Some people cry at small things. They cry at somebody else’s sadness. They cry watching TV, and once they start, the tears keep coming. This happens a lot to people who cannot accept their own feelings — people who hold back what they feel about their own lives.
Crying like that means a great deal of sadness has built up inside. That sadness comes from a loss in their own life that was never mourned. To mourn a loss is to weep over it until you can accept it and let it go. Because that never happened, the loss is still unresolved, and the sadness from it is still there.
Why the tears come out in front of a TV drama
When you cry like that in front of the TV, the tears are not really about the drama. You are crying about your own life.
When thinking about your own life is too painful or too shameful, you hold the feeling back. In front of a drama, though, you can cry. The sadness moves onto the story on the screen, and you end up watching your own life in it. You cry for the character, but the force of the tears comes from your own loss, which the scene has stirred up. If that loss had been mourned, the sadness would not have to come out through a drama.
Therapy helps a person accept what they could not bear
Mourning, then, is about accepting: letting a painful fact in. That is also what therapy does. The tears come from a loss that was never accepted, so therapy helps the person let in the painful fact they have been keeping out.
People often think therapy works by breaking down a person’s defenses. A defense is the way a person wraps themselves up tight so they do not have to feel something. But the wrapping is there for a reason: at the time, some fact or feeling was more than they could bear. Therapy does not try to strip the wrapping away. Instead, it helps the person accept the very thing the wrapping was keeping out.
It sounds like a paradox, but that is what heals: accepting the very thing the person could least bear to accept.
The same scene, every time
Some scenes are sad for everybody. A child longs to see a parent and cannot. Anyone watching would be moved by that. That kind of crying is ordinary; everybody shares it.
The crying I am talking about is different. The tears keep coming in one particular kind of situation. Whenever that situation turns up, or anything like it, the tears come again.
When the tears keep returning to the same kind of scene like that, they are coming from a wound in the person’s own past.
Knowing a painful fact is not the same as accepting it
To mourn a loss is to accept that it happened — and you get to that acceptance by weeping over it.
Say someone did not get their mother’s love. Something that should have come to them never came, and that is a loss. So what they have to accept is this: “I did not get my mother’s love.”
But that fact will not sink in. In their head, they may know their mother never gave them that love. In their heart, it still does not feel final, because they keep hoping that one day she will change and notice their pain. So each time she lets them down, it does not feel like “that is just how she is.” It feels like being rejected all over again. That is why they keep ending up frustrated and hurt.
Here is how that looks. A woman said to her mother, “My arm hurts.” Her mother said, “Go to the doctor.” The daughter was upset by that, and the two of them ended up arguing.
Why did “go to the doctor” upset her so much? Because she was not only reporting a pain. She was asking her mother to care. This mother had never paid her much attention, and the daughter was still hoping for the attention she had missed as a child. So a sensible, practical answer felt like one more refusal. The argument was not really about the arm. Underneath it was an old request that had never been met: “Notice me. Care that I am hurting.”
The daughter knows her mother is not going to change. She will say so herself, and say she has stopped trying. But in the way she actually lives, she is still clinging to that hope, still asking to be loved. When the love she hopes for doesn’t come, she is hurt, and the asking gets louder. That is how “My arm hurts” turned into an argument.
Never having had something is a loss too
People usually distinguish between two things. Deprivation is when something you needed was never there and was never given to you. Loss is when you had something and then it was gone. I count both as loss. An example will make this easier to see.
Picture a child who has had no mother from the day he was born. There was never a mother in his life. He is raised somehow, and he grows up. Is that child hurt by having had no mother, or not?
He is. He carries it with him all his life. The absence of a mother is itself the wound. A growing child needs a mother, and for this child she never came.
The same goes for babies adopted right after birth, too young to know anything about it. Even for them, the fact that they were adopted will not sink in. Adoptive parents are advised to tell the child early anyway, because children do find out, and finding out later makes it worse.
An adopted child at least has adoptive parents. A child left without parents at birth and raised by substitute caregivers instead never knows what it is to have a mother in those early years. He never had a mother to lose. Even so, I count that absence as a loss.
And this kind of loss does not happen only to children with no mother at all. It also happens to a child whose mother was in the kitchen every day and never once looked at him. A child whose mother died can point at the empty chair. This child has nothing to point at — and the hole is the same size.
So this is a loss too: “I wanted to be loved, and the love never came.”
This loss has to be wept over
You have to weep over it — really weep.
The weeping is about particular moments: “Where were my parents when I needed them? When I was in pain, where were they?” You weep over those moments until you can accept them as they were. Then, little by little, you stop clinging — you stop going back to the same parent again and again for the care they were never able to give.
If you keep clinging instead, this is what happens. First comes anger at the world, and behind it the thought: “My parents never looked after me.” Then, as that anger keeps coming back, people go different ways. Some sink into frustration. Others hold on even tighter, like the woman with the sore arm, and go on asking to be loved.
A therapist’s job is to help a person accept that the love they needed never came. But accepting it takes strength. Think what it costs to say out loud that your mother never loved you, and not take it back an hour later — to sit still with it, not phone her, not decide it wasn’t that bad after all. You need to be standing firm inside before you can take in something that heavy. So therapy builds that inner strength first. The weeping comes after.
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Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board