You’re not meant to be totally OK with that, which is what I meant with having to accept that it hurts 🙂 And you’re definitely allowed to be angry and frustrated as well. Also, it actually did take me like two years to get to a point where I could say “that’s just how things went”, so it definitely didn’t come easily. I was in shock and completely lost at first (as this was supposed to be a very important relationship for me) and completely unable to see things clearly, because I was just thrashing around in pain. I also tried to forcefully make myself be all loving and understanding (which is why I might’ve projected the “half-heartedness” onto you). It kind of worked, but then in reality, I just had to accept the pain and allow myself to heal.

That said, think about the story of what happened as a sharp needle. Every time you tell yourself that story, you poke yourself with the needle. It will hurt, every time. I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t go through what happened in your mind and you should just “move on” (I hate that phrase), but just be aware that every time you go through it, it will hurt, though you might become a bit numb at some point (which I don’t consider to be a great thing either).

I have to run now, so I might have to come back later to finish this thought 🙂 I just saw your response and wanted to respond to that with a bit of clarification, which may or may not be clear! 🙂

Hello Lily,

I haven’t read your previous post to which this is a follow-up, so I’m basing my answer only to this one.

Of course it hurts. Rejection hurts. Hurt doesn’t go away even after personal growth. It’s part of life.

That said, I think you’d have two ways of dealing with it, though you can use both. One is to accept that it hurts. Don’t try to make the hurt go away and be frustrated with it. Acknowledging that it hurts is a great way to give yourself the acknowledgement you need and the hurt might stop. At least for a moment. It also might not stop, and then you’d just allow yourself to be hurt. Listen to your reactions and be kind to yourself.

Another way is to just change the story. Your story is now that of rejection. All the words that you use when you tell yourself and others that story is that he chose someone else over you. After that the message is mixed with, sorry to say, a bit half-hearted understanding and putting him down. So clearly, you are hurt, but how did you expect yourself to react to a storyline like that?

I’ve been through something similar and even though it actually was the thing that broke the camel’s back and pushed me onto a path of growth, that particular event still hurts me immensely if I think about it as a story of rejection and choosing someone else over me. There’s no way around it. So all I can really do is the things that I just told you: I either don’t think about it as rejection and think about it as “that’s just how things went” and stop there, or I accept the pain and allow myself to grieve. The only difference in the pain now and then is that I don’t completely panic and think that I can’t possibly survive without him. Except if I start to tell myself the story that there just isn’t anyone like him and now there never can’t be… But since I know how much pain and suffering that story causes, I don’t tell myself that.

I hope I’m making sense 🙂

Prakhar,

You say that you’re trying really hard, but in what way are you actually trying? You have at least two accounts here now both asking for help for the same thing, yet you don’t listen to anything people say to you. You don’t connect with anyone, you just want someone to listen to you. We have listened to you, so you don’t have to worry about that. The problem is though that just repeating the problem isn’t going to make it go away. It’ll just emphasize it’s power over your life more and more. You need to make a conscious effort to shift yourself back into your body and to the land of the living. You have now given away your own power and your focus is in other people’s lives and not in yours. As long as you keep doing that, things will continue to be painful and chaotic.

Get out of Facebook. Now. Promise yourself to not go in there for at least two weeks at first and then later repeat that. It’s hard to control your mind when it’s constantly pulling you back to the trauma you have gone through, but you can make a conscious effort not to feed the pain that causes you to be stuck. So no Facebook.

Stop negative thoughts to their tracks and stop when you start thinking about her. Just stop. Just interrupt that thought immediately. It’ll come back again and again, and each time you interrupt that thought. Keep doing that for as long as it’s needed, but you might be surprised how fast you can see results. Your mind will want you to go over the traumatic experience again and again, but you need to let go of it, at least for a while so that you can get some rest and heal. Right now you’re like a dog with a bone, who desperately needs to drink, but doesn’t want to let go of the bone in order to do so, being too afraid that the bone will not be in his control anymore. Just let go of the negative thoughts again and again. You will have a better understanding and you’ll be in more control than you are right now.

Seek the help of a doctor and surround yourself with people who do live in this world and are grounded. Allow them to help. You might feel that they don’t understand you, but you are seeking the type of understanding that will magically make the pain go away, and that just doesn’t exist. I have been more or less in a mental state that you are in and I did similar things that you are doing now: craving for attention from people and for someone to acknowledge the pain and to make it go away. I also made promises that “I will work on this”, but first I just wanted to share my pain with everyone and expect it to go away like that. It didn’t, but I can understand where you’re coming from. You need to put in actual conscious effort to gain your power back over your life and your mind and your body. It’s not easy and it’s painful, but it’s definitely worth it.

