I'll Give You Something To Cry About

A talk on childhood trauma, dealing with big feelings, and learning to be friends with your inner child again

For as long as I can I remember, I have struggled with intense emotions. Emotions ranging from the darkest depression to the reddest rage and everything in between. I have collected many unsolicited titles throughout my twenty-five years that, if you’re reading this, you might resonate with, reluctantly - cry baby, drama queen, the sensitive one, the list goes on. All titles carrying their own form of deformity, weakness, abnormality. For as long as I can remember, I have believed that something, from the very beginning, was inherently wrong with me. I have spent my life masking, hiding, pushing it all down, fighting myself, truly doing anything I can to be different, to be normal. Nearing my twenty-sixth spin around the sun this year, I want to live out loud, I want to live fully. I am tired of believing the lie that my relatives have sold to me. I am done being afraid of friends leaving because I am “too much.” I am committing myself to a life of experiences and I want to feel it all. I am writing this for myself and for all of the people out there who were too told that they take up entirely too much space, that they are dramatic, that they are abnormal or inherently wrong. I am abandoning the names that were branded on me and I hope after reading this, you’ll join me in this shedding of skin that was never fit for us.

For me, understanding my intense emotions means going back to my childhood and examining the environment that formed my near-constant struggle with feeling my feelings. Let’s take a visit to the world little Tess grew up in.

I am the youngest in my family, born “the baby” - they set me up for the struggle, huh? Growing up, I was told my attitude was unruly, untamable. I was introduced to any new person as Tess, the sensitive one. I was known as the family cry baby. I was, to anyone on the outside looking in, volatile. The generational trauma was hyper-present in my household, and still rots the roots of my family tree. Both of my parents lived through childhoods filled with neglect and they suffered from abusive parents who, undoubtedly, suffered from their abusive parents. In the words of Vonnegut, “so it goes.” The family mantra that was echoed throughout my upbringing was, “pain is weakness leaving the body.” This phrase was cemented into my brain. I have always been a crier and I have always put my heart on display for all to see. Hearing this sentiment throughout my most formative years was a constant reminder that I was weak, that there was something different about me compared to the rest of my relatives. I was also raised with the classic, “I’ll give you something to cry about” attitude. The idea that children cry or loudly express emotions just to manipulate parents, or that children are simply dramatic, are ideas I will never be able to understand, especially because they are just not true. These teachings led me to form core beliefs that my emotions were abnormal and they needed to be stopped, and if I couldn’t stop them from happening, I better shove them deep down where no one could see them. I was never validated for what I felt. I grew up shaming myself, comparing myself to others, and truly believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the whole of me. I would show emotion and get disciplined for it. I never quite understood what I ever did wrong as a child. I was taught that all my emotions were bad, negative, and that they needed to go away.

Reflecting on my childhood now, I realize my responses to the life I was born into were rational, expected for someone who grew up the way I did. I never did anything wrong - I was a child learning the world around me and should have been learning ways to address emotions in a safe, compassionate, gentle environment. Instead, I was a child attempting to express myself in an environment that dismissed emotions as dramatics, as a behavior to be corrected, as something to be beaten out of me. Unsurprisingly, it never could be. This just led to an adult who has no idea how to identify the emotions they are feeling, and has had to work through many therapy sessions to understand that everyone feels, some more deeply than others, and that there is nothing wrong with needing to feel out loud. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a negative emotion. I have now classified all emotions as comfortable and uncomfortable feelings.

Now, I think it is important to address my parents and give more perspective on generational trauma and how I hold my parents in my heart. Context matters.

My mother was raised by a raging alcoholic and a cold-hearted, neglectful mother. My mother did not come from a stable, compassionate, safe home. Throughout my mother’s life, she gathered few tools to use when it came time to raise her own children. My father was raised in a home with a neglectful, cold-hearted father and a mother who was struggling through intense mental health issues that were met with horrific “treatments,” as it was mid-twentieth century. A difference that I cast between my late mother and my father, who no longer holds space in my adult life, is that despite my mother’s upbringing, she tried to take accountability, was open about her struggles through her life, and absolutely tried her best with the few tools that she had. My father, while I hold deep empathy for the pain he has suffered, was never able to come to terms with the pain he caused his children. Parents are complex beings just as the rest of us are and they have their own stories of grief, pain, and sorrow. My parents had needs that were never met, and through those struggles, they failed to meet my needs. They tried and did not succeed. I am deeply angry with them and long for a life much different than the one I was born into, and I hold great love and compassion for the little kids that they once were, who desperately craved love that they never received. I am learning that I can hold both of these truths in my heart, that both realities can and do exist within my story. I have always said that grown ups are just broken children within adult bodies and if we don’t tend to those hurt children, we will hurt others along the way. My parents, one being gone and one being removed from my life, were and are broken children in desperate need of safety and I will always hold compassion for them in that respect. I now also hold compassion for little Tess, who missed out on receiving compassion and love from her parents.

