The actor’s borrowed grief can awaken the audience’s unborrowed one.

Performed feeling can open real feeling in someone watching. The grief on stage is borrowed and constructed, and it still gives an audience member permission to reach their own, which had nowhere safe to go. The artifice is what makes the safety possible; nobody has to admit whose sorrow is being felt.

This is one reason to seek out sad music and difficult films rather than avoiding them when you are already low. They can do work that direct confrontation cannot. If you find yourself weeping at something disproportionate to the story, the story was probably a door rather than a cause, and it is worth asking gently what was behind it.