Rev. Benjamin Perry is Minister of Outreach and Media Strategy at Middle Church, and author of Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter, published by Broadleaf Books, May 2023.

An award-winning writer, his work focuses on the intersection of religion and politics. Their writing can be found in outlets like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, The Huffington Post, Sojourners, Bustle and Motherboard and he has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and NY1. They hold a degree in psychology from SUNY Geneseo and a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary.

He is married to Erin Mayer, they live in Maine with his brother and best friend. They are the editor of the Queer Faith photojournalism series, curator of an art exhibit by the same name, and a passionate advocate for building Church that lives into God’s blessed queerness. His two proudest achievements are skydiving with his grandmother and winning first prize in his seminary drag show.

Joe

Hello.Welcome to another episode of The Caring Instinct. Our guest this week was Benjamin Perry, who wrote a book called Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter.

Olga

Benjamin is an award winning writer and a minister at Middle Church, and the book is one of a kind really.

Joe

Yeah. There's nothing like it, is there?

Olga

Yes. A book about why our tears matter. And this is what the conversation is about. He's brilliant.

Joe

So it's the other side of the coin to the stiff upper lip, isn't it?

Olga

Yes. Have you started the exercise yet?

Joe

No.

Olga

I have.

Joe

Have you?

Olga

I have.

Joe

How did it go? Don't tell anyone yet. Wait till the end. Well, we hope you enjoy, and we'll see you at the end. I thought we'd start off with a quote from one of our teachers, Gordon Neufeld.

Joe

"The world will be saved by an ocean of tears." "The world will be saved by an ocean of tears."

Benjamin

I love that.

Joe

Yeah. Tell us about your book. We've got it here all about tears.

Benjamin

Cry baby, how I'm gonna save the world.

Joe

A bit more pressure for you.

Benjamin

Exactly. So, my book is called Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter. And it is a book that starts off in my own journey as somebody who didn't cry for more than a decade, chronicling how I learned how to cry again, but more importantly, how I learned how to feel again. And then from there, it goes into the science of crying, physiology to psychology, crying in literature. All to say, if crying is this deeply embedded part of our humanness, if it's psychologically and physiologically beneficial, if it's linked intrinsically to transformation in our sacred myths and in poets' minds and in our core stories, why don't we do it more?

Benjamin

And so then the middle chunk of the book goes over all the different social forces that keep people from crying openly. And then the last third asks, if you could get rid of all of that, what would a world shaped by more open weeping look like? And it's interesting that you jokingly frame as an ocean of tears being able to save the world. Because one of the things that I say at the very end, spoiler alert, is that, you know, I've gone through this whole book about all these reasons why I think crying is so essential and so important. So then I sort of rhetorically frame the question, can crying save the world?

Benjamin

And my answer is, no, of course not. Like crying is crying. It's one thing, but I earnestly believe that it can help. I think that it can help people feel more at home in their own bodies. I think it can help uproot some of the toxic masculinity which has such a stranglehold on our culture.

Benjamin

It can help people see through the kinds of racism that masquerade as care. It can help us understand in a really core way who we are and what we want and how we can collectively transform to get there. And so even if it's not the silver bullet, if it can help, we should really be doing it more, because we need all the help we can get.

Olga

In our language and culturally, there's so much that points to why tears don't matter. There's no use crying over spilt milk and all that. So why do tears matter?

Benjamin

That's a great question. Someone wrote a really good book about it. So there's a few reasons why I think tears matter on a purely physiological basis. One of the things that's fascinating to me about tears is that tears connect us to one another. That's one of the findings they've shown again and again.

Benjamin

When people do research where they show people faces that are not crying, and then they digitally add tears to those same faces, what they find is that when people see someone else crying, they feel more tender towards them. They want to help them. They feel connected to them in a way that they didn't when they weren't crying. And I think this really has an evolutionary basis, and most evolutionary psychologists will suggest this, that in the evolutionary environment, when we were developing and developing the capacity for tears, tears served as this really beautiful way to solicit assistance. Silently, a child could be crying without making a noise, and the parent could understand that the child needed help if there was a predator nearby, but also just in a more mundane, quotidian way.

Benjamin

Crying actually facilitates bonds outside of our immediate kinship structures. And that's one of the things that really makes humans, if not unique, at least it's one of the hallmark attributes of human culture, is this willingness to help people who we are not biologically related to, who we do not have a genetic reason to want their genes to survive. We still want to help them because we understand that our flourishing is interconnected. And crying is one of those things that people point to that reliably facilitates this kind of connection. And I think particularly right now, when so many people are feeling isolated and alone, certainly through the pandemic.

