Don’t Apologize to Your Therapist for Your Tears

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You may know this moment in therapy: You’re opening up and bravely allowing yourself to touch a potent feeling or reveal a part of your life you’ve never shared, and then you feel tears pooling in your eyes. Perhaps you allow them to fall down your cheeks, or you try to fight them back, only to have them stubbornly escape from your eyes regardless. What’s next? You might find that it actually feels better to cry; then again, maybe not. In either case, if you’ve ever felt the need to apologize to your therapist for crying in their presence, you’re certainly not alone in this. As a therapist, I’ve heard people say, “I’m sorry” for their tears innumerable times, and there’s not a single instance when I believed that apology was justified. Quite the opposite, when someone I'm working with cries in front of me, I feel grateful and moved. It’s a brave, healthy, and powerful thing for them to do, and I feel honored to join them in such a meaningful, deep, worthwhile place. Not only that, as a new study reveals, sometimes crying is linked with fruitful experiences in therapy.

In this study, a team of researchers repeated recent research that highlighted a connection between progress in therapy, a closer relationship with a therapist, a person's attachment style, and crying. They built upon this work by clarifying the relationship between these elements. More specifically, the researchers found a link between crying and a closer partnership with a therapist among people who felt calm, glad, or comforted, who felt empathy from their therapist, who felt seen, or who felt more able to achieve their aims in therapy after crying. After the investigators accounted for the role of a person’s partnership with their therapist, the results demonstrated a link between crying and therapeutic progress. This held true for people who felt calm or glad, felt seen by their therapist, thought their therapist met them with empathy or felt more capable of attaining their aspirations in therapy after they cried. The research team also found a connection between insecure attachment and a sense of unease with crying, regret about crying, a history of keeping what they were crying about to themselves, and feeling seen by their therapist after crying. After the researchers accounted for a person’s attachment style, even though tears in therapy were linked to feeling less therapeutic progress among people who regretted crying, for individuals who felt seen by their therapist after crying, their tears were connected to more advancement in therapy. In other words, as the research team pointed out, even though people with insecure attachment can feel more uneasy crying in therapy, they might also find that allowing tears to come is worthwhile.

The researchers were right to point out that the design of this study doesn’t make it possible to say whether crying literally causes productive changes in therapy. However, they are also correct in referencing other research that underscores the role of emotional experiences in therapy and in inviting therapists to walk alongside their clients in these moments and talk about them more deeply. I couldn’t agree more. If and when you cry, please try to remind yourself that it’s valid, important, and healthy. Your tears deserve the company of someone who cares about and respects you and who would never want you to apologize for being human.