely changed my emotional baseline. By month two or three, most days didn't need to go home and make myself cry because I had just teared up sometime during the day. I had brought the surface of all of my emotions that much closer to my daily living, I had just become a more tender human being. And everybody who had known me for a long time was noticing these shifts in my emotional life and it just felt fantastic. So that's a little of the personal experience

that led me into wanting to study crying more thoroughly. What do you think was blocking you from crying prior to your daily weeping death march that you started at age 21? Truly is an act of emotional extremism. I'm more than a decade older now and I don't know that if I was confronting the same tearlessness now that I would go about addressing it perhaps quite the same way. But at the time, a lot of it was internalized homophobia that I had repressed. If I look back at the time when I stopped crying, it was right around that same period in early adolescence when I also was starting to be aware of my queerness. And I think I sussed out pretty astutely that crying and homosexuality are linked in the

cultural imaginary. And I was so terrified not only of letting other people see that I was attracted to the boys in my class, but of even admitting it to myself, that I decided to cut that part away because it was easier not to confront it. Also, obviously, the same kind of patriarchal masculine paradigms and those kinds of things that were played as well. But I really think it was this, primarily this act of trying to hide from both others and myself this core part of who I was, because one of the things that's true about crying is it's revelatory. It takes things that are buried and it brings them to the surface. And I was really, really terrified of that.

HOFFMAN Is there data research to show that men cry less frequently and pay a price for that? CB Yeah, it's really funny. If you look into the research on crying, many studies dispense with male participants entirely because a lot of the crying research when they do a study, first of all, it's very difficult to operationalize crying in a lab. Generally speaking, what you do is you put a bunch of people in a room and you show them a sad movie and you cross your fingers and hope that it's a sad enough movie that a lot of them

are going to cry because obviously with ethics review boards, you can't put people in pain or tell them a family member died or any of the number of other things that might make somebody organically cry. And so the combination of that somewhat artificial setting with what we know about male tearlessness in general, when they do survey studies as well, they find that the median number of crying events for a man in a month is zero. And it's not that women, it's 30. If I remember correctly, it's somewhere like six or seven. But still, there's a pretty marked gender difference. If we're going to enter into binary ways of talking about gender, it's a pretty marked gender difference between how men and women are acculturated. And I think that plays out

in some of the ways that crying manifests. And yeah, so a lot of studies that are looking into crying because they habitually have to throw out all of the male data are just like, well, you know, we're not going to even worry about that. We'll just focus and recruit exclusively female participants. Anecdotally, I'm not seeing any research that bears this out, but something that I know from talking to trans friends that there may also be a link between testosterone itself and crying because one of the things I've heard from a number of trans friends, trans masculine friends, is that after they went on tea, they started crying less frequently in a way that they found painful and troubling. And so I have not seen any comprehensive

clinical studies examining that link. That's just something I've heard anecdotally. So there may be a bit of that too. This is anecdotal as well, but I remember, and hopefully I'm remembering this correctly, I had a college advisor who, when I worked with him, was a man, but later became one of the first very public trans figures and was on Oprah. She's quite well known. I'm embarrassed that I'm forgetting her name. And she wrote this amazing essay, I mean, this is, she was a real, still is a real pioneer

in this regard. And she wrote this amazing essay about her experience of transitioning from male to female and how all of a sudden with these hormones rushing through her body, she was feeling the world much more keenly. I believe she described herself as feeling like an open wound in some ways. So that seems to track with what you're talking about right there. Yeah, but one of the things that I really try to focus on in both the book and in when

I talk with people about crying is that all of us have the capacity for crying. Even if there may be some kind of hormonal difference that makes some people more likely to cry or less likely to cry, it's very true, and I am a living testament to that truth, that through engaged and sustained effort, we can become people who feel more deeply. And that's one of the things that I think is important when we're talking about crying is to recognize that crying is almost the canary in the coal mine of this deeper emotional life. So when people ask me, I don't cry, I really want to cry more, how do I start crying? I tell them that you're focusing on the

wrong thing. If I could go back and I could tell 21-year-old me how to maybe go about my bizarre quest in a less quixotic manner, I would encourage myself to focus on the feeling parts because when you can deepen that well of feeling, the crying just kind of happens. That's why we cry when we're joyful, when we're really scared, when we're proud, when we're sorrowful or mourning. It's when the feeling reaches that fulcrum point and everything starts to slosh around like an unsteady glass and it begins to tumble outwards. I really think that the key to crying is to feel our experiences deeply. And it's interesting thinking about the way that folks are encouraged to prune those emotional parts of themselves in so many explicit and implicit ways. But I think particularly men, there's a fascinating part in Bell Hook's The Will to Change, which is her focus on masculinity,

where she talks about that the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence against women, but violence against the emotional parts of the self, to cut out the parts of ourselves that feel deeply. And I don't think that's a natural and normal thing. So even though there may be some kind of hormonal difference, I think that it is compounded by an acculturation, which tells so many people, and not just men, that those feeling parts of you don't matter, that at best they are unimportant, and at worst they are shameful.

And so we learn to paper over and cover them over. And we become scared of them. Yeah, I'm thinking about Tom Hanks in that movie, a league of their own, where he's a male coach of a female baseball team. And he screams at the players. There's no crying in baseball. I want to get pretty deep into the benefits of crying. And you've got some very compelling arguments. But before we go there, I just want to check in with Bianca.