Benjamin

But I think this, you know, these forces of solitude and alienation predated that. When so many people feel this way, we desperately need to embrace the parts of ourselves that are going to solicit connection from a wider world I think that a lot of, you know, we can sort of dive into. I can get very sociological very quickly and get far away from crying. But, you know, a lot of the different cultural patterns we have, social media, you know, workplaces where we are discouraged from really interacting and forming bonds with the people we work with because we're supposed to be, you know, doing the work.

Benjamin

These capitalist forces, like, there are so many things that are pushing us away from one another that having this innate physiological process that actually brings us closer together. What a remarkable gift. And I think, honestly, that when people discourage crying, historically, I actually think it comes from a place, because people recognize that capacity for connection and want to discourage it, because there are people who benefit from keeping us apart.

Joe

That was a question that comes up for me, is, where do we take a wrong turn away from tears in society or growing up? We work with children and work with a lot of parents, and it's really common to hear they get really frustrated with tears, or they think they're doing a good job if their child's not crying. They think, I'm a great parent, you know, my child's not cried for a month or ...

Benjamin

Barely makes any noise at all.

Joe

Yeah, yeah. Where do we, in your eyes, where do we maybe make a wrong turn away from them?

Benjamin

The thing that you have mentioned, rightfully, is that tears are disruptive. That is really true. That when somebody starts wailing, be it a child or anybody else, everybody else takes notice. It really commands attention. And obviously, that can.

Benjamin

Particularly for someone like a parent or a caregiver who is constantly taking care of a child and has to repeatedly disrupt whatever they're doing to attend to the cries. It can be frustrating, obviously, but I think that same quality of tears as disruptive is also one of their really beautiful characteristics. I think that we in an adult culture, instead of, you know, taking it away from the child who's crying, but, you know, looking at it in an adult society, we desperately need more disruption. We've gotten far too numb to this. This crushing nihilism that has become, or cynicism that has just become typical of the way that we oftentimes relate to a social system that many of us feel is crushing us.

Benjamin

A lot of people feel every day like they are living in systems beyond their power to change. And it's easier to make snide jokes or to joke about like, oh, I bought too many avocado toasts, I'll never get a house. Then contend with the fact that we live in social situations where that it placed home ownership beyond most people's financial capacity. And I think crying is an admission of the pain of living in these kinds of systems. And when we admit the pain we are suffering, it invites other people to realize, oh, I've been experiencing that pain as well.

Benjamin

And again, I think this is why people would like us not to cry. Especially, you know, adults are told that, you know, tears are weak, that they are not appropriate, particularly in professional contexts. Like, who does that benefit? It benefits the people who have constructed these professional contexts and don't want them to be disrupted. In my chapter on femininity in tears, I write about my wife, who worked at a women's media website that was this big startup, and their whole mission was, we're going to change the way that people consume news.

Benjamin

We're going to uproot patriarchy in the media room. And yet, when I was interviewing all these folks she worked with, the workplace was so horrendously abusive in their expectations for people's productivity that everybody reported crying all the time. But all of them did it privately. There was like a staircase in the office that was known as, like, that's the place you go to cry. Like, that's the crying staircase.

Benjamin

And sometimes you would get there and someone would already be crying in your crying spot. And so then you'd have to go find a backup crying spot because your one was taken. But imagine if all of those people were just erupting into tears at their desk. People would have looked around and said, oh, my God, we are working in a horrendously abusive environment that is making everybody feel like they're just this side of a breakdown. But if you cry privately, if everybody is crying privately, it lets people think, oh, it's actually me.

Benjamin

I can't keep up. Look at all these other people who have it together, who are somehow able to make the number of articles they're supposed to write per day. It was like 20 articles a day, wildly ridiculous workload expectations. And folks are looking around saying, well, everybody else seems to be doing it all right. It must be me.

Benjamin

It must be my own weakness that is making me cry. And again, who does that benefit? It benefits the boss. It benefits the person who is now getting 20 articles a day out of all these people and all that ad revenue off of their emotional distress without any of them realizing how much potential solidarity there was all around them. And it's interesting, after they laid off, like, a whole bunch of that first wave of workers, the next wave of people who came in unionized and there was a big union fight in the office.

