Why Do I Cry When I’m Angry? A Five Element and Physiological Understanding Behind Angry Tears

You're angry, nothing is going right today, everything seems like it's falling apart, everybody seems like an absolute idiot, and then the final straw breaks the camel's back. Maybe it's a nasty email or a bill you weren't expecting that comes in the mail, or maybe it's stubbing your toe on the kitchen table either way your bandwidth is exceeded, and instead of screaming or punching the wall, you cry.

I think this experience is universal and most people will know what it’s like to cry when they're angry at least some time in their lives. Sometimes, it feels like it makes no sense because we attribute tears to either grief and sadness or profound joy. But crying when you're angry is actually a really normal and common response, and it helps our bodies process the emotion of anger in, sometimes, a much safer way.  

Using the Five Elements to Understand Why We Cry When We’re Angry

One of the tools I use to help my clients understand their emotional processing is looking through the lens of the five elements. The five elements are a Taoist and Chinese medicine concept and tool that can explain literally anything and everything in the entire universe. The elements are the foundation of all that is in existence, every physical thing, and every experience we have, including our emotional experiences can be explained through the lens of the five elements.

As you can see in this image, the five elements are fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. The clockwise pattern that they make is called the generating cycle, and this is a healthy expression of the elements. Every element lends knowledge, wisdom, and sometimes physical properties to help create the element that follows it, fire creating earth and so forth. Sometimes we will refer to these elements as mother and child elements. The right and left star patterns are the controlling and insulting cycles, and these are patterns that the elements will take when they are out of balance and when they need to be back in balance but are having a difficult time doing it through the generating cycle. I find these different Cycles to be profound in helping us understand our emotional processes and by looking to these different cycles we can understand how and why crying when we are angry actually makes sense.

In the controlling cycle, the element of metal controls the element of wood. Now every element has emotional associations and virtues that are attached to them. The emotions of metal are grief and depression, and its virtue is integrity, the emotions of wood are anger and repressing emotions, and the virtue of wood is humanitarianism. So when these elements are in their healthy balanced state we express the virtues and when they are out of balance, we express the emotions. 

When our wood element is out of balance this is often a time where we have a heightened experience of anger and it is usually combined with difficulty in expressing that anger, perhaps we're even repressing it to the point that we feel like we're boiling over. This is where the controlling cycle comes into play. That metal element is going to reach across and check the wood element into place; this is the grandmother taking over the parenting of the child. When this happens, often we have a release of that anger by way of a metal expression which is crying. 

Anger Is Also Our Passion

I think it's important to note that anger isn't always rage and aggression like we most commonly think of when we think of anger. Anger is also a healthy emotion, it's what drives us, what gives us the ability to stick up for ourselves, allows us to stick to our principles, and is what gives us passion. So even when we might be in a state where we don't recognize it outright as being that rage type of anger, we still might feel blocked and stifled when it comes to our passion, our drive, and our ability to stick up for ourselves and set boundaries. Feeling stuck in this way might also produce tears, and it may also produce depression.

Why We Cry When We Are Angry, Physiologically

Physiologically crying actually helps us release and process some of the biochemicals that are associated with the emotion of anger and many other emotions. These biochemicals are hormones, neurotransmitters, and enzymes that create feelings. Anger can often be an overwhelming experience and it’s important for our physical health to properly and completely process that emotional experience to return to a baseline sympathetic nervous system state. Crying helps release oxytocin and prolactin which can help calm us down, lower the heart rate, and soothe us when we’re experiencing a flood of overwhelming emotion.

If You Feel Like Crying When You’re Angry - Cry

Next time you're feeling angry or you're feeling stuck and the tears well up in your eyes, I want to encourage you to let them flow as best you can. Crying is a perfectly healthy and natural response to feeling stuck, and it's essential to allow ourselves the ability and time to feel into that experience. In doing so, we actually help our body by processing those emotions, and we help our mind by doing something that allows us to move through the experience instead of sitting in it.

Helping my clients process emotions, learn new tools, and have a greater understanding of their own emotional processes is one of my favorite parts of my work. If this is something you're looking for help with, I encourage you to book a free Discovery Call so that we can chat about how we can work together.