Write about your pain. Do write a letter to the person who hurt you and explain how it made you feel. Don’t send it. Keep the letter and then write another one. Edit the letter as many times as needed for you to feel like you’ve successfully been able to express yourself. When you have the perfect letter, just keep it. You’re clearly seeking for understanding for your pain and the best way you can get it is from yourself. You are the one who will feel the feelings of being understood, so you are the one who needs to make the effort to get into that place of feeling understood and listened to. So express your feelings the best that you can and listen to it yourself. Be kind to yourself. Be compassionate to yourself.

Please, put in more time in taking care of yourself than worrying over other people’s lives.

He is focused on his life in Chile right now, or at least he should be. My question to you would be: by contacting him and asking how he is doing, are you genuinely interested in how he is doing and what his life is like now or do you want to get his attention? If the former, you’ll not come across as needy and even if he didn’t respond, that would be OK, because you’d understand that he’s probably busy. If the latter, it might come across as needy and if he didn’t respond, you might take it as an insult.

We all crave attention and especially want the attention of those we like. We just can’t force them to focus on us and if we try, it’ll put annoying pressure on the relationship that will eventually break things.

Go ahead and ask how his new life is going. He might appreciate you taking interest and giving attention to him! Just be aware of your intentions. If you need for him to respond so that you can feel safer or good about your relationship, then it might be better to not contact him right now. Feel safe and good first, so that you don’t need him to provide those feelings for you.

Hello Eddie!

You say that your “real personality” is angry, sad and bitter and that the cheerful part is the false one. I think that they are both equally false or real. The negative personality has also been created for the purpose of protecting you from hurt. It’s ironic, because it’s the very thing that ends up causing you hurt, not just by pushing people away, but by keeping you feeling hurt (as you tell yourself negative things about yourself). And when someone gets close to you, your defenses activate and you push them away, and it validates your belief that people abandon you.

Those negative things that you tell to people are also “tricks up your sleeve” that you use to make others believe what you believe to be true, which is that you’d be worthless. That obviously isn’t true, but it’s something you’ve accepted as your truth. Accepting love can be very scary and painful as well, so sometimes holding onto the negative believes is like the saying “better the devil you know”. At least you’re in control. If you’d have to let go of that and open yourself to love and acceptance, you’d be totally exposed. I’m pretty sure your ego (these personalities you have created) would fight back. It’s like a self-defense mechanism that is willing to fight dirty if you try to turn it off. It’ll tell you that you’ll get hurt and you’re stupid if you trust and all kinds of things that will definitely hurt you and keep you from opening up.

I have like a ton of thoughts about this subject, but the one advice I keep coming back to that seems to be the gentlest way to try to gain control is to take away the words. If you take away your words, your defenses can’t do anything. What you call your real personality is just a construct of the mind that requires words to exist. You define it with words and you tell yourself that you are a negative person, when in reality you’re probably neither negative nor positive. You just are. So when you start telling yourself that you’re this or that, just stop. Interrupt yourself. The more you interrupt yourself, the less this part of you will try to tell you anything. Then just be. Enjoy the silence and enjoy just being. You don’t need to counter the negative with a lot of positives, but just remove the negative for a while and live in a neutral space.

Then I hope that you will start to accept that you are loved and lovable. I’m talking about the very spirit of you. You as a human being. Your behavior may dictate if you’ll have a lot of friendships and romantic love in your life, but unconditional love doesn’t care about the superficial. Unconditional love comes at the exact moment you believe that you deserve it and you want it. It has always been there.

Like I said, I have a ton of ideas about this subject and it’s all clear in my head, but I’m not that sure if it comes across as a bit too sporadic 🙂 I hope not.

Please accept that you will never, ever be able to get her to feel what you want her to feel or to say (and mean) what you want to hear. It hurts, but it will get better. But as long as you hold onto some kind of hope that you would be able to change things around, you’ll not be able to let go.