It’s important for me to understand how Tess as an adult connects with little Tess. I hear sentiments like, “I wish I could give my younger self a hug” or “what I would give to talk with little me” and I urge folks to remember that your younger self is still you. We are not other or separate from our childhood, from our child form. Time has simply passed. Remembering this has helped me tremendously in healing my inner child. I really struggle with crying or the need to cry. I struggle with communicating my feelings, even to my closest people who I feel most safe around. I now understand this is because I struggle most with even identifying my feelings. According to my therapist, I am great at analyzing situations (this is a survival skill I adapted as a means to make it out of childhood alive), but I struggle to genuinely identify the feeling I am experiencing i.e. shame, guilt, anger, discomfort, etc.. This is because I was never able to express my feelings, let alone feel them. I was constantly running away from anything that arose within me. Today, I practice radical self love and acceptance. I now understand that due to the trauma I faced as a child, my threshold for overwhelm is much more narrow than say, my partners, who came from a very accepting, more gentle family than my own. When I was a kid and felt the urge to cry, I would run to my bedroom, push my face into a pillow, and squirm around in a fit of rage in order to suppress my emotions, shaming myself every step of the way. These days, when I feel myself becoming overwhelmed and feel the urge to cry, I hold myself in a tight, crossed-arms hug, and while crying, I say out loud, “you are allowed to cry, you have every right to be upset, you are safe and you won’t get in trouble for crying.” These are affirmations that mean most to me and make me feel validated and safe. If you are a person who struggles with expressing your emotions or allowing yourself to feel things, it’s really helped me to discover what it was that led me to that point of struggle, and reframing the situation into something helpful and non-shame based. Knowing that the child version of myself is still me, I’ve come to understand that nurturing her needs, listening to what she is telling me, and validating those needs is crucial to healing. For so long, I have pushed her away, I have ignored her needs, and I have shamed her the way my mother shamed me. Learning to be a friend to little Tess has truly transformed my relationship with emotions. Being the parent for myself that I always dreamed of having has healed me in ways I can’t ever begin to express, and has led me down a journey of radical self love and acceptance.

Another huge lesson I’ve learned in this life is people feel emotions, and feel them differently. My whole life, I’ve constantly compared myself to others and have made up false metrics of how I am supposed to live my life. Understanding my story, my context within this world, has helped me come to terms with the fact that when I feel joy, I am over the moon. When I feel sadness, it is all-consuming. When I feel anger, I am enraged. I experience this life intensely and wholly. The cool part about this - there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way I feel and how I choose to express these emotions. I have days where I feel “too much” and I have moments where I feel I am being “too dramatic” when responding to circumstances that elicit strong emotions. Gentle reminders to myself of my conditioning, practicing radical self love, and reciting those affirmations to myself, whether out loud or in my head has been such a profound help. I hope that when you are at your lowest low or highest high or anywhere in between those places, you remember that your feelings are valid and demand to be felt. I hope you feel them wholly and know you are safe within yourself and that you have a safe space with me, at the very least, to express them.

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with intense emotions. Beginning today, I revel in intense emotions. I weep and scream and wheeze laugh and smile with all of my teeth showing and wrinkles by my eyes. My philosophy on life is that we are the universe experiencing itself in human form. Humans are imperfect and beautifully flawed and so is every aspect of this existence. At the end of my journey here on this planet, all I wish to remember is how much I felt, how deeply I embraced it all, and what a privilege it was to have done so. I hope you hug yourself today, thinking of little you, who is running around in light up shoes inside your heart, and you remind them of where you are, how far you’ve come, that you love them through where they’ve been, and that you practice some radical self love and acceptance.

With all the love my body can muster and the biggest, warmest hug -

Tess