I tend to cry a lot, or perhaps more accurately, I cry frequently. I remember coming to tears rather easily when I was a child, but then I didn’t cry as much during my adolescent years, maybe into my adulthood. Trying to figure out what it meant to be a man and an adult in the world may have limited my crying. I have had some very interesting experiences with tears, both mine and those of others over the years of my life, times I will discuss momentarily.

Men who cry

I am not the only person I know who cries. You might think, perhaps accurately, that women cry more than men, but this is not the whole story. In my work with men, especially in the recent days and years I find men crying in my office much more frequently than men tend to do in their daily lives, whether with their family, friends, school, or work. Allow me to tell you about some of these men, as the stories tell more about crying and what crying means than philosophical, psychological, or theological analyses might tell us. These men have come to realize the truth, psychological value, and relational value of crying and what it means in real life. (Of course, the names and identifying information of these individuals have been changed for purposes of privacy.)

• Brian is a man of about 40 who has made some major changes in his life, especially during the past few years. He came to me just after a hospitalization for treatment of anxiety and depression. He was also struggling to deal with a divorce, custody, job, school, and challenging children but had found an angel of a woman who has been the centerpiece of his recovery, maturity, and success. Most recently, he came to me after many months reporting on the success he had had in his pursuit of a professional degree, but then said that he needed to talk about the loss of the friendship of a man who had been his best friend and colleague in his former career of coaching softball. I won’t tell you the whole story behind the separation but to say that he realized that he hadn’t finished the grief associated with this loss, now more than a year old. Brian cried as he talked about his love for Sam, the betrayal of Sam, seemingly out of Sam’s immaturity, and the lasting effect his grief has had on him, something only now had he found the time to identify, much less address.

• Peter is a man beyond 60 who has had many successes in his life including his profession, his marriage, many friendships, a deep and abiding faith, and two girls whom he has raised with his wife. Not only has he done well in all of these areas of life, but he also came from a household where his sisters were molested, his father ran off with the neighbor woman, and he was left to be the man of the house, something by the way, he did quite well. I won’t discuss the consequences of this responsibility, which were the formation of Peter’s good character and work ethic, but perhaps also with deep scars from that period of life. Peter’s losses are myriad: he acquired a serious autoimmune disease that landed him unable to work despite his strong desire to work; his daughter abandoned the family a few years ago and came out as transgendered; his own siblings have not done well in life requiring him to be of assistance to them in adult life, and his siblings in-law have been equally challenging. While genuinely in love and in a stable marriage, he admits that his work ethic and rationality have suppressed his awareness and expression of his deeper feelings. As we talked about these losses, Peter came to tears. He was grieving for these many losses, but perhaps the largest of which was his daughter.

• Frank is a man of about 40 who, by his own report, “never been able to feel much,” i.e. particularly joy and sorrow, which are the two emotions that are a consequence of loving something or someone. The only identifiable emotion, or perhaps the predominant one, is the feeling of anxiety, which is, of course, fear-based. In his home of origin, he learned to protect himself from any feelings because his family had no room for such things, not unlike many families that I have heard of. He has struggled in work, partly because of his brilliance, which makes him smarter than everyone else, but perhaps also because of his difficulty feeling, displaying, and hearing feelings of joy and sadness. His professional life has been challenging because he hasn’t been able to find a fit for who he is and what a company might have to offer him. A short attempt at a personal business failed largely due to the results of the Covid epidemic. One of his sons has a serious autoimmune disease and was very challenging for many years until doctors finally made an accurate diagnosis. His marriage is tolerable, but somewhat because of his lack of expressed feelings, it is not much more than that. He had at least one serious depressive episode some time ago and “can’t afford to go down that road” because it almost ended his marriage. Today, Frank’s tears came as he realized that he had not given his children the privilege of having the necessary emotions of joy, sorrow, fear, and anger, much less help them mature in the feeling and expression of these emotions in life. Frank does not cry easily. He was grieving the loss of those years due to his own inability to feel, much less allow for feelings.