I don't know if you have any questions or comments at this point. I just want to check in with Bianca. I don't know if you have any questions or comments at this point. I mean, the first obvious comment I think is that I would have been a great subject in that study. And I say this somewhat in jest because I do cry easily, but I think there's a spectrum of feeling, which I really appreciate you sort of creating that umbrella of feeling deeply, because I don't necessarily feel shame when I cry in one context but I may feel shame if I cry in another and really seeing it as two sides of a coin if you can even just say they're two sides is helpful. So you know it's hard for me not to go right to the root of

where crying shows up in my life and ways that I would like to make it better. I can tolerate crying at movies and I certainly tear up when I'm happy and there are all sorts of ways in which I feel really deeply. But I think probably for a lot of people, crying in the context of feeling deeply with a partner and trying to understand your feelings and their feelings and your interaction as a unit can be sometimes fraught. And you had written about crying representing a lot of which you haven't fully realized yet. And it just sort of dawned on me

that you think you know what you're crying about, but you're right. You haven't fully articulated it yet necessarily. So of course presenting it without clear communication is going to be confusing to the other person. So barring incredible communication skills, what is your take or input on when feelings are raw with another person, potentially about another person, and both being able to embrace those feelings, not judge yourself for them, but use them in a way that is actually helpful that your partner can also understand? Who's this mythical other person you're referring to? I mean, we have many cats, so creature.

I mean, I'm trying to be as general as possible. Well, not to be the person who comes on the mindfulness show to talk about mindfulness, but I do think that the more we can curiously examine why we're crying and understand it for ourselves, the better we are able to then share and communicate that information with somebody else. I think a lot of the kinds of miscommunication you're talking about happen because we feel this thing really, really deeply and we don't have the words to know even precisely why we are feeling so deeply. And so then when we get to the point where we're trying to communicate all of the enormity of those feels to the person sitting across the table from us, we don't even really

have a good way of framing it for ourselves. And so that act of framing it for somebody else becomes nigh on impossible. I had a meditation teacher who I know there's so many different metaphors that people use for examining one's thoughts, whether it's treating them like clouds passing by in the sky or ants walking in front of you. My teacher, maybe it's because we were in New York, loved to talk about being at a subway station and treating your thoughts like trains pulling into the station. The goal is, you can't always stop the trains,

but the goal is to not get on the train and let it go out the other side with you on it. And actually, I think that one of the things that I try to do now when I cry is hop on the train for a little bit and see where that's headed. And there's a danger there, because if you get on the train for a little bit and see where that's headed. And there's a danger there because if you get on the train and those doors close,

there's no guarantee that you aren't all of a sudden going to be on a one-way trip to Saab town and really be weeping in a way that you hadn't intended. But I think the more that we cry with frequency, the more we're able to cry some, in doing so start to peel back why exactly we're crying. So I'll give you an example. I was reading an article recently about anti-trans legislation in all these states and I started crying and at first I thought I was crying because of the horrible things

that I was reading about in the paper itself, the quotes from people they interviewed, things like that. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that I wasn't actually crying about the article. I was crying because there was a young person in my congregation who died by suicide recently who was trans. I was crying because I have a number of friends who live in states under these laws and are in the process of trying to transition, are not sure exactly where that is going to lead or whether they're going to have to flee where they live. And I realized there was all of this deeper hurt that if I had just then talked

to my partner and tried to frame it in the context of this article, it might not have made sense why I was feeling so deeply about this article for which is obviously awful, but I didn't have any. I wasn't telling her those connections in my life that were actually the source of the crying. And so after I cried and I realized what I was actually crying about, I reached out to the mother of the child and I reached out to some of my friends. And that's one of the things that I think is really beautiful about crying is it can both tell us what it is really we're feeling if we're mindful about it or we're sitting with the tears in a contemplative kind of way. And it draws us closer to other people,

to the folks who we're crying about. And that way it works almost as a loving-kindness meditation. Sometimes we're crying for us. Sometimes we're crying for someone we know. Sometimes we end up crying for people we don't know at all. At times we even end up crying for people who we find difficult at best, odious at worst. But if we can continue to be curious about that experience of crying, I think it helps us know what we are feeling, and that's what enables the kind of communication

you're talking about. So it's interesting what you're saying that it's like there's an investigatory impulse that's triggered when you feel yourself starting to cry. It's like what's going on here? Is the apparent proximate cause, this article, really what's going on or is there something deeper and you can use the momentum of the emotion to bring you to greater awareness. Yeah. So often crying is not actually about what's happening in the moment. I'm thinking about interviews I would do with folks who end up crying in a workplace because of something that someone said and the comment itself was somewhat innocuous, but it triggered something much deeper, some trauma, some, some pain that that person's moving with.