Benjamin

And it's interesting to watch. I think more and more people are wising up that this model of sort of individual capitalism, all of us out for ourselves, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, of which not crying is such an integral part. Like, that's part of that mythos. People are realizing that this is a lie and looking for something better. Yes.

Olga

And then it's a feedback loop. It's a place where it's not safe to cry. So we don't cry there, and we make it a place where it's not safe to cry. I thought when you said crying is a social signal for people to come to the person who's crying and to help and to show empathy, who would not do that? Because some people would double down, would make fun of the tears. A bully, right?

Benjamin

Yeah.

Olga

And we've basically constructed our world around bullying.

Benjamin

Yeah.

Olga

Around not becoming the target of bullying.

Benjamin

Yeah. That if you can be strong enough, then the bully will go after somebody else. And I think, you know, going back to what we were talking about, raising children, it's one of the reasons why so many parents will tell their kids not to cry. I interviewed lots of people for the book because I wanted it to contain far more perspectives than the ones that I carry in my own body. I spoke to a number of different children of first generation immigrants, and they were talking about the way that they felt that their parents had discouraged them to cry was even though now, as an adult, they're trying to unlearn that and develop this capacity that they felt was really extinguished during their childhood.

Benjamin

Looking back, they still understand their parents admonition not to cry as a sign of love, that it wasn't their parents trying to be mean or awful or, you know, emotionally damage them. It was the fact that their parents had lived the kind of lives where they were never afforded the ability to cry. They didn't have that space, that those emotional resources. They lived in a world that had treated them pretty relentlessly and had never given them that kind of space. And so they said, well, I want my child to be tough enough to be able to survive this kind of world.

Benjamin

And a lot of them now, as adults are saying, what I want for my children is a different kind of world. I don't want to just raise another generation that's able to just suck it up and take it and succeed in an abusive environment. I want something different. One of the other interviews that I loved from the book was this interview with this pediatric neurologist who specifically focused on how children learn ethics. That's her whole field is, you know, what is the link between neurology and the development of internal moral systems?

Benjamin

And one of the things that she pointed to was that when you tell particularly very young children, because there's, you know, and she was talking about how she'll get letters from, you know, parents of kids as young as, like, six months who they've been like, oh, someone's telling me I should really let my kid cry it out, that I shouldn't soothe the child when they're crying. Is that just going to reinforce the child's propensity for tears? And we're going to be back here again. And she said that when you do that, you train your child to understand that when they are suffering in the world, help is not necessarily coming. And it really changes the way that people and you see these results.

Benjamin

Even as young as one year or two years old, the sensitivity to threat is so much higher. The belief that aid is forthcoming has been fundamentally undermined and that those kinds of dispositions carry forward into adulthood. And I think there are so many people who are going around with this heightened sense of threat, this sense of there is not enough these philosophies and ethics of scarcity that are in many ways trained in us from a very young age when we are not sure that if we need help from the world, that it will be forthcoming, that there might not be enough care to go round.

Joe

To go back to what you told me before, that's almost perfect for the bosses in our society where we're primed to work, get on with a job, and not have your tears.

Benjamin

Yeah. And you're also primed to be sensitive to, you know, somebody else is coming. To take my job. Like the sort of nativism and anti immigrant fervor that people say, like so much of that is, is predisposed in this sort of heightened sense of threat, of if they come here and have a life, then there's not going to be enough for me. And I do think, actually, that crying helps to break down some of those ways that we have been acculturated, that if we can admit our own vulnerability, it actually, in a paradoxical way, short circuits those loops of threat and scarcity, because when we are vulnerable, oftentimes what happens is other people help us.

Benjamin

It's amazing. I recently had, because I live in rural Maine, I had to stack four cords of wood, which is a lot of wood. If you're not a cord of wood person. Much wood. And it was going to be like a brutal, brutal day.

Benjamin

And I was, like, just dreading it. And I, like, shot a text to a friend and I was like, hey, I don't know if you, like, you're doing anything. I just really need help. Like, I can't do this all by myself. And they were so happy to come over, and we had this beautiful day stacking wood together.

Benjamin

And then I made them dinner and came from that place of admitting that I was vulnerable, that I didn't have the ability to do it all by myself, that seeded this beautiful social interaction, that now, you know, when he needs help with something, he's probably gonna ask me, like, those kinds, that kind of vulnerability, if it becomes an ethic, it inspires generosity from the world. And we realize that we have, we live in so much abundance, and if we just shared it better, all of us could be flourishing, all of us could be thriving.

