The benefits of crying in a culture built on restraint

Imagine walking into a room with people sharing stories that make them cry—and no one looks away. 

In 2025,  Mumbai hosted one such gathering, signalling the arrival of “crying clubs” in India. This was inspired by Japan's Ruikatsu therapy session, where a group of strangers gathered and cried together, under the guidance of counsellors. 

India has plenty of laughter clubs. Crying, however,  is rarely communal. It is private, often concealed. The benefits of crying are commonly associated with relief, but tears lack the easy social synchrony of humour. 

Why crying can be therapeutic

Increasingly, a good cry is being reframed as cathartic. Some may even call it productive. Daatri Dadhich (who goes by her stage name ‘Cherryy’), a musician based out of Salasar near Jaipur, recently took five minutes to cry between recording takes. Her voice felt lighter afterwards and she could sing better. “That’s all the time I could afford because I was in the middle of a recording,” she says. Dadhich realised the shift only after months of creative paralysis.  “I was trying to ignore my emotions. But now that I have started crying when I feel overwhelmed, I've written like five songs in January itself!” She now cries twice a week, sometimes intentionally. 

She isn’t alone. 

Sidharth Sarcar, a Delhi-based landscape architect, has learned to recognise emotional build-up and make room for it. When films or artwork move him, he stays with the feeling rather than shutting it down.  “I used to have one go-to film about crying. So if I feel like I haven't cried in some time, I deliberately watch certain videos just to let out those tears. And it helps,” he says. What follows is usually quiet reflections, sometimes a call to someone he cares about. 

New Delhi-based education consultant Jayashree, tracks her crying episodes to identify patterns. “If I've cried three times about something in a year, then it is an issue. Plus, after a long session of crying, you may feel tired at first but a sense of lightness sweeps in within half an hour,” she says. Research supports what many describe instinctively. An August 2015 study published by the National Library of Medicine found that emotional crying is a complex, mixed, and often beneficial process rather than purely positive or negative. “While it can cause immediate, short-term negative moods and discomfort, research suggests it often leads to long-term emotional relief, stress reduction, and social support by acting as a self-soothing mechanism,” it stated. 

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“Crying is the body’s most natural emotional release mechanism,” says Dr Malini Saba, psychologist, and founder-chairman, Saba Family Foundation. “Crying doesn’t mean drama or breakdown; it’s the moment when one finally stops resisting what they’re feeling, when one sits with it, when the tears come, and one doesn't fight them. A good cry is therapeutic as it leaves people quieter and helps them process grief, disappointment, or emotional overwhelm in a conscious way. During a depressive spiral, crying isn’t a cure but a signal for help.” Jayashree has experienced the difference. “That’s when the conversation you're having with yourself as you cry makes a big difference–when I’m telling myself that I’m worthless and that I’m getting what I deserve, versus when I’m not blaming myself but letting it go.”

How social conditioning shapes emotional expression

In India, however, crying is still largely a solo, private act, shaped by gendered expectations and emotional hierarchy. Nidhi Gupta, 35, a PR consultant from Delhi-NCR, the oldest sibling, who was raised to be the strong, responsible one, still feels embarrassed when she cries in front of anyone else. “Being a woman comes with the responsibility of taking care of other people’s feelings,” says Gupta, who experienced uncontrollable crying, blaming herself for crying too much. “I grew up with the idea that crying is pointless. I also grew up with two brothers,” says Gupta, who has only seen them cry at home. “And that too because we’re an extremely communicative family. Outside the house, they wouldn’t be caught dead crying because of the construct of crying being a sign of ‘weakness’. Most men will cuss to release; they won’t cry. [They] get awkward when someone cries in front of them, and look for an escape route. Either way, crying alone is less awkward,” says Gupta.

“Crying alone can become some sort of a spiral,” says Sarcar, who spent much of his adolescence isolating his emotions. Growing up as a queer male, he was mocked by classmates when he cried—a reminder of how emotional expression in India is policed early. “At that age, even a close friend wouldn’t console you but ask you to stop crying, because that’s the one way of proving that I am strong—to not cry. My life changed in the last 12 years, as I started taking into my emotions and respecting what I felt. Before that, I shied away from crying. I was embarrassed after crying because it was never taught to be a valid form of expression. It was just considered weak,” he says.  

What shifted for Sarcar was not just age, but safety. Having people who respected his need to cry as a move from shame to release. 

Masculinity, power, and who is allowed to cry

Actor and theatre practitioner Mohit Mukherjee, grew up in Jamshedpur in a household with two boys where emotions were rarely discussed. Bullying only amplified the lack of emotional expression as a norm.

