.

i havent cried either since i was about 7 orso...
It was a coping mechanism (crying is bad, crying gets you beat up even worse) that turned itself against me i guess. You will cry when you're ready... We're not the only people that don't cry/didn't cry for a long time, trust me.
I didn't even cry when my brother died, that doesn't mean my world didn't crumble and fall in pieces that day. It doesn't mean i didn't cry.. just no tears.
And hey you can cry for other people that's a start!

I could not cry for years. I was numb. Now I cry at the drop of a hat.

Survivors will sometimes compartmentalize their brain. In order not to "feel" the distress of their past, they have shut off access to the emotional parts of the brain. They regain the ability to feel and cry as they proceed in therapy.

Puffer

Yerac - ditto for along time man!

Even after I was flooded with flashbacks of the abuse I didn't cry for years. I had flashbacks of awful, awful memories - horrible things but every memory and my processing of all the memories was completely void of emotion.

I have no idea what finally triggered it but about three years ago I had what I call an emotional flashback - for whatever reason all the emotions of what happened to me came flooding back - it was so overwhelming I literally fell to the floor and just started crying.

I agree with the other replies here - it will come and it's, in my experience, normal that the tears haven't come yet.

Heal well,

your pain is probably more than theirs, yerac.

is there a rule saying that shedding tears is the only way to physically recognize or acknowledge or combat the pain you feel? and bring peace?

i would say that the "inability to cry" at all -- never -- be it funeral, wedding, birth of child, watching bodies fall 100 stories and pop open on the ground on 9.11 as i did here in manhattan - whatever -- no tears would be a major problem in my view.

but you do cry you typed. so, what is the issue? what if we guys get more response out of -- something else? you know, taking up boxing....where that contact with a punching bag soothes our soul? karate? smashing pumpkins. did you try any of that? where are the rules? who says what is right for men? (i'll answer, not a damn soul alive today can say what is right for men.)

i write screenplays. so i'm forced to use "crying" as a tool that works for a movie given its a "cultural symbol" for reconciliation, cleansing, and change in a character. but that is not real.

i don't know where that symbolism of crying came from - but i find that in real life we are far more complex, and thus deserve and need more sophisticated tools to express our emotions. just my view.

I can't cry either. SSRIs have left me emotionally sterile.

I was the same way for awhile. I rarely ever cried, and when i did i felt disconnected from the emotions that brought it up, so it made it feel fake. Emotions are something that are a kept in our bodies and if you disconnected from a part of your body or your body entirely during the abuse to protect yourself, the way to really feel your emotions related to the abuse and cry your pain is to reconnect with your body. For me, that part of my body is my chest. That is where i feel the most numb and disconnected and times when i have been able to feel more connected with it, i feel more and have been able to cry.
God Bless,
Nick

.

Every time Clarence got his wings. About the only time i really cried. Make believe - about a man who finally gets to see that people really cared about him deeply. He didnt really have to die.


Even when my children were born the doctor commented how cool and collected i was. Still havent for my mother. Its the way it goes. I know i will someday, i am getting much better at just letting the emotion wash over me without trying to pre-program it. No longer rehearsing the lines i am going to say. That part has been really freeing. Turns out i can be funny, who knew.

After I regained the ability to cry, I went through a phase where tears came out of only one eye, my right eye. For instance in watching a sad movie.

No the tear ducts were'nt blocked. It was caused by dissociation between my eyes. The right eye expressed the emotions and the left eye was stoic. Funny? No, tearful!

Puffer

While contacting the grief that's all blocked and walled off is I think important, there are other ways of expressing it than crying. There's nothing wrong with that for men or women in the slightest, but it's a bit of a feminine mode. To sit around with others and cry over a loss.

Tom Golden wrote the book "Swallowed by a snake" about men grieving. And has a video on his web site. I relate to what he's saying a lot because I don't cry at all easily, and almost never in the presence of others. Partly that's because I was punished for being sad as a child but, too... I think our culture is pretty ambivalent about men crying. Tom talks about that too. Men are criticized for "not dealing with their feelings" but if a father, a man, bawls his head off people are afraid. OMG, he's loosing it! What's wrong with him!!! They fear he's somehow not reliable, or competent or damaged beyond repair.

Tom talks about rituals, and actions are important to men. Doing something in honor of something. I've started doing things like this. When my partners father died, he made an urn for his ashes that I think was really important to his grieving.

You might think about how you might create something symbolic for the younger parts of you. Like, an alter of gifts to the child you were. Talk to him about it. You could carry some of those things around with you to honor that part of you and what was lost then. And perhaps reclaim those parts in the process. It would make a great series of posts here too: all the little gifts you create for your little boy, teen, young man self.

I don't understand it either. The last time I cried was six years ago.

I recently found a picture of myself as a young boy aged at about the same time as I was starting to be abused and that did it for me, I cried for that little boy for hours. Hang in there man.

.