Buried Cries

“I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me” (Maya Angelou quoting Terentius Afer, an African enslaved by the Romans in 150 BC).

Chapter 14 of my book 20 Ways to Break Free from Trauma is entitled: “When we cry out in distress”. In it, I focus on what happens to us humans when our tears or cries are not responded to. We are wired for connection and if this connection is impaired, unpredictable or absent our cries may become silenced and buried deep within us. What are the implications for humans whose cries are buried in this way? Might we become uncaring towards others, unempathic to another’s suffering?

I overheard someone in the Post Office queue. They were telling someone that their friend, who had experienced a sudden loss, had “cried all over me”. It made me think that this person may have buried cries inside, so he couldn’t tolerate another’s distress.

 

Do we tolerate other’s distress, or do we ‘avert our gaze’? This term was used by Louis Blom-Cooper to describe the many statutory and voluntary agencies that failed to notice that Jasmine Beckford was being systematically starved and beaten to death by her stepfather and neglected by her mother in 1984. Averting our gaze is a good term that sums up what happens when we fail to look at something clearly because it is too shocking and painful and doesn’t fit with our preconceived beliefs.

There is much in our national and international news that is distressing, and there is much cruelty that we are capable of inflicting on each other. One of the consequences of the distressing events might be that we “avert our gaze”. Sometimes this may be necessarily protective. But we need to be careful. Maybe averting our gaze can easily grow, giving us the distance we need to be able to become inured or uncaring about pain or injustice, or from a sense of us being connected to and responsible for bad things. It is a way that we disconnect from our hearts.

Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics podcast recently spoke about Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, which makes a study of how cheerful, ordinary men killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end in docile obedience to the 1940s Nazi regime that they had accepted as legitimate. They found ways to legitimise their actions and avert their gazes from the vulnerability of those they killed.

In our national debate, we appear to be getting so locked into cycles of blame and scapegoating that we pounce on others who have been perceived to make mistakes with self-righteous zeal. This climate creates paranoia, it does not heal broken hearts, it does not put the vulnerable at the centre of our priorities, it does not hear the cries of distress and take time to listen to them and heal them. It takes away our humanity.

When someone cries in our presence, I have always believed it is a sacred space and a privilege to be alongside them. They are are showing us their humanity, they need space to weep. Let’s never say “Don’t cry on me”. For the sake of our mental health we should welcome our tears and the tears of others and let them flow.