“Even if you’ve been aware of the stereotypes and not believed in them, unlearning then becomes even more difficult,” says Mukherjee. Especially since the unlearning also includes unlearning the definition of masculinity that society feeds people in India. “Everything was very matter-of-fact and the habit of not crying, of not emoting, not sharing things, began there,” he says. 

Mukherjee recalls sneaking out at the age of 13 to cry alone for a minute after learning his brother was moving cities. “There was no outlet, there was no respite in terms of crying, or even any conversation about it. Crying for yourself is just unburdening yourself. It's something I'm starting to understand now. I question if the situation is grave enough for you to cry,” he shares.

In recent months, he has started to cry deliberately as a form of emotional release.. “I've genuinely felt lighter after,” he says. The gap is not uniform, but it can feel sharper outside large urban centres. 

Dadhich has seen her father cry thrice in 21 years. “He’s used to positioning himself as a ‘strong’ person, which is a societal expectation. Breaking out of it is even harder in smaller cities,” she  says. “Meanwhile, a woman crying is so normalised that she might not be taken seriously. It’s treated like a regular thing and not a big deal,” she adds. If men are discouraged from crying, women are often dismissed when they do.

“Plus, if a woman cries at work, she will be accused of doing it to garner sympathy—a tag that sticks even if it happens just once. She’ll also be termed as the ‘emotional’, and hence not practical (and then reliable) one,” says Gupta. 

“But manipulative crying is also a chosen act to distract from the main issue or from being blamed. This is then not a vulnerability,” explains Sheena Sood, consultant in psychology and counsellor, P.D. Hinduja Hospital and Medical Research Centre, Mumbai, 

Jayashree has seen this misinterpretation at home. “Because of this, men are often made to believe that they should be wary of it. And women hesitate to cry in public to avoid the risk of being called ‘performative’ or ‘manipulative’. Due to conditioning [to not be emotionally expressive], men generally won’t have the empathy to cry along,” she says. “The stigma was so ingrained that men aren’t taught to cry for themselves.”

How the ideals of masculinity in colonial times reshaped the benefits of crying

“Crying as a sign of weakness is a relatively layered construction shaped significantly by colonial modernity,” says Anoushka Jain, author, heritage expert, and founder of Enroute Indian History. “In the history of Indian art and aesthetics, grief was not originally a gendered emotion. It was over time that it came to be increasingly visualised through the female body. Under British colonial rule, Victorian ideals of masculinity emphasising restraint, stoicism, moral discipline, and the suppression of overt sentiment began to reshape elite Indian self-fashioning. In response to colonial stereotypes that depicted Indian men as effeminate or overly emotional, Indians internalised and performed a hardened masculinity to counter such claims. The stigmatisation of crying intensified in the colonial and postcolonial period, when masculinity became entangled with discipline, respectability, and nationalist self-definition.” 

A January 2011 paper by the American Psychological Association conducted across 37 countries found that women cry an average of 30 to 64 times per year, while men cry an average of five to 17 times per year. 

The disparity is often read as biological. It is, however, equally cultural. Sociologist Shambhobi Bagchi notes that crying is coded as ‘feminine’ because emotional expressiveness itself is coded weak. “Normatively, crying is seen as a weaker emotion, allotted to women, the weaker sex. Men are supposed to be rational. But today, because we have voices from the margins claiming their space and also fixing certain narratives, these norms are getting weaker with the younger generations,” she says.  

“So, even today, if women don’t cry, they are criticised, especially when they lose a loved one—that’s how several cultures have incorporated crying as an activity into the cultural realm,” adds Bagchi. 

In 19th-century Rajasthan, public grief was sometimes outsourced to rudaalis—professional mourners invited to perform sorrow that elite families could not display in public. “In communities where upper-caste Rajput codes of honour discouraged elite women from appearing publicly or expressing overt emotion at funerals, it was often delegated to women from marginalised castes, especially those from Dalit or economically vulnerable communities. These women were summoned to cry, beat their chests, sing songs recounting the virtues of the deceased, and amplify the prestige of the household through the scale of mourning. They were compensated—sometimes in cash, sometimes in grain, clothing, or leftover food, though the payment was rarely dignified,” says Jain. 

“The portrayal of upper caste individuals crying in public is [still] almost perceived as a loss of power, even if subconsciously. How vulnerability is viewed differs based on where people stand as social beings,” says Bagchi. 

Today, vulnerability remains conditional—something that people can only indulge in when they are in a safe space. Science may outline the benefits of crying, but society decides who can afford them.  

“I don't know if society is still equipped to handle someone crying in front of others. You also don’t know how someone is going to end up interpreting your crying, and I don’t want to give random people that privilege, which is the problem with collective crying,” says Mukherjee. 

With empathy, it is possible to heal via collective crying. “Just like it is possible to open up to a stranger, because you wouldn’t care if they judge you,” explains Bagchi.