The Synergy Game - A Journey From Death to Life

Chapter 11 - Release to Heal: The Essential Power of Crying, Screaming, and Shouting

This is my book The Synergy Game. I am serialising it here a chapter a week. Each chapter will be available for everyone to read because, after all, that’s why I’ve written it, to help others, to share what has helped me to rebuild my life.

Chapter 11 - Release to Heal: The Essential Power of Crying, Screaming, and Shouting

“But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.”

Hans Christian Andersen

I was driving home one chilly but sunny Sunday afternoon from a beautiful village about 30 minutes away.

It was my first time going out for a drink by myself since my breakup, and I had been to a local brewery where they have live music on a Sunday afternoon.

I sat there feeling so strange on my own amidst groups and couples. I toughed it out, trying to look like I was relaxed and enjoying it, but just holding it together and feeling like everyone was staring at me, the only single person there, like I had a huge flashing neon sign on my head.

The singer had a beautiful voice, but when she started to sing La Vie en Rose, it was too much. I went up and paid for my drink before running outside and bursting into tears. That had been one of our favourite songs.

I walked down the street sobbing and not caring what the people I passed thought, got in the car and started to drive home. I couldn't stop crying, and suddenly, it turned to absolute anger and rage, and I started shouting and screaming out all my hurt and pain. I was saying things I couldn't say in person but that my heart needed to get rid of.

I knew it wasn't safe to be driving, so I quickly pulled over and sat and shouted at the top of my lungs, screaming louder than I thought possible with a voice I didn't even recognise as my own. The sounds were raw and primitive and from a place I didn’t know existed. It seemed to go on for a long time but was probably only a few minutes. When it stopped, I was drained, and my throat hurt.

I drove home and sat curled up on the sofa with not an ounce of energy left even to make a cup of tea. I pulled a blanket over me and laid my head on the oversized cushion.

I thought about what had happened and how, if we let it, the body knows exactly what we need. When it needs to release emotions, it's so important for us to give ourselves the space to allow that to happen. I don't like to imagine what would be happening to my body if I had not allowed that to come out. I know it's right to allow this because the way I feel after is calm and peaceful and like a weight has been lifted.

We can all find a space to do this when we need to. Even if it's locking yourself in the bathroom and shouting and screaming into a pillow or inventing a trip to the supermarket so you can be alone in the car.

The body needs to release emotions, and we now know that not doing this and dealing with how we are feeling causes illness and disease, or more correctly, dis-ease.

I woke up one day with terrible lower back pain. I'm not someone who has ever suffered from a bad back, so this was not normal. I'd had a few bad days, sad days where I was just crying a lot and wondering how I would make a life for myself.

I sat on the sofa in a lot of pain and decided to look through some old photos. On our last wedding anniversary, the girls had made a beautiful gift for us of photos through the years of the four of us on our travels, enjoying life, being a family, all carefully pasted into a pale green leather-bound album that they’d had custom made. It was meant to be something to be treasured, and they had both worked hard on planning it all.

Looking back now I can see that it was a precious gift and that on the last wedding anniversary we had together, we were celebrating as a family, the four of us. Almost like it had come full circle and was a fitting end. Although I didn’t appreciate that until much later.

It just hit me we were no more. The beautiful family I had treasured and created was gone. I lay on the floor and cried, and the grief was so deep and painful, I could hardly breathe. I curled up into a ball and just lay there on my side crying so hard for all that I had lost, all that had vanished from my life.

After a while, I got myself together and sat back on the sofa. I took a few minutes to realise that my back pain was gone. Not just better but virtually gone. There was a twinge but nothing major. A few minutes earlier, I had been thinking there was something wrong, the pain was so bad, and that maybe I should go to the doctor.

That was another reminder of how powerful our emotions are, the mind-body connection. I had basically cured my pain by crying.

I had always had such a tight rein on my emotions. Growing up in an abusive household where I had to hide what was happening to me and where I was constantly reminded that how I acted and looked was a direct reflection on not only our family but on God and the religion we were a part of meant that I often hid how I was feeling. Emotions and honest talk were definitely not encouraged.

So obviously, when I became an adult, I saw no reason to change. I was always that person who was 'fine' or 'great thanks' even when I wasn't. I didn't let myself cry in movies because it felt silly, and it made my husband feel awkward.

However, once I started on my healing journey, I found out how important it was to feel the feelings to acknowledge my emotions. I started allowing myself to feel more.

The big breakthrough came when I went on a ten-day meditation course to develop psychic awareness. The course included twenty-five meditations over the ten days. I had no idea what I was in for. By day two, I told the lady running the course that I doubted that I would make it to day ten. In the meditations, we explored our fears, our limiting beliefs, our hurt, our pain and our anger.

I had never had to look so closely at myself before. I'd never had to think about how and why I felt the way I did about certain things, to confront the pain of my childhood, and my family relationships, my relationships with my daughters and the way I felt like I'd failed them in some ways, and my relationship with my husband which by then was on very wobbly ground.

In those ten days, I learned how to cry. I learned how to sit with my emotions, and feel them and release them. It was a life-changing ten days.

On the day after I'd finished it, my sister messaged to say our father had died. I didn't even know he was sick, and I had not had contact with him since I was twenty-nine over twenty years previously.

Now, that was a crazy set of emotions to deal with, and for the first time, I was on my own, not just physically because I was in Bangkok and my husband was in Phuket, but I no longer had his support. Even though we were still married and living together, he had become distant and uncaring, but before I’d had all the attention I could ever want from him.

So I cried in a confused way, not sure if I was sad because he'd died or sad because I wanted to be crying over a father who had died that I loved. I wanted to miss him; I wanted to feel that devastating loss, but I didn't. I just felt confused.

But now I cried. I had never thought before that crying was a gift but now, I do.

So, most times when I feel like crying, I do. There are times when I have to hold it in, but I let myself feel however I feel. My sister once said that she couldn't believe how well I was coping with everything after my marriage breakup, but I feel that it was because I was living alone and was able to do all the things I needed to let myself heal, one of the most important being that I could cry whenever I needed to.

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Previous Chapter - From Pen to Flames: Writing and Burning for Emotional Liberation

Next Chapter - Pathways to Peace: Embracing Forgiveness for Personal Freedom

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