No, I’m not talking about the results of my coping cleaning. I’m talking about emotions.
You see, recently I’ve been upset. Very upset; You know, tears and sobbing and curling up in a ball in bed and not wanting to come out. But it’s been a bit different to the usual, in that it isn’t depression! So yes, I’ve been feeling sad, but it also feels clean. Something has upset me, and it was a cause not a trigger. All my upset is because of this, and, what’s more, it’s something that is socially acceptable to be upset over. Hell, it’s emotionally acceptable to cry over it!
It’s a strange feeling. I’m still sad, but it’s a lighter kind of sad than my depression brings, and even when I feel miserable I still have the bit of me that marvels at the fact that this is what life could be like if only I weren’t depressed.
I go to a lot of effort to explain to people that depression isn’t “feeling sad” or “feeling blue”… it’s not a feeling at all… it’s something else, something worse. To me this is proof of that. When even my saddest days on meds feel amazing in comparison to the daily grind without them, and it’s not because the daily grind was sadder, it’s because I was depressed, and it’s not a clean healthy feeling.
I don’t like feeling sad. But I do like feeling healthy!
Not Alone in There 
Makes a degree of sense that.
Crying is, as I understand it, a release mechanism as much as anything else.
Once you’ve processes what it is that has made you sad then I imagine that it does help.
And, in addition, the ability to ‘legitimately’ cry would be – in and of itself – quite cathartic