Joe

Would you have been able to ask for help, do you imagine, if it was back in the time when you'd lost your tears, you hadn't found them again?

Benjamin

I really don't think I would have that time period between, you know, when I was probably about twelve years old and when I was 22, I just deadened myself to the world. And some of that was a lot of particular things that I was going through. Me coming to terms with my queerness, my discomfort, and my own masculinity. Like, there were all these things that I just couldn't deal with that I was developing awareness of, but didn't have the emotional tools to really process for myself. And so, and particularly, you know, growing up in the nineties been so much lovely homophobia and other delightfulness, it was easier to just shut off those parts of myself.

Benjamin

But the thing about, you know, emotional suppression is you can't just be like, I'm gonna shut off these emotions, but not all the other ones.

Joe

They all go down.

Benjamin

Exactly. Like, you just deaden everything and you alienate yourself, yourself from yourself. By the time that I was in my early twenties, I really didn't feel much beyond, you know, I could say, oh, I'm feeling happy or I'm feeling sad, but I just. It was simulacra of each emotion. You know, in the book, I use Plato's allegory of the cave, you know, watching shadows dance on the walls of my heart and making myself believe that they were real, but it wasn't any kind of genuine emotion.

Benjamin

And when you live like that, it really does cut yourself off from other people. And I see so many older men who don't have friends. This is born out in the statistics and research too, that there are all of these, these men in their seventies and eighties who not only do they not have friends now, but they have never had really friends for much of their adult lives. And it's because they are not willing to open themselves up emotionally to the world at all. And I'm not trying to blame folks.

Benjamin

I think so many people like this is something that has developed because they have been acculturated, particular kind of way. It's not natural, it's not innate, and it's not their fault. And yet we need to recognize the kind of damage that has been done to generations of people and acknowledge the ways that so many of us also carry those scars and start to do that work, to uproot it. Because if we don't do it, we are just going to pass it down to the next generation. We are in the same old mess again.

Olga

There's this bit of research by Brene Brown that just blew my mind. It's about trust. So the question was, what makes you trust a person? One of the sources of trust is they approach you for help. It's not about this is someone who you would go for help, but they actually come to you and ask for help, which for so many people is so hard.

Benjamin

And I think a huge part of why I think crying is so important because in order to admit to somebody else that you need help, you actually have to admit it to yourself too. Like, that's the first step. Like, it's really hard to go to somebody else and say, hey, I need help with this. I can't do it by myself. I think it's almost harder to admit to ourselves that we're not totally self sufficient.

Benjamin

I think that actually is the rate limiting factor for so many people, because once you admit it to yourself, then it becomes, okay, what can I do? And you're like, oh, well, I have, look at this. Look at my family, look at my social connections, look at all these resources that I had at my disposal. And I wasn't, you know, actively tapping into because I was operating under this delusion that I was just going to be able to make it through life by myself. Or in the case of like a couple, you know, as a two person autonomous unit.

Benjamin

Like, I think so many of us become convinced that that is the only way to move through life. When none of that's true for none of us. Nobody has ever been self sufficient. That is a wild and outrageous lie. Certainly we can, you know, develop resiliency, we can bring things to the table, but all of us, every single one of us, need our social connections, our families, our friends, our communities, if we are actually going to be able to thrive.

Benjamin

And the people who pretend that they made it by themselves, on their own, are the people who are exploiting a whole bunch of folks whose labor they are not recognizing like that. That is the universal truth. If you see somebody who is flourishing in the world and they say, I got here by myself, they are not acknowledging all of the people that helped them get there, 100% guaranteed. And so I think that crying really helps us get to that point where we can admit to ourselves, I need help, I need help. I can't do it by myself.

Benjamin

And it's not a bad thing, it's not a failure, it's not a weakness. It's just what it means to be human.

Joe

That's the dynamic I think we see with parents as well. The parent that doesn't allow a child's tears, in my experience, quite often hasn't found their own tears themselves for whatever's happening. And like you said, if we can help them get there, then they can be open to their child's and things just soften up then for everyone.

Benjamin

Yeah, and I'm not a parent, so I try really hard to not, you know, do too much armchair psychoanalysis of. How parents go through life. But I do think part of what I see in parents that discourage crying is also a resistance to opening and acknowledging that. That collectively things are hard. If the child is crying and the child is having an emotionally hard time.

