Q: How do you stay focused in a crying scene? It seems easy to lose the connection after a while.—Nick S.*
In any given scene, there are two connections that are essential to maintain: the connection to the emotion you’re feeling and trying to express, and the connection to the other person or people in the scene.
In a scene that involves crying, it’s easy to lose connection to the underlying emotion causing the tears if all of your energy is going toward the actual act of crying. Sure, you might be crying at that point, but to the viewer, it’s just meaningless water. In life, when something happens to us, we experience that event first in the body. The body experiences a sensation based on the event. That sensation informs the limbic center of the brain, which produces an appropriate emotion. That emotion then travels to the frontal lobe of the brain and produces a thought.
READ: 4 Reasons You Can’t Cry on Command
If you’re losing that connection, it’s essential to reconnect to the body and to the sensation in your body that created the emotion in the first place. You’ll also reconnect to the other person or people in the scene by focusing on the bodily sensations that they cause you to feel. Your corresponding emotional connection to them will follow.
Crying, ultimately, is emotion plus vulnerability. Losing touch with the underlying emotion can cause you to disconnect from yourself, and losing touch with how you feel about the other person or people can erase the feeling of vulnerability that crying in front of them would cause, creating a disconnect.
The answer, always, is to bring your focus back to the place that had an experience that made you want to cry in the first place: the body. And the wonderful thing about the body is that it will take care of the rest for you.
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This story originally appeared in the July 23 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.
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