Hello hearta,
Great to have you around here in the forums, and well done on your first post! 🙂
I want to start by saying that I have not had the experience you are speaking of personally, however as an employer I have had a massive amount of experience with employees in the workplace and - for what it is worth to you - the picture you paint in your post is one that I see very often in the workplace. Workplaces by nature are intense sometimes, and we're talking about human to human interactions which cannot help but occasionally become deeper on a personal level rather than a robotic professional level.
In my experience, showing emotions at work is not a negative unless a person become paralysed by their emotions and cannot do the role they are employed to do, and even then I think the response needs to be wholly out of concern for the individual's wellbeing rather than the mechanistic needs of an organisation (not always the case, I know).
Your emotional display at work is not in and of itself anything that your colleagues and employer have not experienced before in their work-life; indeed many of your colleagues, peers, supervisors, etc., may themselves had an emotionally triggering event happen in the workplace and may have needed some time to realign and recover from the personal impact of a professional boundary crossing.
Why have I mentioned this? I encourage my team to not worry about what others are thinking, as (described above) this kind of scenario is not new in workplaces around Australia and indeed the world. Their is nothing on the surface of what has happened that will lead your peers to believing anything about you that is negative in an ongoing sense. If you're able to remove that very public aspect of the situation from your list of concerns and worries about the situation, you are much more able to focus on your internal recovery, which you already know a lot about as you've been handling it like a boss all your life!
You had a big cry at work; as far as your colleagues go, this is nothing they have not experienced before or done themselves. They may understand more than you give them credit for. I want to encourage you as far as is practicable to focus on what matters most here, which is you and your internal management of your own response. That is what we can control - even if it's in an excruciatingly slow and clumsy manner.
