too much emotion

I am sure no-one disagrees about showing intense emotion when faced with the traumas and highs of life. It is all the faked over-emotion about things that are intrinsically not that bad, or exciting that is so irritating.

You know the kind of thing: Show Host announces Contestant has one £50. Contestant bursts into tears, leaps up and down and screams OMG, OMG, OMG.

I also hate it when tv cameras linger on people when they are genuinely deeply distressed; after hearing or fearing bad news, or grieving. I find I tend to shut my eyes and not watch when a tv camera ghoulishly and lasciviously feasts on the distraught face of a parent whose child is missing or has been found dead.

There are times when we need to cry, and times when we just can't help crying. But these sickening shows on TV where we see gaggles of relatives and friends'going through agony' and crying because they SO want their boy/girl to win just appall me. It has become expected as part of the entertainment and robs all those involved of any dignity in my opinion. Maybe they don't want dignity though, their all important five minutes of fame seem more important in whatever form it takes.

FlicketyB I know exactly what you mean about tv cameras trying to capture every teardrop.

The most compassionate TV interview I saw was in Australia, they were interviewing people who had been taken from their parents as children and sent to Australia, where some of them met with awful treatment. They were talking to one man who had been told his Mother was dead which is why he had been sent to Australia, it wasn't until years later that he learned she had died only shortly before he managed to track her down. At that point he started to cry, the interviewer put his hand on the man's shoulder and the cameraman turned the camera away. Those of us watching were aware of the grief but it also let the man maintain his dignity.

I loved my Mum very much but found myself unable to cry at her funeral. It was a burial and even though I stood at her graveside with my four siblings and other family members, all upset, and several weeping openly, I felt emotionally numb.

I still feel guilty about that. It may have seemed that I didn't care. I did but I just could not cry. How can someone who is normally emotional and can cry at a soppy film, not shed a tear for her dear Mum?

Gagagran know what you mean. I was exactly the same last year when we lost my 98 year old mum. She had been ill for a few weeks and at the end I just wished deep down that she would go as she would have hated ending her life like that. I did just what you did without a tear. I booked the funeral arrangements and even at the undertakers I didn't cry. My daughter and my grandsons were inconsolable. I feel guilty sometimes but at other times I just accept that we all grieve in our own way and cope in different ways.

Exactly sherish. Also if somebody is the grand age of 98, even though you will still miss them a lot, you know it's time that they went, if they were ill or distressed in any way. You may find yourself crying at some point later on in life, we are not all the same.I didn't cry at my Mothers funeral either [I was in my 20's] but I did cry a couple of years later, in fact quite a bit.

Too much false emotion does diminish real emotion, and I often wonder what children [who emulate us] think; cry at a funeral, cry because you have won £500 pounds, cry at a designer kitchen, cry when you win a holiday to Florida, cry and carry on alarmingly when somebody you have never known is announced to have died. Etc.

I may burst into tears if I don't receive an Easter Egg.

I think you've put your finger on it Gagagran I didn't cry for either of my parents because the grief was too deep. The tears we cry over a soppy film are on a more superficial level, which is why so much of the public emotion seems wrong. Basically we realise that most of the people are crying as if it was a film rather than deep beyond tears grief.

And why do interviewers have to descend on bereaved families and ask them how they feel??? What do they expect them to say???

I think shock comes into it. When my sister died in a road accident I cried for months. By myself, in the car, as I drove to and from work. For my parents, 85 and 92 when they died and where we could see that the end was drawing nigh. I did not. Their age, their condition that meant for several months before hand we were keyed up waiting for the inevitable, so that when it happened we had already adjusted to it and, in my fathers case, where he had died fully aware and suffering, there was a feeling of relief that his suffering was over.

Yes Flickety the shock of a sudden death plus the fact of someone dying young.

When I was younger I was very much a stiff upper lip type of person, however as I get older I find myself (annoyingly) welling up at almost anything. I don't mind the occasional moist eye at something particularly beautiful or emotional, but get mad with myself at all other instances.

Since I was reading at Mum's funeral, I simply didn't allow myself to cry then. I went into an emotional 'bubble' and for her sake did a good job. It was all the more poignant as it took place on Good Friday and the readings were so appropriate.
The other day we discussed taking the bouquets from DD's planned wedding in July to the garden of remembrance and I found myself weeping buckets.

What I cant stand is that, on TV, when someone starts crying, they never seem to have a handkerchief, and do that irritating thing like wiping the tears away with one finger,whilst (for women), trying not to mess up their mascara! Grrrrrr!

I wept buckets when my ex told me he was leaving. It was a combination of hurt, shock and anger. Rejection is a kind of bereavement, compounded by the knowledge that the 'rejecter' has found a replacement. When my father died suddenly I also cried a lot, whereas my mother's death was expected and I just felt drained, so cried very little. Somehow, nowadays, I don't seem to have any tears left.

I became more emotional after I had children. Seeing other children suffering - as on the news, would start me off.
Since Mr.G died, I find myself crying, suddenly and out of the blue. Sometimes I have a couple of days when I am inconsolable and on others I suddenly cry when a memory pops into my head or just picking up an item which stirs the emotions and then 10 minutes later I am fine. I can turn it off and on - for instance if I am having 'a moment' and the phone rings or someone comes to the door, I can become immediately normal. I thinking it is all part of the grieving - a coping mechanism Glass is quite right, it is healthy to laugh and cry.

NanKate your story put a wide on my face.

Gally ((hugs)) x

[hugs] for Gally from me too

I was the same as anno when my DH told me he was leaving (to live with a younger model), the hurt and rejection were very difficult

I meant ex-DH, not the current one!