And again, I think this is partly why crying can become so fraught in social contexts, because we don't see all of what lies beneath the surface of other people's interior lives. And so you can be that person who makes a comment that you thought was someone innocuous and all of a sudden the other person is crying in a way that you don't understand. And when that happens, you have the option to either denigrate their crying or say that person's histrionic and emotional. Or you can take a beat and realize that you've touched on something that clearly that person is feeling deeply. And even if you don't come away with the thinking that, you know, the thing that I said warranted that level of weeping, that's somewhat immaterial because clearly something in

this interaction has caused this other person to weep. And that we go back to sort of the evolutionary reasons why we cry, that's what it is. It's an attempt to solicit care and concern and connection from other people in our tribe, our non-kin. That's one of the fascinating things to me about the evolutionary research on crying is the way that it's linked to all of the different ways from language and religion and culture that we have developed ways of developing meaningful non-zero relationships with people who we don't have a biological reason to be committed to their survival. Crying becomes this visible signal that something is happening on the inside of me or perhaps, you know, a physical peril. But oftentimes it really is that there's this

thing that I am dealing with in my life and I need help. I can't carry it by myself. What a beautiful, beautiful thing that our bodies are hardwired to express that need for community. BF. Just to say Bianca's question points to some interesting interpersonal dynamics between me and her. I smiled then when you talked about people inappropriately dismissing other people's tears as histrionic or emotional because that's a mistake I've made repeatedly over the past 16 or so years of marriage and dating with Bianca. So I'd love to get into that, but let's just stay on a high level,

more universal level for a while. You just talked about evolution and the evolutionary roots of crying. From the research, is that really the only reason why we've evolved to cry because it's a sort of social signaling, or is there some physiological stuff going on as well? Well you've just named the two big academic theory camps of why we cry and

the truth is that there really has not been sufficient crying research to definitively say one way or another why we cry. Is it social? Is it physical? Honestly, it's probably a blend of the two. If I was going to be casting stones into what data we do have, the reality though is that crying is not linked to any number of profitable diseases, so it doesn't get that kind of funding. It's not linked to things that are useful for the military, so it doesn't get that kind of funding. I would love to, for example, see research where people put people who are weeping under FRMRI machines and things like that, but we just

to date those kinds of studies have not happened. And so some of these questions I'm not going to have definitive answers for. What I'll say about the theories of why we cry, And so some of these questions I'm not gonna have definitive answers for. What I'll say about the theories of why we cry, there is a camp of folks who believe that tears do serve an excretory function of some sort. So this dates back to Dr. William Frey who published a book in the 80s called Crying the Mystery of Tears, which was a pretty landmark book at the time. It was a big cultural moment. And in it, his big finding was

that the chemical composition of emotional tears was different than the chemical composition of irritant tears. So the tears that you cry cutting an onion or there's smoke in the air, those are chemically distinct from tears that you cry out of deep feeling. And specifically, there are a few different proteins like prolactin that are found in higher concentration in emotional tears. And so Frey's hypothesis was that the tear ducts are actually concentrating these proteins at a level higher than is found elsewhere in the bloodstream and secreting them through the eyes as a way for the brain to release stress or other emotions. Now, there's not been nearly enough research to try to replicate

this hypothesis. The couple studies that have been done have been inconclusive, so whether or not that's true is really anybody's guess. Now there's another whole host of folks figure headed by Ad Winkerholtz who's this Dutch researcher, he really focuses on the social function of tears. And there's all kinds of research that shows that when you see somebody crying, you feel more likely to help them. You feel gentler towards them. You recognize more quickly that they are in need of support or care. So they who studies where they take sad-looking faces and then they digitally add tears to them and show them to two groups of people and the people who are in the experimental group with the digitally added tears are quicker to recognize that this person is in distress and more likely to think that they need assistance.

And so there certainly seems to be and more likely to think that they need assistance. And so there certainly seems to be a social function to tears that incite us when we see somebody crying to offer help and assistance. And certainly from a very core biological with our children kind of sense, that's very true. That is clearly why your baby cries is to solicit your attention so that you feed it or clean it or do any of the other number of things that it is not yet able to ask for verbally. But there's no indication that that social signaling decreases as we get older. Certainly, some of it transitions into language, but we still try in ways that are trying to solicit help from the broader world. And that's actually another hypothesis for

why we have those extra proteins in emotional tiers is that the added proteins actually increase the viscosity of the tear and slow the rate at which they fall down our cheeks. So they elongate the amount of time that that visible signal is present. You said the research on crying is limited so I asked this question with some hesitation but what if anything do we know about the physiological and psychological benefits of crying or do we know nothing? From clinical studies we don't know a ton about long term if people cry frequently is that linked to better health outcomes things like that there are studies that show there are studies that show that emotional repression is really unhealthy. Now, obviously, you can be a person who is not emotionally impressed but also does not cry, so it's not

a neat one-to-one parallel. But certainly, most of the folks who I talk to who don't cry cry, link that not crying to some kind of emotional repression, even if it's just, oh yeah, I'm not a person who has a lot of big feelings. Most of us, all of us, are born feeling big feelings. And so there is a process of culling that that happens for many people as we get older. We can have conversations about whether or not there are appropriate ways of developing manageable containers for our feelings so that they don't just run our lives and govern us. But I do think that the pendulum often swings too far the other direction and people stop crying because it is an indicator that they are also doing a whole lot of emotional repression, which we know is very unhealthy and like two heart disease and stroke and all sorts of other negative health outcomes. And one thing I

will share anecdotally as a minister and someone who is friends with a lot of other clergy and therapists and care providers is in my experience and in others' experience related to me. People who don't cry oftentimes have a much harder time moving through grief. But there seems to be something about that act of crying that helps take grief and move it through our bodies in a way that is not just symbolic. So for folks who don't weep, oftentimes I notice those people are the folks for whom grief tends to double back and redound and expand and fester in a way. Not that people who cry all of a sudden don't feel sad about the person who died, but it offers an opportunity to really confront what that person meant in your life,

the reasons why you're crying over them, all the love that you carry for them. That process of weeping does something in terms of your ability to process grief. And since grief is pretty core and essential to what it means to be a person who is alive for any length of time, I do think that not crying in the long arc of our lives has some negative outcomes, even if they're ones that aren't as readily apparent. Coming up, Ben talks about how vulnerability can be misused or weaponized, how tears can play a role in interpersonal relationships. Bianca and I talk a little bit about how this plays out for us, how we tend to replay childhood patterns in our grown-up relationships,

