When you don’t allow yourself to express yourself through laughter and tears, the result can be physical pain, due to stress and a lack of passion for life.
Ron grew up in a home where laughter and tears were never expressed. Anger was the main sentiment expressed by his mother, while his father was mostly withdrawn. When Ron turned eight, he managed to suppress both laughter and tears to keep from feeling rejected by his father and controlled by his mother. Closing off was his way of protecting himself against the invasion of his controlling mother. He became a serious child, a controlled and controlling child.
Ron grew up, went to college, became a successful lawyer, married, and had three children. However, nothing, not even the deep love for his children, managed to break his rigid and controlling way of being.
Ron sought my help because he was not only very unhappy, but was often in physical pain. All he could say about the physical pain was that he hurt. “My body aches. My chest aches, my stomach aches, and my back aches.” A doctor examined him thoroughly and learned that nothing was physically wrong. The doctor told him that he was stressful.
Ron told me that he spent a lot of his free time daydreaming because when he was present with himself in the moment, all he felt was pain. He had learned to daydream to avoid pain.
However, Ron was now 48 years old and the reverie no longer worked well. The pain was breaking through, especially in the form of debilitating back pain, and Ron decided that he needed help.
The problem behind Ron’s pain was that his main intent in life was to control. He wanted to monitor how others felt about him, how well his employees worked, how his wife treated him, and how well his children did in school. He also wanted to control not feeling the pain of rejection and the fear of being swallowed up that he had felt so much in his family. He especially wanted control over not feeling the pain of her own abandonment of him.
Ron’s control had worked for him up to a point. He was financially successful. He had all the material things a person could want: a beautiful house, a vacation home, a boat, and all the electronic devices a person could use. He had a wonderful family and was in good health, apart from his pain. However, he often felt miserable and had no passion for life.
The problem Ron was facing was that being in control was much more important to him than being a loving person to himself and others. As a result, Ron felt empty inside and was constantly looking for others to fill him up. He had no interest in taking responsibility for his own feelings, his own pain and joy. He wanted others or things to fill him up and make him happy.
Imagine how a child would feel if you put them in a box and told them they can never laugh or cry. This is what was happening with Ron. His inner child, his own feeling, was in a box, he was not allowed to laugh or cry. Laughter and tears are our natural ways of expressing and releasing feelings. Without the God-given gifts of laughter and tears, our feelings get blocked inside, ultimately causing our muscles to go into painful spasms. This is what was causing Ron’s pain. He could no longer control his feelings without feeling physical pain.
It was an uphill battle for Ron. In those moments when he let go of control and opened his heart to love, the pain was gone. But his fear of being rejected or controlled was usually more powerful than his desire to love himself and others, and he closed off his fear. He feared that if he opened up to his feelings, he would be weak and seen as such, which he feared would lead to rejection, absorption, and being taken advantage of.
Ron wanted something he couldn’t have: the illusion of security that being so controlling gave him, without the physical pain of being so controlling.
After practicing the inner work, Ron finally saw that loving himself by allowing himself to experience his laughter and tears did not cause him the weakness, rejection and sinking he feared. In fact, by becoming more aware of his feelings and allowing himself to express them, Ron learned that he actually felt safer, more powerful, and much more alive and passionate about his life than when he was trying to control everything.
Laughter and tears are great gifts that allow us to express and release our feelings in healthy ways.
