Crying Through the Years

I’m a crier.

I know this is not necessarily breaking news. If you’ve heard me speak about my remarkable cancer recovery, or holding my mother’s hand as she passed, or watching my children grow up, you’ve likely seen me well up with a tear or two.

Last month I participated in a Medicine Man Retreat in Breckenridge, CO.  I haven’t been a fan of men’s retreats overall, but I knew one of the facilitators from a retreat Leigh and I had attended in Jamaica.  It had been six-months since I last journeyed with plant medicine, and the cold plunge, small group, high altitude hiking mixed with a small group of like-minded men intrigued me.  I had reservations before I headed out but appreciating so much the healing potential I’ve already experienced, I pushed through my reticence.

I could not have been more wrong about my doubts.

 “Do you always cry this much?”, someone asked.

Caught off guard when near the end of the 3-day retreat, I began to think about this question.  While I had welled up several times during the weekend, there were no new “deeply emotional discoveries” per se but the retreat format, the facilitators, and my fellow guests engendered a sense of safety, encouraging vulnerability and willingness to share deeply personal anecdotes and stories resulted in some profound healing for each man who was there. 

As I’ve reflected on my history of crying, I realize, like many grade school-aged boys I learned not to cry early on. Bike accidents and schoolyard bullies aside, I pretty much avoided shedding tears in public. That being said, I know I’m not alone in hearing my father the submarine captain bellow, “If you want to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.”

The first time I remember crying during a movie was in seventh or eighth grade, during Brian’s Song, a movie about the relationship between football players and good friends Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers. When cancer took Pic’s life I remember being surprised and embarrassed by my involuntary reaction to the made-for-TV drama. 

As I recall my tears in high school flowed from a broken heart or two in the gritty Hawaii high school dating scene. 

During my Plebe Year at the Naval Academy tears marked the after-effects from chugging a bottle of Tabasco sauce during “Beat Army” week, then sitting on the floor in my dorm room in my muddy uniform and sneakers after my classmates and I commemorated the end of our first year by scaling Herndon Monument. Of course, finding out about the untimely death of our childhood family dog, Streaker, brought tears well. 

During active-duty classmates and shipmates lost in the Beirut bomb blast and other accidents in the line of duty brought quiet tears privately.  Later, quiet tears publicly escaped while assisting in a military funeral where I literally dropped tears on the tri-folded flag before handing it to the Admiral for presentation to the fallen sailor’s mother.  Although a very human response, I carry a pang of guilt for not maintaining proper military decorum in that very public, very poignant moment.  (It was literally my job to appear stoic).

Tears began to flow more freely when I got sober in 1988, coming to grips with the inauspicious trajectory my life choices had created. This new era of self-reflection began the unwinding of a ball of undifferentiated resentments and fears which, when examined without traditional liquid numbing agents, revealed I had in fact given myself a lot to cry about.   My cancer diagnosis in 1994 brought on a newer, deeper dive into seldom-tapped emotional pools with the overlay of existential angst and sudden concern for “legacy” as it related to my children, ages 8 and 9 at the time.   When I found myself on that slow train of uncertainty, tears flowed more easily as concerns about others’ reactions slipped into nonexistence.  The only thing more emotional than a cancer diagnosis for me was a remarkable recovery that, upon reflection, still tugs hard at the heartstrings.

With the arrival of the new millennium, I began to emote family milestones including children going to college, weddings, grandchildren, and their milestones, as well as the failing health and death of my parents and my father-in-law.  All this while attaining a level of career success that kept our family comfortable, but never seemed to compensate for the pop-up emotional jags these milestones evoked.

In 2017 I experienced a panic attack while working on my father’s taxes at 2:00 AM.  (I know, there are a lot of issues to be unpacked in that statement).  This led my doctor to prescribe Zoloft and Ativan for an anxiety disorder.  My primary care physician notably commented, “Your talk therapy, journaling, and stage play are nice, but you need drugs!”

She was right. This category of meds, SSRI’s, can be very effective at “managing” emotions; specifically on a scale of 1-10, I could operate in the work world between a 4 and an 8.  I never got too low, or too high.  It was like magic.  I remarked to my long-time AA sponsor, “I wonder if this is how normal people feel all the time!” 

As time went on, I realized that while I didn’t have a lot of uncomfortable and awkward public displays of emotion, my creativity on the improv stage and blog writing had slowed down considerably, as had my sex drive.  SSRI’s, in my case, acted like emotional Imodium AD; the diarrhea may have stopped, but the constipation became too much to bear.  While these observations can be easily dismissed as natural by-products of getting old, I was not as “present” as I could have been for either my growing family or my dying father. 

Searching for a cure to relieve me of the need for daily medication to live a fuller, more enjoyable life is precisely the dynamic that led me to plant medicine.  The benefits of feeling fully the range of emotions this life experience has to offer has, without a doubt, been one of the great gifts I’ve received in this lifetime.

Naturally, I am predisposed to crying at military deployment-end videos, inspired athletic performances, and Instagram-perfect acts of compassion captured amid difficult moments.  Anybody who may inquire into the health of an ailing parent, or a dying dog will often expose my vulnerability, tapping directly into deep wells of emotion surrounding my experience.  What I have come to realize about myself is my crying is less a reflection of any particular emotion than it is a measure of the depth of that motion.  Sometimes it’s easy to rationalize why I’m suddenly welling up, sometimes not. On one end of the scale, I’ve been described as, “developmentally delayed” and “a whuss” (a really, real Naval term), to the other, hailed as “emotionally available” and “self-aware”.  At some point my bride claimed she finds it “sexy”, so I’ll stick with that.

The renaissance of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT – yup, it’s my name!) including programs like Medicine Man Retreats, is, in my view, most effective when coupled with skilled facilitators and an active integration plan.  The 4-facilitator to 6 – guests ratio was ideal. It provided a safe and secure environment that promoted vulnerability, introspection, and healing.  In this retreat, I was shown how my obsession with self-punishment is a glorified form of avoiding the present moment.  Some back alley wisdom says, if I have one foot in yesterday, and another foot in tomorrow, all I can do is piss on today. 

I’m a crier and I am good with that. Every day I strive to experience the full range of emotions my life has to offer; joy, anger, bliss, sadness, disappointment, redemption.  Whether that comes out as a laugh, a cry, or a giggle, bring it on! I want to feel it all until the day I have to depart this earth.

Check it out, men. www.medicinemanretreats.com

For the ladies: www.medicinewomanretreats.com