Benjamin

With whatever is happening, the parent has to bring emotional resources to that situation that they wouldn't have to bring if everything was fine. Fine. Capital f. And so if you don't have the kind of emotional resources, as you're saying, if you're not in touch with your own emotionality, if you're not able to access the feeling parts of yourself, then damn it, you really better hope that everything's fine all the time, because otherwise you're not going to be able to provide care for this child who you really do genuinely care about. And so rather to sort of look.

Benjamin

At it from an empathic place, I don't think it's this parent saying, like, oh, I want, like, what a weak, awful child I have. It's the parent honestly not having the resources to be able to really navigate the situation and just saying, I want you to be fine, because I want you to be okay. Not recognizing that, to demand being okay when the child is not actually doing well is a kind of emotional violence.

Olga

I think another source of the loss of tears, apart from priming our kids and ourselves for the world of bullies, is happiness, actually, or the pursuit of happiness. Before I had kids, I vowed that when I do have, when I do become a mother, my children won't cry.

Joe

Did you?

Olga

I worked with children. Yes, I worked with children. I cared about them deeply, and I wanted them to be happy. And I vowed that my kids won't cry. They'll be happy.

Olga

Now I realize that to be happy, they have to cry. And it's easy for my two year old, but with my eight year old, he's already at school. He's a boy, which matters here. So all these ideas are starting to seep in, that he needs to be tough and all that. And when he does have proper tears, those tears of futility, those sad tears, as opposed to angry tears or hurt tears, and when he brings them to me, I'm honored.

Olga

And I know that this is resilience.

Benjamin

And I'm so glad that he has a mother who's willing to hold that for him. You know, I think that's really beautiful, a beautiful spirit space that you've created. With your son, and that's not enough, because I was also really blessed to have a mother who made space for my tears and held them. And I grew up in a culture that, outside of my home, wasn't like that. And so there's only so much that you can do as a parent to overcome these huge socializing forces that your child receives at school and out in the world.

Benjamin

It's really beautiful the ways that parents can try to create that kind of sanctuary. And yet, until we change the overall container, you know, you're pushing the rock uphill.

Olga

Absolutely. I do remember I asked Joe, because I grew up in Ukraine and Joe grew up in England, and he isn't aware of that. But when I was a teenager, there was this whole emo movement that became a youth subculture. Do you remember that?

Benjamin

Sure do.

Olga

They were the kids who said, we will own our tears. I will cry them.

Benjamin

I was a punk kid, and so there was always, like, tension between the punk kids and the emo kids. The music was very similar, but one was sad and one was angry.

Olga

Yes.

Benjamin

And both groups were like, ah, those other people. Just that, like, navigating pain in different ways.

Olga

Because it's not ingrained in the culture anymore to own it, people had to basically become a subculture and be different with everything that that entails.

Benjamin

Yeah, and wild. But that's like a reactive subculture of being like, you know what? I am gonna own my emotions. Not only am I gonna not hide them, but I'm gonna wear them with pride. You know, I remember emo kids who would do their.

Benjamin

Their eyeliner, their mascara, in a way. That, like, you would see, like, the tears or whatever. Like, you know, you would have these, like, girls walking around with, like, these, like, clear evidence of crying as this reaction to a world that had made them cry. And I think that's really beautiful. It's a little silly, but so are so many beautiful things.

Benjamin

So there are so many things that are. That are powerful and honest reactions to the world. You know, I think a lot of the reaction to emo kids were like, oh, that's so cringe. I don't know if y'all use that word across the pond, but, you know, like that. I think that was sort of the reaction to a lot of emo kids.

Benjamin

And what I think that sort of revulsion is, is, in its own way, a tacit acknowledgement that there is something that they are doing that is making me uncomfortable. And I think that discomfort comes from people not being in a place where they can acknowledge their own emotions. That's when you point to somebody else who's being really emotional and saying, oh, my God, they're histrionic. They can't handle the world. When even if that person, like, that's a well formed and healthy, you know, emotional relationship that keeps them centered and keeps them in their own bodies, I think that sort of skepticism and revulsion by other people testifies to a lot of the numbness that so many people are carrying around.

Benjamin

And you're right before, you know, about that link between happiness and crying, because that was what happened to me when I stopped crying. You know, it was because I was worried about being perceived as gay or effeminate or, you know, weak. And so whenever I would start to feel sad or feel like I had to cry, I would tamp that motion down so I could cry in a private place, right? You know, wait to cry in my room. And then eventually, I got really good at it.

