Crying When You Are Angry - How Emotion and Tears Get Connected

You Want to Answer Back and Tears Come Instead

Someone has said something unreasonable to you. You know exactly which points to contest. The instant you assemble the words and open your mouth, your throat closes and tears come. What you wanted to convey goes unsaid, and the room files you away as the person who cried.

For the person it happens to, this experience remains as a double defeat. Not only did your argument fail to land; an assessment that you are emotional got added on top. And the emotion inside you was not sadness but anger.

What we take up here is the mechanism by which anger comes out as tears.

Tears Are Not Reserved for Sadness

Line up the situations in which tears appear and it becomes clear they are not limited to sadness. Intense pain, hard laughter, cutting an onion, being moved, and being angry.

Of these, tears from an irritant such as an onion are a reflex that protects the eye. The rest, the tears that accompany emotion, come from a different system.

What the emotional tears have in common is that the emotion is strong. Mild sadness produces no tears; deep sadness does. A light laugh produces none; laughing hard does. Tears, in other words, appear to correspond largely not to the kind of emotion but to its intensity.

From this vantage point, tears of anger are no exception. Strong anger comes with strong arousal, so it satisfies the conditions for tears.

The Relationship Between Arousal and Tears

When a strong emotion arises, the body changes its whole posture at once. The heart rate climbs, breathing quickens, muscles tense, digestion is suppressed. It is a switch for responding to crisis, and it moves in the same direction whether the emotion is anger or fear.

When that switch operates strongly, the effects extend to other bodily functions. The glands that produce tears are under autonomic control, and their activity changes as arousal rises. The sensation of a closing throat arrives at the same time because tension has increased in the muscles involved in breathing and voice.

So in a moment of anger, losing your words and producing tears happen together. Both are results of the same switch, not a display of weak will.

One more factor is suppression. When anger arises in a position where you cannot show it, the function that suppresses expression moves at the same time. A state in which the force pushing out and the force holding back are locked against each other leaves strong tension in the body. The expression that suppressed anger leaks out as tears is, as a description of the sensation, fairly accurate.

In Settings Where Crying Reads as Weakness

The problem is that once tears appear, the substance of what you were saying stops being handled.

When tears come in a workplace or a negotiation, the topic usually changes at that point. The other party stops talking and tells you to calm down, and your argument is set aside. Even without ill will, the discussion breaks off.

This disadvantage is not the responsibility of the person crying; it lies with the convention of reading tears as emotion running out of control. But while waiting for conventions to change, you still need your argument to land. So the response aims not at stopping the tears but at securing a route for the argument to arrive.

What You Can Do When Tears Are Coming

Tears have several precursors. A closing throat, heat behind the eyes, a shake in the voice. Three moves are available at this stage.

One is to slow your speech and lengthen your exhalation. With arousal rising, breathing turns shallow and fast. Deliberately lengthening the out-breath takes a little momentum out of the switch. Even a few seconds makes a difference.

The second is to leave the room temporarily. Say you need a moment and stand up. Some people fear it will look like fleeing, but the outcome is better than continuing an argument in tears. Return within five minutes and nobody asks why you stepped out.

The third is to move attention to a different bodily sensation. The feeling of your soles against the floor, the temperature of your palms. Turning attention to sensation disperses the resources that were going to processing the emotion.

None of these stops tears completely. The purpose is to buy the few minutes it takes to finish speaking.

Putting It Into Words Afterward

What you could not say in the moment can be delivered later. If anything, later gives you better precision.

What works is sending it in writing. Open with a line saying you have organized the points you could not finish conveying, then write the facts and the request. In writing, tears are irrelevant and only the content reaches the other party. It also has the advantage of remaining as a record.

Taking this method as given changes how you hold yourself in the moment. The premise that you must say everything right there falls away, so arousal climbs a little more gently as well.

And if tears come repeatedly with the same person or in the same situation, the relationship or the environment is worth looking at. The skill of handling anger is a response from the side of emotion, but when the situation that keeps generating the anger is itself the problem, polishing your coping technique only prolongs the depletion.

Tears of anger are a record of the fact that emotion moved strongly. Treat that as something shameful and you lose the ability to be angry in situations that call for it. Crying and being right are compatible.