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Before we get back to the show, just a reminder about the Healthy Habits course over on the 10% Happier app, taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. You talked about one of the benefits of crying being connection to other people, that it's a social signal that is kind of asking for support. Can that be misused? CB Absolutely. I have a chapter in my book where I talk about crocodile tears and all other kinds

of what I call weaponized vulnerability. To offer a couple of cursory examples and more courageous ones, I'm thinking about Kyle Rittenhouse histrionically weeping on the witness stand to avoid responsibility for going hunting in another state to kill some protesters, or Brett Kavanaugh histrionically weeping during the Supreme Court hearings as a way to avoid confronting the truth of what Christine Blasey Ford testified to in her testimony. Or Christian Cooper, the birder in Central Park who was accosted by that woman, Amy Cooper, who began weeping into her phone and telling the police, oh, there's this African-American man, and he's coming for me. Those kinds of performative weeping whose goal is to cover up the truth, to use a grand display of emotion to obscure what is going

on and to exert one's will upon the world. And very often, if you look at all of those instances of weeping I just outlined, it is vulnerability wed to power. It is a different form of power expressing itself in a predatory way using vulnerability when overt force is either not possible or less advantageous. So certainly in those kinds of circumstances, crying can and does become unethical and violent. And I don't think that that's really representative of the vast majority of times people cry. And I think that very small portion of instances where people use vulnerability in a predatory manner make us fearful about vulnerability in the remainder of our lives. And that's really tragic because it is such a core part of what it means to be in a relationship. I've been thinking about the conversation you did with Esther Perel a few weeks ago where she was talking about what

does it mean to cultivate deep relationships. And a core part of that that she outlined is that ability to be vulnerable with people, to let them into what's actually happening in our world. That if we don't do that, we don't form deep relationships. BD I was struck by the fact that when you chose examples of weaponized vulnerability, they were pretty much all on the conservative end of the spectrum. I'm revealing my political leanings. Well we share those. I think I can speak for Bianca on that.

We share some of your biases, but I think it would be safe to say that it is not just people on the right of the spectrum who misuse tears. Oh, absolutely not. I do think, generally speaking, that the misuse of tears does tend to align itself with certain kinds of power and power relationships, that that's when predatory vulnerability is truly at its worst. In the chapter, I also talk about people who would just do petty scams on the street who approach you and say, oh, my kids are sick and I need money to get, and you're pretty sure that they're not being entirely truthful.

Ultimately, in that kind of circumstance, that person might be a perfectly lovely human being who needs the money. Are they misusing vulnerability? Yeah. But it's not the same from an ethical perspective. I would say it's not the same kind of egregious abuse. And certainly I don't think it has the same kind of widespread ramifications that vulnerability wed to power do. And so one thing I will definitely say is that it's certainly not restricted to political leanings because for example, there's a lot of left of center white folks who will use

T.O.'s in a very similar kind of way. I'm thinking about one of the examples that I give in my book is while I was at seminary and I went to a very left of center seminary, there was a whole big conversation about race and racism that happened on campus my second year. And in the course of this conversation, this woman who absolutely would have if you asked her, what are your political ideologies would identify as leftist, progressive, what have you, use the N-word, already not a great start. And then when people confronted her about it, began overtly weeping and talking about how she's not that kind of person and

focused the entire interaction all around her own emotional life to avoid accountability for this thing that she had just done. And so certainly it is not exclusively the province of conservative people to misuse tears, but I do think that the misuse of tears oftentimes aligns with various forms of social power and privilege. I want to talk about some personal stuff, but just to sum up this part of the conversation, it sounds like there are several benefits to crying. One is that it can help you process big emotions. It can make you more emotionally aware.

It can be a signal that there's something to investigate here. It can deepen your relationship to people around you. It can help you change. It can lead your relationship to people around you. It can help you change. It can lead to personal transformation. Is that a good rough summary of the case for crying? Yeah. And to sort of also loop in this, you know, bridging across political difference or divides,

it's also an opportunity to recognize the humanity of someone with whom we vehemently disagree. I have a friend, Dylan Maron, who has this brilliant podcast and book called Conversations with People Who Hate Me. He's someone who's gone viral on the internet a lot and so gets all kinds of less than kind comments in the reply sections. And he started this podcast series where he would invite people on who left him truly hateful and odious remarks and has hour-long conversations with them. And I was talking to him about when people cry in those conversations, and he says one of the things he always tries to do, even if he doesn't think their tears are particularly laudable or even if they are in some ways being a little bit predatory in their vulnerability,

he always uses that as an opportunity to connect, to treat them as a human being, to treat the reasons why they're crying as real and valid, even if he doesn't necessarily in his heart of hearts agree with them. It's an opportunity to see someone else's humanity and to show them that you are invested in theirs. And that kind of connection is what makes crying essential in our interpersonal relationships with people we love. But it's also a core part of how we begin to. Dissolve some of this poisonous polarization that we find ourselves submerged in. Yeah, I know Dylan, too. He's fantastic. I'll put a link in the show notes to Dylan's book and podcast.

