Now, I realize what’s trivial to one person may not be trivial to another. But what do you do when a person starts crying because, say, they lost a contact lens and will have to wear glasses during their cruise? (This really happened to me once!)
Me? I’m a thinker. The last time I took the Myers-Briggs personality test, I had one feeling point. There’s very little you can do to me to make me cry in front of you. For some reason I see it as a sign of weakness. I’d rather cry in private, if I were going to cry at all. When someone cries around me, I have no clue what to do. Mind you, I’m not asking for advice here. I just get extremely uncomfortable around criers. When they start crying I just want to go away until they get themselves together. If I were to ever cry in front of someone who’s not my husband, I’d want them to leave until I could compose myself. I realize that some people won’t and they feel the need to comfort the other person. I guess I’m not like that.
If this happened to me, I’d probably walk away from that person. I can’t stand whiners and people who act like spoiled brats. But then I like http://www.heartless-bitches.com/
Yes!
I would like to differentiate types of crying. If a friend cries because he or she lost a relative or dog or such, that is totally acceptable to me. And I cry at funerals.
Actually, this was one of the odder things about becoming a massage therapist. See, people cry on the massage table all the freakin’ time. They also giggle, snort, and tell you waaaaay too much about their personal lives.
I try to take it as a compliment. It must mean the person trusts me; and the conversations tend to get odder as the massage progresses, and the client heads for sleepy-time. So they are indeed relaxing. Since I’m already touching them, the “comfort” cues don’t seem to apply. I just keep quiet and keep working.
Maybe it’s the people I know, but generally people don’t cry about trivial things unless there’s something else going on. I would instantly assume that the trivial thing they appear to be crying over was the thing that pushed them to the breaking point, and now they’re using it as a point for an outlet.
My husband will get absolutely livid about the stupidest things, but only when about 800 other reasons to get upset have happened to him, and he hasn’t acknowledged them. Real life example:
Mr. Bead: “This Coke is flat! I drive all the way over to Popeye’s to get Coke with my chicken and now I don’t even want to drink it! How hard to I have to work to get something to go my way? Everybody floats along getting exactly what they want and I can’t even get a drink to be what I asked for!”
Beadalin: “Uh, what’s going on? Did something happen?”
… and then I found out that he’d discovered that one of his employees was upset with him and bitching about it to everyone, and that someone had teased him about not owning a house, and another employee and cried twice that day, etc. Lots of stressful items causing a seemingly unrelated outburst, since he couldn’t blow off steam at work.
Anyway, depending on how well I know the crier, I either get them to talk it out, or offer them a hug, or just say (non-meanly), “I’ll give you some space” and walk away.
Usually when I’m talking to someone who just starts crying for no reason… I realize I should stop talking to myself!
I know it’s pathetic, but I cry for absolutely no reason at all fairly often - and it has nothing to do with monthly cycles, and I’ve never been pregnant. I’m just messed up!
Seawitch - Message releases emotional tension stored in the body. Message releases toxins stored in the body. More fundamentally; many people in western cultures are suffering from severe touch deprivation. I find it odd that you managed to become a message therapist without having heard this!
The crying is not strange or unusual, it is expected.
As an aside; aparently some people have a robotic tic that causes them to immediately exit a room when onions are poorly sliced? I wonder how you deal with leaving yourself; when the crying is so trivial… s
I agree with Beadalin on this issue - lifelong psychological torment on specific patterns can cause all of the variables within that pattern to trigger crying; even if the trigger is lurking slightly outside the perimeter of your awareness. example: The voice of a person who beat the crap out of you for a decade straight is talking in the backround; yet it’s not the same person.
I either crack a joke (unrelated to the incident at hand) or give a nice pat on the shoulder and a murmur of encouragement.
Seems like people who are already overstressed are the ones that crack for the slightest reason, around me anyway. It’s just an outlet. I really don’t see it as a sign of weakness.
I mean, come on man, it’s not really fair to talk about us…er, I mean them that way! Maybe those contacts meant a little bit more to me than you know…Life is so unfair! ::sniff sniff::I might as well stay home and read The Screwtape Letters again…I’ll never have a man…my daddy was riiiiggght…waaahhh…
I generally don’t cry over my own problems or things that are affecting me, because much like Juanitatech I see crying for myself as a sign of weakness.
I’ve always been able to cry at movies, or reading a book but then again that crying isn’t a “woe as me” cry, it’s an “I can empathize with X character’s feelings” cry. I’ve never had a problem expressing my empathy for others. I’ve noticed this so much more after September 11th. Ever since then I cry all the time. Something as simple as a song I’ve heard on the ride home from work, watching the news on tv, a sad commercial, reading a book. I saw a homeless man on the street after reading the Anyone ever been homeless thread and I cried all the way home. It’s like any little thing sets me off. I cry more easily now and it often stops as quickly as it starts.
My point is that I never really understood (and secretly lost a little respect for) people who cried at every little thing and now it seems I’ve become one of them.
What on earth would make you think I didn’t know this? Just because crying is expected doesn’t mean it isn’t strange or unusual - in fact, I think it’s all three.
I would consider crying over seemingly-trivial problems to be a clue that something else is going on, too. Maybe the person is overstressed or dealing with some tragedy in their lives, and this is just a trigger that makes them think of the problem or go over the edge.
At a particularly difficult time in my life, I became one of those people. (I rarely cry, I hate crying in public, and I will do anything to avoid it.) Weird things would set me off, and I would either try to get away or sit there trying not to let anyone know what was happening. This happened in class, in church, at picnics…
I haven’t seen many crying in public, let alone crying for a seemingly trival reason, but logically I would have to agree with those who have said most likely this person is otherwise “typical” and is having a really bad day/week/year. Beyond that, it’s certainly possible that some cry in public for reasons most of us would deem inappropriate, but I wonder how frequently this behavior would occur.
If I knew the person, I would probably approach him and quietly talk to him to try to see if there was any way I could help.
If I didn’t know the person, I have no idea what I would do. I hope I would do the right thing at the time and know what the right thing (including nothing) is.