You are not the only one to have such thought patterns and I have personally suffered through something like that many times. I didn’t have strong enough boundaries and the self-esteem to end bad relationships when I should’ve and I just allowed them to linger until enough damage was done. I was completely stuck being preoccupied with other people’s lives and thoughts and feelings instead of my own. It is hell on earth, I know that. And I also know that it’s very painful to change that, but after you are able to do it, there is such bliss and serenity…

I got some help from Al-Anon, which is the sister organization of AA. It was basically for friends and family members of alcoholics, but essentially in the meetings there were just loads of people who were codependent and had forgotten to actually live their own lives and tried all kinds of ways to make others behave in ways they wanted them to behave. There’s not enough trust in one’s own abilities and too much emphasis on another person’s power over us. As long as you are preoccupied with her life, you’ll not be able to build that confidence you need in yourself to carry on with your life and build relationships that are healthy and not hurtful.

I think you are also stuck in some kind of illusion, which is actually quite “normal” when in a relationship like that. When I’ve been in hurtful relationships, I never trusted my own eyes and ears and my feelings, but I listened to all the explanations how it was actually I who was in the wrong. I also got depressed, because I truly believed that I was the worst girlfriend in the world and if only I were different, things would be better. It was all one big lie and an illusion which I believed and helped to create. Then you become afraid to face the reality, because you think that the reality is that you’re bad. That is not the case. Reality is your friend. Perhaps that’s why you’re afraid to write about these things, because then you have to face the reality that it’s over? Or that you chose a girl who was not good for you? Been there, done that. I know how you feel, and you don’t need to be afraid.

My advice is to connect with real things as much as you can. Get out of Facebook. Get out of your head and into your body. You said that you’ve tried meditation, but you could also try mindfulness in a way that you go into the nature (or where ever) and really pay attention to your surroundings and to your senses by touching, smelling, seeing. You need to build trust with your own senses, so that you believe what you see and hear, and if something feels wrong, you’ll believe that feeling. Slowly start building your confidence again by doing things that you like to do that are tangible. Listen to yourself and pay attention to your own needs. And if you start having a negative dialogue in your head, just put an end to it immediately. Just make it stop. You’ll see that with time, as you keep interrupting the negative self-talk, it’ll eventually quiet down.

Just focus and be kind to yourself and you’ll get through it. And afterwards you’ll have more compassion towards those who are lost.

Hello Eishita,

I just joined this forum and was about to write my first post, but felt compelled to respond to you first 🙂

I have this view/theory on trying to conquer negative thoughts with positive affirmations: it doesn’t stop the negativity, but it just introduces another voice into the mix. So there’s going to be a battle between two separate voices, each telling you a different truth. This can feel like an endless circle or constantly bouncing back and forth between two extremes.

My view on meditation is that it’s the time when you silence those voices completely. All of them. You stop verbalizing things and explaining to yourself what’s going on. You simply experience things without creating a story about the experience. To me, it’s been a real blessing to learn how to do that, and it can be learned with a bit of practice. The momentary relief from the chatter is wonderful. That’s when it’s easier to see that life is actually pretty neutral. You are neither good nor bad and there is no such thing as “not good enough” or “better than others”. To be able to compare, you need words, and if the words are taken away, you’ll exist in a space where everything is as it should be, and there’s no better or worse.

So I would propose that you take a moment and just try to stop verbalizing what you’re feeling, seeing, hearing… For example, look around you and allow your senses to gather information, but don’t start analyzing it. If you see a glass, just see it and don’t start telling yourself “that is a glass”. I know you will, but just try to practice being aware that you constantly produce words that explain to you what’s happening. Then try to let go of that for a moment and just be. Allow your surroundings to just be as well, without attaching descriptions to everything. You’ll get better at it with practice.

It’s honestly a really good skill to have, because you can then create serenity when it’s needed. The purpose is not to stop feeling, and there’s nothing wrong with being emotionally sensitive to the events in your life. That is just one of your great abilities. The point is to stop ruminating over the pain (yes, I see the irony of my nickname) and creating an identity based on a passing thought. The point is to let go of words that are hurtful and not internalize them. Not only the ones that your own mind creates, but also those that pass the lips of other people. With social media, it’s so common to just blurt out every passing thought without actually thinking of the consequences or whether the words are true or not. As a result, we have masses of people stuck in a cycle of being hurtful and getting hurt. It’s good to give yourself a moment of rest from all that.

Since our identities also rely on words, it can feel a bit weird when there’s no way to describe what you feel and who you are, but rest assured: you’ll not disappear. You’ll just have another view on what reality actually is without some of the constructs of the mind. You might realize your own power and how limiting words can be. You can also put it all in perspective, because you have the power over the words, not the other way around. They are a tool for you to use, not shackles that describe your existence.

You’re much more powerful than you realize and will ever be able to describe 🙂 We all are!

Cheers,
Armi