Love Dylan. Bianca, so you're a better historian than I am. Crying has kind of been a running gun battle in our relationship. I put most of the responsibility for that on myself. But are you comfortable summing up what the issues have been? I will sum them up. Part of the reason why I'm not totally comfortable, I think, is worth saying, which is that I too share some of the shame around it, as I mentioned before, not just in the context of what we'll talk about, but I think background and how you were raised really matters. And for me,

I came from parents who felt and expressed very differently. On the one hand, my father went silent when there was any kind of conflict, and he knew that from his family. And on the other, my mother was anything but silent, but it was not necessarily productive. And it was often hurtful to not have real modeling, not that either of them, you know, did this on purpose or, you know, they had their own traumas and feelings around it. Were they to explore? I think they came by their methods completely honestly honestly. But obviously, we are a product of where we came from, and Dan can explain where he came from. As a result, or a partial result, I never quite knew how to communicate clearly how I was feeling. Maybe there were certain patterns depending on

topics of conversation and people with whom I might be connecting with or not connecting with. But I didn't really feel uncomfortable feeling deeply and having tears watching movies and you know, just crying for other people truthfully. And also just the word crying, you know, it's not always weeping, it's not sobbing. A lot of times it's a meniscus that forms, or it's the sense that if you're not completely aware of what you're feeling, you could devolve into a puddle. And maybe that's not really appropriate in that moment.

So I say this all to say that that's what I came into, our relationship as a human being, also as somebody who is in the middle of a grueling medical residency, and as somebody whose particular traumas around love and security and relationships were not really obvious to me yet and would only become obvious once I was in the one that would stick, meaning this particular person that we're speaking to right now. I think for a lot of people, their issues really only surface when they're in the lion's den, if you will.

And so that's a long way of saying that, you know, when we really became serious, invariably they're going to be subjects that you approach differently and that you react to differently. And there were things that were hurtful to me that I didn't understand as part of my historical baggage being triggered. And there were the ways in which we responded to each other were also potentially misleading and not addressing the issue at hand. And I learned fairly quickly that being tearful, and I would say on average really means not active crying as much as it is, voice choking up a little bit and welling up of eyes, not that I haven't like overtly cried over certain things before,

that has elicited clear tension from Dan. And as much as we've evolved to have this incredibly open and wonderfully communicative and insightful coexistence as a couple and as a family and as just humans in this world, we can talk about so many things, when there are certain topics that can really strike us both. And when that happens, I have the dual experience of both feeling something uncomfortable that I need to connect with him on, and also being completely self-aware that by starting the emotions of crying, I'm going to shut him down and he'll disconnect. So that is truly our sort of Achilles heel. I don't know. Is that fair, Dan? Yes. Yeah. Maybe a little more fair to me than I deserve, but yeah. Well, you can speak to your foibles. Please, let me hear them.

Dan, can I ask you a question? Sure. So, you're someone who's been very publicly open about your struggle with anxiety. Is part of your reflexive aversion to crying in some way a conditioned response because you fear where that kind of emotion that is not disciplined or controlled might take you. I think it's very close. I think it's probably a couple things going on. One, I had a very similar story to you in that I was actually quite emotionally free as a boy. My parents were totally cool with crying. It wasn't like I was ever shamed for it.

But then, you know, entered into the spin cycle of toxic masculinity in junior high and high school, and I never cried again. I have a very clear memory of being at a sleepover freshman year in high school or maybe eighth grade with three other guys, and somebody hit me in the head with a lacrosse ball, and I cried, and I was mocked mercilessly and extensively. And so, yeah, I very much took in the signal, don't cry. There are lots of impolite words that people will hurl at you when you do. So I think that's one thing. The second thing is I'm a very anxious person.

I think that over time, I've realized that when I see other people getting upset, it reminds me of the parts of myself that I don't like, and therefore I get uncomfortable. So I think that's close to the theory that you advanced. And I think the third is that I'm also thin-skinned. And sometimes when Bianca would cry, I would take it as an accusation that I was somehow insufficient and I would get scared that I was, you know, like, not up to the job, incapable of being in a relationship. I think that's more ancient history. This

cycle isn't being triggered for us that frequently now. But I think those three factors historically have been quite potent for us. Well, one of the effects, even if it's not triggered regularly or doesn't have a huge impact on us, I find myself in moments of being tearful for reasons that have nothing to do with Dan that feel good and therapeutic and beautiful watching a movie I'm very self-conscious of because I know that he doesn't like it. So it's not just about active conflict, it's about coexisting with different styles to

the extent that Dan may or may not want to cry, I don't know, but it's on me not to sort of mute myself, but I'm just saying it is in my very conscious thought even if we're not fighting. Right. That makes a lot of sense. And I think one of the things that you just brought up, both of you, is a really common common issue in interpersonal relationships when it comes to tears, which is that, Dan, when you see Bianca crying, there's a part of you that wants her to feel better. And that's not a bad thing. It's not a part of yourself that should be denigrated or mocked. It's an entirely healthy and rational response to seeing this person who you love in some kind of distress. The issue becomes when the response to that is, I just wanted the visible manifestation of that to go away rather than actually sitting with this person and moving through what they're moving through beside them.