Benjamin

And so then I didn't need to. Cry later at all. I could really just suppress it in the moment, and I wouldn't cry. And what happens if you do that over and over again for years is you just develop this instinctive reaction to feeling, you know, that operates through suppression and that, again, doesn't. You can't just target the sad feelings.

Benjamin

It's not the way that emotional suppression works. And so all of a sudden, you. Know, like, I go and have fun. With my friends and things, but I wasn't feeling joyful. I was just, you know, feeling, like, happy.

Olga

Oh, tell us more, please. It sounds like you're really agile with emotional expression and suppression.

Benjamin

Yeah, I mean, I think part of this is, you know, I'm a minister by vocation, and so a lot of my professional life since, and I relearned how to cry in seminary. So it was this period of really intense spiritual discernment that coincided with a rebirth and the ability to feel again. But then right after that, what I did is I started on a professional career, which in many places, requires me to be really attentive to my own emotions. When you're providing care to somebody, it's important that you're not bringing in outside things that you're feeling into this. This moment of emotional care.

Benjamin

So, like, for example, I used to work as a hospital chaplain, and so I would be meeting with all of these different patients, and I might leave a room where a patient was dying, and I would have had, you know, this 30, 45 minutes of sitting with them and praying with them and caring for them, as in this moment before death. And then I would go immediately to a different room where a patient was totally fine and in there for a routine procedure. And I remember one time I had a transition like that, and I was talking to the next person, and they were like, "Why are you? Did the doctors tell you something? Why are you talking to me like I'm dying?"

Benjamin

And I realized it was because I had brought this other stuff into this room with me. And so you have to get really good at, you know, what am I feeling? How am I feeling it before you go into a care moment? But I think that that kind of emotional awareness training, while it, you know, is professionally essential for me, it's good and useful and leads to just a more rich and robust life for all people. The more that we are able to really be aware of, what are we feeling?

Benjamin

Having an emotional vocabulary. I remember I was doing an interview with somebody about crying, who, you know, who had not cried in decades and was in therapy, and they were talking about their therapist needing to work with them to create an emotional vocabulary, because that was actually at the point where they were, where they didn't even have words to be able to describe what a feeling might feel like. Not only were they not feeling the thing. They just didn't even have really words to describe emotions in general. And so they were trying to develop a larger emotional vocabulary so that they could be more attentive to some of the smaller details and how they're feeling.

Benjamin

And I think to loop it back to crying, I think crying is this really powerful way of being attentive to what we are experiencing and to the fullness and opening ourselves to the fullness of it. I think that's why so many people suppress tears, is because it can feel overwhelming. To really feel all of what we are feeling in its fullness, in its complexity. Oftentimes, I am holding multiple emotions at the same time. All of that can feel really overwhelming to the point where we start to weep.

Benjamin

But if we let ourselves get there and we let ourselves sit there and not rush ourselves to, again, this seductive normalcy, we actually uncover things about who we are, about our relationship with the world, these emotional truths. That's why I think so many people link crying and transformation. Why so many people have these epiphanies after a bout of intense weeping. It's not because there's something intrinsic about the weeping that magically unlocks these things. It's that you are opening yourself to the fullness of all the things that you have been suppressing. And that acknowledgement and interaction with the sum total of what you are experiencing allows you to get to a point where you make that hard decision that you've been putting off for so long.

Olga

How does one start crying if they stopped?

Joe

Yeah, that's my question as well. It's like, how do we bring people to their tears? Maybe it's children. Maybe it's the most defended. Maybe it's someone who's quite open, but they've never just, they've not got there.

Olga

I'm just asking for a friend.

Benjamin

Yeah, exactly. Per rumor, somebody. Somebody has a hard time. It's interesting. I don't know why I wasn't expecting this, but that this is the question that I get all the time from so many different people that I wasn't expecting when I wrote the book.

Benjamin

So I also get a lot of people who will share, oh, my God, I had this beautiful experience of weeping. And this is what, you know, this is how crying has been so important to me. I was expecting all of those responses, but I was not ready for just the sea of people who would reach out to me saying, I can't cry. And I really want to. Like, that has been the heartbreaking reaction that I've gotten so many times that, you know, as somebody who lived that probably I should have been more prepared for.

