Hi Katy
Being a highly sensitive woman; I can cry at the drop of a hat. There can be quite a variety of triggers - empathy/another's pain, overwhelming stress, a memory/thought and the list goes on. When there's some seriously convincing acting going on in some movie, I can easily sob my way through just about the entire movie. Being a 'feeler', I feel just about everything, unless I've chosen to be detached, for one reason or another.
To be an observer of our emotion is definitely a wonderful experience at times. By wonderful, I don't mean fantastic, I mean full of wonder. 'I wonder why I feel so much anger. I wonder why I feel so stressed or anxious. I wonder why I feel such deep compassion' and so on. I figure, if we were taught from a young age how to manage and understand our emotions there wouldn't be so much wondering to do. Typically, we're conditioned to suppress emotion rather than understand it. We're typically conditioned to keep our feelings to our self, rather than freely express them for relevant analysis and self understanding.
So, here you are wondering and analysing, 2 potentially liberating traits of a sensitive person. I've found that when I cry I'm typically either venting or connecting. For me, if the crying is stress related, I'm venting that build up of energy that comes with stress. If the crying is empathy related, I'm deeply connecting to that person I'm feeling for. Actually, sometimes I'll cry when I don't understand what a particular challenge in life is about. I suppose you'd call that crying (out) in frustration. This tends to only happen with those kind of life altering challenges that can cycle around and around in some potentially depressing way. With these, the revelations can be slow coming.
I've spent years coming to gradually understand the nature of my emotions or feelings, through a heck of a lot of analysis. I suppose you could say my goal has been to analyse the hell out of them in order to reach the heaven in them, that liberating aspect. Self understanding is one of the ways I manage not returning to depression. It's one of the ways I manage to raise myself.
It is said that to feel our way through life and trust our feelings as our compass (that they're telling us something) is what strengthens our intuition and sense of direction.
🙂
