In your experience, does fighting the feelings help? Answer not using your logic, but your felt experience.

Odds are, fighting doesn’t help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here asking for help.

You hurt because you care. You care about belonging, about contributing, about being open to others. And, since you care about this, you hurt.

We can’t get rid of this kind of hurt. Would you even want to? Would you want to be indifferent to other people?

I’m not trying to be mean or brutal. I’m just trying to a place where this hurt is a meaningful part of your life and not something you keep fighting (and failing to defeat).

So what can you do? You could notice your thoughts as thoughts. You can try giving your brain a name and thanking it for informing you about the things it informs you throughout the day. This doesn’t make thoughts disappear, but it helps seeing them as thoughts and not reality.

You can also imagine that you carry your sensations, memories, moods, thoughts, images, etc. in your hands, as if you were carrying a delicate flower. This is a way to honor your life without running a way from it and also without being entirely determined by it.

Finally, you can ask yourself what kind of person you want to be, what you stand for. What are the qualities of being that you would like to adopt in your life? You can discover this intuitively by wondering what you care for. If rejection hurts, you likely value inclusion. If abandonment hurts, you likely value consistency and kindness.

The task the becomes accepting our current reality (thanking our brain for its suggestions and holding our whole life experience preciously) and taking our next step with the qualities of being that we value.

If you’re curious about this perspective, let me know and I can tell you more about it :)