When I was doing chaplaincy in seminary, I had a supervisor who would talk about oftentimes when you're sitting next to somebody who's crying, what do you do? You put your hand on their back and you rub in a circle. And she said, what this communicates is you are crying and I am uncomfortable with that and I would really like you to not be crying anymore. And she said that what's much better is if you put your hand on their back and you just hold it there. Because what that communicates is I'm here with you in this moment and I'm going to be here with you as long as it needs to take. I'm going to sit with with you as long as it needs to take. I'm gonna sit with you in these tears,

even if I don't understand them totally, even if I don't share them. I love you enough to sit with you through that discomfort it's creating in me, because I want you to move through this experience in the fullness of what it takes. That sounds exactly right. And it's so striking to me what Bianca said earlier

about her dad getting distant. There's actually a great t-shirt that says, I don't get mad, I get distant. And in some ways, like she married a guy who has a lot of similarities in his emotional style to her dad. In fact, Bianca was on another podcast recently. I'll put a link to that in the show notes, a podcast called Search Engine. And she was telling

a story about how when she was eight, is that my right Bianca? Eight? She had a brain tumor that had to get removed and she had been crying to her parents about how she was having these intense headaches and her dad had dismissed it. And there was a moment that Bianca was in the hospital. She finally got taken to the hospital, got a brain scan, and she was sitting in the hospital and she could see her dad in the next room being shown the results of the scan. And when he saw that there was a tumor, he just hung his head. And I remember thinking, that's me, you know, I had sympathy for both her and I'm embarrassed to admit for her dad in that

moment. And so, yeah, I don't know exactly where I'm going with this, other than to say that it's interesting how we can replay these childhood patterns in our grown up relationships. how we can replay these childhood patterns in our grown-up relationships. Well, it's interesting, Dan. I'm going to go to the tape, if you will, for a moment. Because you say that you're somebody who doesn't cry, but you actually, in your book, you cry twice. This is one of the habits of having written a book about crying, as I'm very attentive to when it pops up in other people's books. So in the book, you cry when Peter Jennings dies. But then the second time you cry

is in the middle of your meditation retreat. It's actually a really pivotal moment of your book that you're at that point where you don't know that you can go any further in this retreat. You're so sick of being on the mat and convinced that maybe this entire venture was a mistake, that you're ready to give it up entirely. And that's when you have this breakthrough moment where you start weeping during a loving

kindness meditation and not just crying a little bit, but sobbing. And it's interesting to me because that experience so neatly aligns with what I hear from so many folks, which is that crying happens precisely in the moment of transformation. And it's not in the moment of epiphany. That moment for you in the retreat comes a little bit later when Joseph Goldstein asks you to think about is this useful? That's the sort of aha moment that you have after that. But the crying is what clears something in your body in order to put you in a place where you can have that aha moment. And so much as you might think that or like to believe that you're outside the bounds of human experience and crying, even you, a professed non-crier, has had one of these really

quintessential crying experiences of crying in a moment of transformation. experiences of crying in a moment of transformation. Well, just to say, I'm an admitted non-crier or not frequent crier, but I don't say that with any pride. I buy your thesis about the value of tears and crying wholeheartedly. So I'm being open about my capacities or lack thereof just as a way to get people thinking and talking. But you're right. There are two examples in the first book I wrote, 10% Happier, about me crying. The first one I will say, I remember Peter Jennings was the main anchor of ABC News,

died in 2005. And 10 years later, they re-aired some footage of us, of people who were close to him reacting. And Bianca saw me crying, was like, what the hell is that? I never see you cry. And I pointed out that I had been very high on cocaine the night before and not slept. And that is probably what allowed me to break down

and cry in that moment. Similarly, on the meditation retreat, you know, was incredibly intense experience and a lot of the defenses get stripped away. I would recommend meditation retreats as a much healthier mechanism for this than all night cocaine binges. A pile of cocaine. Yes, exactly. So, so I think there's a common denominator between those two examples you, you cited. I will say, I mean, I did have an experience crying, but I think there's a common denominator between those two examples you cited. I will say, I mean, I did have an experience crying recently in Bianca was with me, we were having a very sensitive health conversation with somebody close to us. And it was upsetting to me, I got up and went in the other room and cried. So it's not like, I'm not trying to say here that A, I never cry or B, crying sucks or is shitty or you shouldn't do it. I'm just trying to be open about where I can and cannot go. Does that make sense? That totally makes sense. And I think that that last thing

you said where I can and cannot go is exactly right. For so many of us us when we aren't crying or have difficulty crying. It's because there are parts of ourself that we have difficulty going into. And the really wonderful thing is that all of us have a whole life to probe and delve into these parts that we've repressed or have trauma experiences like the story with the lacrosse ball that you mentioned. There's all kinds of reasons why people don't cry. And one of the things I always really try hard to do when I'm out and about talking about the book or talking about crying is I never want anybody to feel shame for not crying because there's already way too much of that going around. So many of us grew up with this sense of shame

because we cry and then we stop crying and then we become adults who feel shame because we don't cry anymore. All of that shame is not helpful and it's not ours. It's something that's been foisted onto us and it's something that unfortunately we have the responsibility to dig through. It may not have been ours in its source but it's now ours because we are holding it in our bodies. And the question becomes what are going to do with it? I think focusing on the crying in some ways is the wrong angle. The question is how can you begin reconnecting with those emotional parts of yourself in ways that don't trigger anxiety or don't trigger that emotional fight or flight that sense that, oh, this is not a safe place to

be. And so maybe it ends up being something that you in the same way with it when you're first meditating, you sit on the mat for five minutes and try to count your breaths. Maybe you end up doing the emotional version of that, feeling a little something and try to hold it and try to explore it a little bit more deeply. and every day try to cultivate those kinds of emotional experiences so that you feel them more more deeply. And I think particularly in some ways it's easier with meditation because it's this foreign practice you know not many of us are brought up sitting and focusing on the breath and trying to not follow our thoughts. It feels difficult and we ascribe that difficulty to, oh, it's this thing that I've never attempted before.