• Jack is a man of about 35 who is a bright college graduate but who has done nothing that was really right for him to do: not school, not friends, not work, and not girlfriend. We might say that he was also in the wrong family, and like many families, having “too much mother and not enough father.” Fathers (or father figures) ideally assist children to leave the safety of mother’s love and find their ways into the world where they will need to find their own safety. Jack never did that and remains riddled with anxiety, something that many men have under the anger, avoidance, and addictions they suffer. As a result of his felt inadequacy, he is inclined to complain about the world that is not like the mother that he had, and sadly still has as she indulges him. His crying was for a lost life, perhaps starting at about the time that he really needed father to assist him into the real world, but his losses are all of above: school, job, profession, friends, spouse, house, freedom, and ultimately a life where he can serve the world. He lives in the dreams of being a benign dictator of the world, but can’t seem to accept his lot in life, much less the need to move forward without the ultimate safety that infancy only provides. It was a mixed crying today, both of his losses together with a kind of resentment that the world has not given him the magic bullet.

• Isaac is now about 50, a man who has worked diligently in life to find, pursue, and succeed in his artistic profession, something few artists do. Coming from a father-absent family and an abusive mother, he found a way to trust himself only, take care of himself, and work hard, all of which he continues to do. Indeed, he fell into addictions and avoidances in his earlier life but has conquered those anomalies, but yet retains the very male-like tendency to get angry too easily. As we talked about his current dilemmas, which include some challenges in his art business and a constant amount of physical pain, it became obvious to everyone in the room (his wife was present) that he was facing the fact that he couldn’t “do it alone” anymore, and that “doing it with someone else” meant that he had to share his deeply held feelings of anxiety and anger about his childhood and the result of his not being able to grieve these events. His crying was a result of seeing that while he had done well in life all on his own, he couldn’t do the “second half of life” on his own.

• James is the youngest of the men I saw this week, now just about 30, and someone I have seen him off and on since  his mother didn’t know how to deal with his resistance to schoolwork. The “problem” with James was that he was brilliant and not motivated to elementary school being too elementary. He has had many losses, which led to a drug addiction and failure in the world of work, but  also including his most recent girlfriend. I had a hard time helping James find the tears of sadness for these losses.

Why do we cry?

Deb and I wrote our first book, The Positive Power of Sadness with sadness in mind, but more generically how central the emotion of sadness is in life. We often say, “If you love something, whether person, place, thing, or idea, you will lose this thing.” If I lose something, whatever it is, I need to grieve that loss, which usually means crying. Grief is not exclusively crying, but the crying that I see with men in my office, which comes with such resistance, is usually genuine and productive. Grief helps us “finish” the loss of what we have loved. We also say of loss, “Find it, face it, feel it, and finish it.” Importantly, you can’t really grieve alone because grief, especially profound grief, feels like a black hole from which you can’t seem to escape. But in truth, grief ends if it is felt and finished. Men crying in my office are often finding, facing, feeling, and finishing their losses.

It is important to note that not all crying is about sadness and grief. Notice when you come to tears, perhaps trying to hide them, when you watch a so-called “sad” movie? I always cry when we watch A Christmas Carol even though we watch this movie every Christmas season. Why are you crying then? Usually, you are crying out of joy when there is some kind of restoration, generosity, graciousness, or other form of love. In our Sadness book we discuss how joy and sorrow are evidence of love: have something you love, you feel joy; lose something you love, you feel sadness. We call these tears and the emotion associated with them “love problems.” You can see the men described above have all kinds of love problems, mostly of things, opportunities, people, and ideas that they have lost…or things that they yet have.

Why do men keep from crying?

