Immersion

Why do I cry during a therapy session?

Short answer

Crying in a session is a normal response to strong feeling, not a sign of weakness. Research on adults links how readily you cry to your attachment style and your beliefs about crying. Tears often show up when you finally feel safe enough to let something surface.

The research
Millings, A., Hepper, E. G., Hart, C. M., Swift, L., and Rowe, A. C. (2016). Holding Back the Tears: Individual Differences in Adult Crying Proneness Reflect Attachment Orientation and Attitudes to Crying. Frontiers in Psychology, volume 7, article 1003.
Sample 1,404 adults across two online samples of 623 and 781 people, ages 18 to 81
Published 2016
Journal Frontiers in Psychology
Abigail Millings and her colleagues studied how readily adults cry and why it varies so much from one person to the next. They ran two large online surveys, one with 623 people and one with 781, with ages spread from 18 to 81. Each person answered questions about their attachment style, their attitudes toward crying, and how easily they cried across different situations. Two patterns held across both samples. People higher in attachment anxiety, who tend to worry about closeness and rejection, cried more readily. People higher in attachment avoidance, who tend toward distance and self-reliance, cried less readily. The team also found this was not only about the feeling itself. A person's beliefs about crying helped explain the link. The views that crying is healthy and that crying is something you can control accounted for much of the gap between the groups. In plain terms, how easily you cry is shaped by how safe closeness feels to you, and by what you believe crying means.
Read the paper

What does this mean for you?

A therapy room is often the first place in a week where it feels safe enough for a feeling to come out. That is part of why tears can arrive there and nowhere else. Crying in a session usually means something real landed, not that you lost control of yourself. For many people, the tears are the body catching up with a truth the mind had been holding at arm's length.

It is worth being honest about what this study can and cannot say. It looked at crying in general, not crying in therapy, and it asked people to report on themselves at a single point in time. So it maps patterns across large groups, not a rule about you on any given day. Attachment style is a tendency, not a verdict, and it can shift over a life and with good care. Read this as a way of understanding your tears, not as a label for them.

Even with those limits, the direction is steadying. Your tears are information, not a fault. If you cry easily, that is not fragility. If you rarely cry, that is not coldness. Both can trace back to what closeness and control have felt like for you over the years. Neither one tells you whether the work is landing, and neither one is something you need to fix before you show up.

The takeaway

Terms in this page
Set and setting Grounding

This is the work Asendar™ was built for: helping you notice what rises up in a session and carry it into the days that follow, tears included. If you want a simple read on where your head is today, take your Mental Readiness Score.

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People also ask

Does crying in therapy mean the session is working?

Not on its own. Tears are a sign that a strong feeling surfaced, which often happens once a room feels safe, but crying is not a scorecard. In this research, how much people cry tracked with their attachment style and their beliefs about crying, so the amount of tears says more about the person than about the progress.

Why do some people cry easily and others almost never?

In this study it tracked with attachment style. People who worry more about closeness cried more readily, and people who lean toward self-reliance and distance cried less. Beliefs about crying, such as whether it feels healthy or controllable, explained much of that gap between the two groups.

Is it a problem if I do not cry in therapy?

No. Not crying is not the same as not feeling. The research found that people higher in attachment avoidance, who tend toward self-reliance, simply cry less readily. It can help to tell your therapist that tears do not come easily for you, so nobody reads a calm face as distance.

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