And I think it's really frustrating when it comes to emotions because all of us feel emotions. All of us have felt emotions throughout our lives. And so to approach our own emotional lives with the same kind of introductory approach can feel really infantilizing and frustrating. And if that's where we need to start, then that's where we need to start. BT. I think the nuance around Dan, I know he's capable of crying and obviously had the history and I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to look into, but it's the relational component because in all of your examples, maybe except for the cocaine binge,

I don't know, you know, you were alone, which is the value of crying alone. I highly recommend it. I think it's very cathartic and you have a lot of space to explore what's going on. But it's the relational component, which then I think there is an element of connectedness between two people when one is crying, which suggests both trust in the other person to receive that emotion and an opportunity for the person receiving it to give support. And so the real utility in becoming more connected becomes undone by not being able to do that. But I don't know, there isn't a prescription for how many times you should cry with your mate. And it's been a running joke between us that I've never actually seen him cry.

I've seen the aftermath twice. I haven't wanted to say it out loud because I feel like that's going to make him not make sure I don't see it the next time. But I also like I'm there for that. Like this is my wheelhouse. I'm built on empathy as long as I'm not feeling threatened. So bring it. And again, I really hope, Dan, that you don't hear my comments as in some ways trying to

pathologize you. I think that people can be absolutely wondrous human beings who don't cry. I don't think it's essential for happiness, for good personal relationships, for vulnerability, or any of the other kinds of attendant feelings, emotions. It's not essential, but I do think it's something to be curious about. And so that's what I, you know, to you who are listening, if you're somebody who doesn't cry, I don't want you to hear, the guy who wrote the crying book says that there's something broken in me. What I would love for you to hear. The guy who wrote the crying book says that there's something broken in me. What I would love for you to hear is maybe that's a part of me that I need to look at with a little

more curiosity. I would also add in Dan's defense if that's even needed because I don't think it is. He is someone who is, well, I mean, the curiosity and intensity and intention with which he investigates his feelings and helps others with theirs is remarkable. So the lack of crying thing is sort of a minor point right now, I think earlier on. It might have created a few more barriers, but the kind of, I think, support and connectedness he is able to provide as I think podcast listeners have heard vicariously, it is real and very much at work and appreciated. CB And if I can leave you with a little hope, Dan, one of the things that I have frequently come across in my interviews with people on crying is older folks who talk about how they didn't cry as much during the middle chunk of their lives but started crying with much

more frequency as they became elderly, which I think is really interesting. This is wholly unscientific, but I've also noticed people talking about crying a lot in liminal spaces. People don't necessarily cry in the hospital room with the person who's sick. They cry in the waiting room. They cry in the car ride home. People cry on airplanes. They cry in staircases. They cry in these places betwixt and between, I think in part because those emotions are moving through us in similar kinds of ways. And I wonder if as we get older and closer to that ultimate liminal space, if that proximity softens something

that results in the number of folks who confess not having cried for many years in their lives, but starting to cry more as they get older. That makes sense. But just to say I don't feel attacked or pathologized or criticized or any of that. I think all of this is very interesting. To make a rough analogy, in my mind, there's some similarity between my discomfort with crying and my inability to dance.

It just feels like areas where I'm still locked up and repressed and I'm interested in looking at that, and I don't mind doing it publicly. I love that. Coming up, Ben talks about the messages we deliver to our children about crying and how to provide a safe environment for our kids to cry in.

I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenpann. And in our series Legacy we look at the lives of some of the most famous people to have ever lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. In this series we look at J Edgar Hoover. He was the director of the FBI for half a century. An immensely powerful political figure, he was said to know everything about everyone. He held the ear of eight presidents and terrified them all. When asked why he didn't fire Hoover, JFK replied, you don't fire God. From chasing gangsters to pursuing communists to relentlessly persecuting Dr. Martin Luther King

and civil rights activists, Hoover's dirty tricks tactics have been endlessly echoed in the years since his death. And his political playbook still shapes American politics today. Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm curious about what it means to teach a child about sort of the parameters on crying because we have been extremely supportive of Alexander, our son, feeling his feelings.

He's nine years old. With that comes a certain amount of boundaries as they mature and hopefully that you express what you need to express to the point that it's constructive and helpful and then hopefully it fades away. And so just a couple of weeks ago, he had injured himself sort of at a basketball and was sitting on the sidelines and was really, really crying. Not that it's for me to judge how much pain he was in, but I had a sense that the injury was not as bad as the protracted crying made it out to be. And I probably did the pat on the back and rub, which I can appreciate actually sending a different kind of message. But at some point I said, why don't we just kind of quiet down a little bit?