As I have worked with men, almost exclusively, for nearly 60 years, I have seen many men, like those described above, who have struggled to cry, and more importantly struggled to grieve. I need not elaborate on the fact that the American culture does not allow, much less encourage men to grieve yet alone, simple state sad thoughts and feelings.  I have heard men repeat their fathers, coaches, and other authority figures words like, “Don’t cry or I’ll give you something cry about,” “Don’t be so foolish (when you are crying),” or just, “Get over it for goodness sake.” When I ask men, “Who taught you about emotions (among other things about life),” their nearly universal answer is, “No one.” Why is that? Does crying seem un-male-like?

I was not raised in such an environment, so I come to crying a lot easier. There is rarely a day that I don’t cry about something, often loss, and more often joy. I told one of my therapists once that “I felt like crying when I hear people’s stories (of grief and loss),” and asked him what I should do. His answer: “Cry.” So I did, the very next day as I heard a sad story. The response from my patient was this: “Why are you crying?” My answer: “Because I feel sad hearing your story.” His next response: “No one has every cried for me.” Sadness, in this case, sharing sadness with someone, is “a love problem,” not a weakness problem.

You can’t cry alone

Well, that’s not entirely true. Certainly, you need to cry alone sometimes, and should cry alone. My point is for the larger picture, particularly for the larger losses and joys in your life. All the men I noted above cried in my presence, and for the most part they don’t cry anywhere else. I do my best to provide a safe place for men to “find, face, feel, and finish” their feelings of sadness as well as a place for them to find the love that underlies all sadness and all joy. It is necessary for people (men, in my case) to be with someone when they enter what seems like a dark hole with no end in sight. Indeed, when we face deep sorrow, there is no end in sight. I can’t see the “end” as men are facing and finishing sadness, but I know it is there. They don’t know it’s there and need me around as a kind of safety net.

I am remined of a session with “Isaac” where he was talking about his abusive childhood. His wife was present as well. As he told of this abuse and neglect, both his wife and I came to tears. Not weeping, mind you, but just tears of love and compassion for a human being who was going through the emotional suffering, namely sadness, that he was not able to do when he was six, eight, or 12. Why were we crying? Because we felt safe in it; we were just listening and feeling with no fear of the dark hole. It often happens in my office that I am drawn to tears before the patient in front of me dares shed his own. I think this is part of the “safe place” that I try to provide for men. I often say to my client, “It is good for me to be with you at this time” or perhaps even, “It is good to cry with you.”

You don’t have to be with a therapist in order to “find and ultimately finish” sadness, but you do need someone who can listen, feel, and remain patient with you as you feel though your emotions. This is a person who knows his own feelings and is able to genuinely listen without advice, much less talk about his own feelings. The reason men cry in my office, often to their surprise by the way, is that I might just the first person who was able to genuinely hear their feelings. You might have to take a chance with a friend, possibly a family member, but be prepared to be disappointed.

Considerations

• Consider how often you cry. Consider also the times when your body and soul seem to want to cry? Note the “love problem” that you might have, i.e. you have something that you love or you have lost something that you have loved
• Note the anxiety that you have, perhaps daily, perhaps constantly. Note that when you sad, you do not feel anxiety. You cannot feel sadness and fear at the same time. Sadness, in fact, often eliminates fear because fear is of possible loss of something that you love.
• Talk to someone about this matter. See what they think…and feel. You might find some common experiences. Be careful whoever you choose
• Govern the expression of crying to safe places. Unfortunately for many men, there is no safe place. But it might be safe (and it should be safe) with your spouse, that special friend, and maybe one good relative.
• Cry in front of you kids: it’s good for them to see how a person faces “a love problem.”
• Remember that tears are evidence of “love problems,” which means that you feel joy (that you have something that you love)…and cry, or you feel sadness (that you have lost something that you love)…and cry.

Further reading

• Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2017). The positive power of sadness: how good grief prevents and cures anxiety, depression, and anger. (If you can’t get it at a reasonable price, contact us.)
• Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (20s21). I want to tell you how I feel.
• Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2025). Balls: men finding courage with words, work, wine, and work.
• Lutz, T. (1999). Crying: the natural and cultural history of tears.
• Midlandspsychological.com: blogs on love problems, sadness, and the lover temperament