Benjamin

But it was just really overwhelming to hear how many people, for how many people. That is true. What I tell them, and what I'll tell you is, is that I think getting to cry, like, how do I start crying again is the wrong question. The question is, how do I start feeling again? Because if you feel enough and feel intentionally, you will get to the point where you will cry.

Benjamin

Like, it will just happen. Crying is a thing that happens when we feel intensely. Like, that's just true. That's where it comes from. And so if you can get to the point where you are feeling intensely again, the tears will unlock.

Benjamin

So, for me, how I started crying again was I embarked on this bizarre spiritual experiment where I made myself cry every day for, like, six months. And so the first time was really, really hard. I had not cried in, like, a decade. And I did everything I could possibly think of. So I watched sad movies and I listened to music, and I watched silly social YouTube videos of dogs reuniting with owners.

Benjamin

I was just trying to. Just going through Rolodex of anything that might make me cry. And eventually I ended up thinking about what would I say to my parents if they were dying and what was left unsaid in that moment. Because at that point, I hadn't come out to them. There was so much that I had not told them in that particular moment.

Benjamin

And so that was what it took in order to really feel enough that I started to cry again. When I cried for that first time, I just broke down and wept for what felt like forever. And then I felt really, really great. And so I think, more than anything, that's why I started to do this thing where I would go home at the end of the day and just try to make myself feel enough that I would cry again is because over the course of weeks and months, I just started feeling great and like a different, like a better, more full version of myself. So I could label it in hindsight as like, oh, look at this.

Benjamin

This thing I did, you know, what a beautiful, like, disciplined, you know, meditation or something. But it really was because at the time, just because when I made myself cry, I actually felt alive in a way that I had not felt in a very long time. That, to be totally clear, is a wild and hugely unrealistic approach for most people. Like, I was a seminary student. I basically had nothing to do all day but read books and go to class and conduct weird experiments on my psyche for, like, lots of people in the world with jobs and kids, and you don't have hours a day to sit and just try to really make yourself feel again.

Benjamin

But I think that there are ways that all of us can be a little bit more attentive. And so I think it becomes if you start to have a feeling, rather than being like, this is not a convenient time to have that feeling, explore it. Feelings rarely come at a convenient time. We start to get really sad and you're like, oh, crap, I have work to do. I have to go start my day.

Benjamin

What happens if instead, you just sat with that feeling, even if you're not going to, like, sit with it for an hour? What if you sat with it for five minutes and just really focused on what it is that I'm feeling? And what does that make me notice about myself? Where does it sit in my body? How does it affect my breath?

Benjamin

These kinds of somatic questions and sort of leaning in there. I think what you'll notice if you continue to be attentive to your emotions in that kind of daily quotidian way, is that you will just start to feel more regularly. Whereas you might have only really caught a feeling once or twice a day. Maybe now throughout the day, you're going to notice, oh, I'm feeling happy. And not because there's something in my life that's particularly inciting joy.

Benjamin

I just am happy. And you start to really feel, oh, wow, that feels light in my chest. I feel like my breath is coming a little bit easier. That pain that was in my side isn't bothering me as much. Or you'll be towards the end of the day and the sun is going down and you realize, oh, wow, I'm actually kind of feeling melancholy.

Benjamin

And again, it doesn't necessarily have to be linked to a particular stimulus. It could just be that all of a sudden, your body is feeling a different kind of way. And if you're gentle with yourself and you see and you feel the contours and textures of that emotion and you're attentive to them, and over time, this kind of awareness will give you a different relationship to your own emotionality and hopefully one that will continue to deepen. And then I think that you're just going to notice that all of a sudden you will start crying. There'll be a day where you haven't wept in months, and all of a sudden you're feeling sad.

Benjamin

And instead of running away from that feeling, you really lean into it. And you're exploring, oh, wow, I'm carrying all of this catch in my throat, this heartbreak from a loved one being sick or images of war or any of the other number of horrifying things that can afflict our living. And if you sit with it, all of a sudden, the tears will just start to come. And so again, I think starting to cry is the wrong frame. The question is, how do we feel?

Benjamin

And then the crying is going to happen. And when you do start to cry, then don't run away from it. Embrace the tears. Let them fall. Not, you know, in a deliberate or intentional way, but just in a making space kind of way, making space for really being human.

Olga

I think instead of my daily yoga, I might seek out my favorite sad song today.

Benjamin

I love that. There's a show called Shrinking on Apple TV.

Olga

Oh, yeah.

