Crying Is Normal,
Most Of The Time
>
CINDY CAIN
Special to The Jewish News
D
on is afraid to walk his
daughter down the aisle
when she gets married.
The 50-year-old
Caterpillar Tractor Co. worker can't
even get the girl to go to a movie with
him.
They're not fighting. Don is crying.
Too much, he admits. And he doesn't
know why. He's afraid he'll weep
uncontrollably during his daughter's
walk to the altar. He can't even stay
composed during movies.
Don, not his real name, wasn't born
a crier. It started 10 years ago after he
had back surgery. Doctors say it isn't
>
caused by the medication he took then
or takes now for blood pressure. Don
can't explain it.
But it is a problem. He cries watch-
ing commercials and when he reads
books or even the newspaper.
"It's strange," he
said. "I'm a perfectly
rational person."
When you're living
life with a crier or as
a crier, it's no laugh-
ing matter.
One Joliet, Ill.,
mother knows first-
hand. Her heart
broke last year when
her 14-year-old son
wept on stage during
a music recital.
>
"My son sobbed
and sobbed and said he couldn't con-
tinue," said Lynn, a nurse.
The teen-ager had wept all night
before the competition because his
clarinet was broken and he had to
borrow his teacher's instrument. Even
learning to play the instrument was
traumatic. The boy cried night after
> Cl night when he couldn't perform per-
fectly.
Born criers have little or no control.
Tears bubble forth from their ducts
when they're angry, sad, frustrated - or
all of the above.
"We don't really know why some
people have a lower threshold for cry-
ing," said William Frey II, director of
Dry Eye and Tear Research Center in
<'D
St. Paul, Minn.
Studies on identical twins indicate
the threshold is not biological.
Personality tests also cannot predict
who will or will not be a crier.
Yet hormones and socialization may
Cindy Cain
Service.
writes for Copley News
play some role in who cries and who
doesn't because in general, women cry
more than men. The average woman
cries 5.3 times a month and the aver-
age man cries 1.4 times a month, Frey
said.
Yet averages can be misleading.
Some men report crying up to 10
times a month.
"And you'll find some women who
don't cry at all and some who cry
every single day," Frey said.
A recent study from the
Netherlands shows people who cry
easily tend to be low in a personality
variable called "emotional stability,"
said Randolph Cornelius, a psycholo-
gy professor at Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Emotional stability is an ability to
read a social situation and to know
when to "clamp down" on emotions,
he explained.
Without this ability, an individual
can spend a lifetime shedding tears.
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For instance, one 72-year-old
Romeoville, Ill., woman has cried easi-
ly since childhood.
"It could be anything," she said.
"Even if a teacher looked at me cross-
eyed."
As a kid, she cried when she was
teased about her Southern accent. As
an adult she has wept mostly during
family crises. But even a sad commer-
cial on television can cause her to start
sniffling.
"My emotions are sitting on top,"
she said. "With other people you have
to dig down for them. They're better
at hiding them."
Friends have hinted she shouldn't
still be crying over the loss of her hus-
band, who died a year ago. But she
can't help it.
"It's always been that way," she
said. "I have no idea why. Every day
it's a struggle."
Frey said there is no known way to
dry up a crier's tears. The best they
can do is learn to accept themselves.
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4/3
1998
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