Do you do anything you'd call therapeutic crying?

I have this specific practice I wanted to share about and see if it resonated with others. I stumbled into it while trying energy healing (as a lifelong skeptic). Does anyone else do anything similar? Do you agree with my assessment of how it works?

I refer to it as emotional release meditation, and was thinking about it today as I engaged in it with the intention of processing/crying about a breakup.

In early 2023, I was at my all-time bottom with pain, was going through horrendous insomnia due to a medication issue, and decided to join a friend and try this energy healing program, Coherence Healing by Cornelius.

In the sessions, I would very reliably cry. Epic emotional release kind of crying. It brought me substantial relief from the pain too for the rest of the day.

At that time, I had read a Sarno book and tried some of the exercises without noticing any changes, so I thought emotional work wouldn’t be relevant to my pain. After Coherence Healing, I thought I should do a much deeper sweep in that realm.

After a few months of 3-4 weekly sessions and as I was feeling substantially better, I dropped off and made a note of what I thought was happening — mechanically, and what that process might be doing, especially since I still don’t accept that the person (across the globe) is directly manipulating something in my body.

With more reading and therapy with Vanessa at PPC, here’s where I’ve landed on this.

The algorithm:

• I get into a private space — critically important — and into a meditative state. Close your eyes, tune into sounds, your breath, etc.
• I invite feelings and emotional thoughts into my consciousness. Sometimes I know exactly what’s been bothering me; otherwise I think about recent events and possible worries, present or upcoming.
• I focus on a body part or person or feeling — if I know it — and I start counting. In Coherence Healing, it was about “raising your frequency to 1,000, 2,000, etc.” But I think any kind of count works. Just something extremely rote.
• The point is so that you can experience emotions at the same time, and specifically in a case like mine, so your brain doesn’t get hijacked by logic, as it might if it’s been trained to suppress feelings and solve problems instead.
• I then let the emotions flow, and one way I know I’m succeeding is that I’m crying.
• I let that keep going for as long as I can. Often there will be a few pauses of a few minutes, but I keep going towards my allotted time goal.
• At the end of all this I usually feel lighter, and if it was a longer session with more crying, I might feel less pain for hours.
• Back when I was doing Coherence Healing, a lot of the time the step of inducing feelings included other methods, which I still apply depending on the day:
  • Listing emotions in your head, as directions to get rid of them, as it were.
  • Mentioning body parts directly becomes relevant for pain sufferers because, for us, those are triggering subjects. For example, “remove any fear of pain in the foot”. In the original Coherence Healing by Cornelius, it would be “remove any fear of moving forward from the foot”, and if everything in that phrase applies, I would do the whole phrase.
  • “Remove any pain from the pelvis”
  • Focusing on chakras and “raising their energy”, if I’m feeling down in overall emotional terms.

An example from today:

• Today, I knew I felt like crying on Saturday while in the company of someone I love that I’m possibly losing in that romantic/partner role soon.
• I pictured that moment (subconsciously) and tried to call up the feeling (consciously).
• The feeling started to take over and my eyes started to well up. It lasted a couple minutes and then sort of went away. Soon, I realized, I was thinking of other stuff. First reaction: “OK, I wasn’t as bothered by it as I thought.”
• I then scanned and searched some more, and somehow ended up picturing the scene again.
• Realizing consciously this time, I kept imagining the moment, and I triggered a lot more sobbing. This time it lasted closer to 10 minutes.
• I kept repeating the last few steps and looking for more waves of emotion. Since I’ve already spent months processing this particular issue, it didn’t take me as long as it does on other occasions. When it’s really bad, I could cry on and off for 40+ minutes.

I think the reasons this seems to help are: Encourages dismissal of fear and related danger signal concepts (that I didn't list), discourages cognitive and encourages emotional processing. Probably also directly by hormonal release.