Benjamin

Where for folks who haven't seen it, it's a story of a therapist who is, his wife dies, and he's going through all of this grief. And so it's a story of how he's grieving, how his daughter is grieving, and his mentor, played by Harrison Ford, also has this relationship with his daughter, and is trying to help her out. And one of the things he tells her to do is to grieve intentionally for five minutes a day to put on the saddest song she could. And then really just, even if the rest of the day, she's trying to sort of suppress and put that grief in the background for five minutes, can you really just feel the momentous weight of all of it? And so she'll create these little palaces in time where she can just weep and weep and weep.

Benjamin

And I think for a lot of us, that is what it, what it takes. I remember I did an interview with Kaitlin Curtice, who's an author. She's written the book Native and writes these books that are very much about her own indigeneity, but also the relationship between creation, care and personal gentleness and developing different kinds of relationships with the earth. And she talks, in her interview with me, she was talking about how one time she was at a retreat and she put her hand on the earth and tried to open herself to what the earth was feeling, and all of a sudden brought her into this space of the overwhelming, crushing weight of climate change and ecosystems dying out and mass extinction. She said she could only take two minutes of that.

Benjamin

That two minutes, even two minutes, was overwhelming to a point where she had to stop. But that's what it takes sometimes to really come to terms with the enormity of what we're facing. Really give yourself space to feel it. It is too much. It is wildly outrageous and unrealistic that any of us should have to move through everything that we are moving through and still be a person who wakes up and starts another day.

Benjamin

And yet that's what we're called to do as parents, as caregivers, as people. You wake up and you start again, and I think giving yourself space to really feel the emotional weight of all of that, you will find a resilience that extends throughout the rest of the day that that numbness actually is not serving you. We become very good at convincing ourselves that it does that. Oh, if I don't really feel all the things, it's going to be easier to get by, easier to get through. But the cumulative weight of that crushing numbness of week after week after month after year creates a psychic burden that is so much greater than the emotional pain we experience when we open ourselves to the fullness of living.

Olga

Absolutely. A beautiful book, Cry, Baby by Benjamin Perry, that I couldn't recommend more.

Benjamin

Thanks, Olga.

Olga

Could I ask one last question?

Benjamin

Sure can.

Olga

This is kind of a final question that we ask all our guests. What do you do for play?

Benjamin

What do I do for play? That's the best question ever. Yeah. So I play the guitar and I play the banjo and I love to play both of those. So that's making music.

Benjamin

I try to, at least for 30 minutes an hour every day to make music. And then the other thing that I do for play is gardening. I live in rural Maine and we've planted six apple trees the first year we lived here. And then those were doing really well. And so then last year we planted 50 apple trees and we're probably going to plant another 50 this coming spring.

Benjamin

And just like, taking care of something living brings me such joy. So even though, you know. Yeah, gardening is also sort of work, there is a playfulness in that relationship, particularly because I'm not, you know, I'm not gardening to live. I'm not gardening, you know, I'm not a farmer. But, like, the ability to really be playful in, oh, I'm going to try to plant all these things and keep as many of them alive through the winter as possible like that.

Benjamin

There's so much joy in that and playfulness in that for me.

Olga

Oh, my fellow gardener. I know, exactly. There's work in it, but there's so much. You're playing with nature, actually.

Benjamin

Yeah. It's a relationship.

Olga

Absolutely.

Benjamin

There's joy in that.

Olga

Yeah. I've planted eleven trees in my garden. That was just a little one.

Benjamin

When I love that. And then you get to see your. Trees grow and these trees are going to live past me. That's the thing I love about these apple. Like somebody else will have an apple orchard because I carried buckets of water from the river to try to water my little saplings, you know?

Olga

Absolutely.

Benjamin

I love that.

Olga

Yes. We're now thinking about moving house. And I'm just thinking, on the one hand, I'm sad about living on my trees and on my fruit bushes. On the other hand I'm thinking, but how they will leave, what a gift it will be to someone else who moves into this house.

Benjamin

Yep.

Olga

It's the legacy, isn't it?

Benjamin

Something that lives beyond us.

Olga

Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you for your work and for your book.

Joe

Thanks so much. Yeah, really appreciate it. Yeah, really love the book. And we'll try our best to get it changed. Stiff upper lip in England. Thank you.

Benjamin

Well, thank you so much, Olga and Joe, for having me on the show. It's been an absolute delight. And thank you for working to make the world a gentler place.