And he said it full voice, stop trying to stop me from crying. You're not helping. These are my tears. Don't try to stop them. And on the one hand, I was like, okay, we've definitely helped him feel confident that his feelings are valid and we're here for them. It's all great. But then the fact that he really wasn't able to sort of take the social cues of the game going on and his friends just hearing him kind of wailing on the sidelines and be able

to contain that, I found that challenging and I'm not usually the one that finds that kind of thing challenging. So my questions are usually very long-winded and I don't know what they are until I finish the background, but it's something around how do you give sort of permission and validation but also learn how to contain it enough that we understand social cues and where to sort of keep it in this world. Yeah, it's a really important question. Going to your example with your son, you said, I didn't think that the physical injury was that serious. And you're probably right. What I'm curious about is what about the emotional

injury? That maybe it wasn't entirely the physical pain why he was crying in the first place. And not to, again, say that you did the wrong thing or anything. That's just a thing that popped into my mind that so often times we ascribe the reason for someone's tears to the thing that we saw and not necessarily the thing that they're experiencing internally. The other piece that I would say is I think for parents, one of the best things that you can do

is to create a space for your child where that child knows that all of what they're feeling is real and valid. And clearly, you have done that because you felt confident enough to tell you, hey, I'm feeling this thing and I need to feel this thing. One of the things I think is really important though is remembering that the messages you give about crying are not the only ones that your child is receiving. And so, as much as he may be hearing in his own home, crying is healthy, it's part of what it means to be a human, it's part of living a full emotional life, you should not feel shame about it. He is also hearing a broader world which still, unfortunately, heaps all kinds of shame on the act of crying. Less, I think, than it used to, but still. And so that creates a responsibility for you to be

intentional about repeating those kinds of messages even in situations where you feel like, oh, maybe this is silly or not entirely in your head warranted because your child is already going to be receiving all kinds of other messages about crying that you can't control. Those are really hard to shake. I mean, even still a decade after I did this, you know, six-month-long intentional crying experiment and after doing two years of research for a book on crying and interviewing people and talking about crying and going on podcasts and lecturing about crying, I still have this reflexive shame and anxiety that I feel about the act of crying, even though

I'm a person who cries pretty openly and freely, I had this weird anxiety preparing for this podcast that I was going to get on and find out that the reason you had brought me on is debunked, that crying is actually really super unhealthy. And I knew even as I was thinking this, the book was not a real thing. Obviously, you would not be having me on the podcast to expose the crying book as a fraud that didn't align with who he were or the kind of work that you do. And my brain would still go there.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was just this deep-seated shame that I still carry about crying, that I still, even after all of that work, am not wholly convinced in my own brain and in my own body that crying is an okay thing to do. And so the more as a parent that you can just keep repeating that message, you won't win entirely. Your child will receive other messages, I guarantee it.

But the more you can make sure that your message is consistent, he's going to continue hearing a message that gives life from the people in his life who matters most. Right. And so to the point at which I thought he was potentially embarrassing himself, as he grows older, we provide the safe environment for him to feel, but he's going to modify his behavior in public based on those cues. Yep. He's going to see those social cues. He'll get those cues from other people. He's going to find ways that he's going to have an experience where he cries a lot and someone's mean to him about it and he goes, oh, maybe I shouldn't do that again.

Right. That's helpful. But the more that your message can be one of tears are healthy and right, at least hopefully he will have that deeper well to draw on after he emerges from the crucible of adolescence from which none of us escape unscathed. Yeah. Right. Right. Hear that, Dan? Right, right. Hear that, Dan? This all makes a lot of sense. I mean, my dad was a big crier

and I remember him telling me, let it all hang down when I was crying. So I got the message at home that it was cool. It was my buddies who fucked me up. And that was of course the culture that fucked all of us up. I do see things kind of moving in a better direction and yet I think there are all sorts of noxious messages being sent, especially to boys. Ben and Bianca, was there something you were hoping to cover that we didn't get to?

No, I mean, I thought this was a great conversation that certainly could go on, but I don't have anything specific burning. I think leaving it on talking about what crying can instill in the next generation is a really beautiful place to wrap it. And one of the things that I love about crying is it is an invitation to not just transform ourselves but to collectively transform the world. That the more we are able to live with emotional honesty and vulnerability that invites connection and relationship, the more we are able to build the kind of resilient social systems that are exactly what we need for the kind of large-scale monumental change that we have ahead of us.

Our crises are pressing and they are not getting smaller. And the only way that we are going to be able to collectively build power and adapt to them is by being honest about what we are facing, how it sits in our bodies and our own inability as individual humans to overcome it. And crying can nurture that kind of gentleness in the self and invitation for community that is essential for a collective transformation. CB A. And I recommend that there's a book called The Beasting, pretty new book, probably going to win the Pilcher this year that I really enjoyed.

And there's a great scene in there where a, I think not coincidentally, a gay politician and out gay man who had endured a lot of homophobia gets up and talks about the dangers of climate change and how one of the key preconditions for dealing with this is going to be that we drop our masks and relate to each other honestly. And that seems to echo a lot of the things you're saying, Reverend. I hope so. Ben, can you remind everybody of the name of the book and whatever other stuff you're putting out into the world on the website or social media so that we can download it

all? out into the world on a website or social media so that we can download it all. Thank you. I'm bad at self-promotion. I have a book out. It's called Cry Baby, Cry, Baby, Why Our Tears Matter. You can find me on socials at Faithfully BP, although I am using them less frequently. But you can always drop me a line at my website, which is benjaminjperry.com. But you can always drop me a line at my website, which is benjaminjperry.com. Dr. Harris, Reverend Perry, thank you both for your time. It was great to talk to both of you. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Thank you, likewise. Thanks again to Reverend Benjamin Perry.

Really appreciate him coming on. Don't forget to go to my website danharris.com to sign up for the newsletter where I sum up my favorite learnings from every week's episode danharris.com. And before I go I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. We get additional pre-production support from my old friend Wan Bo Wu. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

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