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 🙂