One thing that I’ve always a hard time with is bouncing back after a breakup and trying to figure out how to stop hurting.

I’m much better now than I was years ago, but every now and then, something happens and I find myself stuck on feelings of pain while rehashing the past.

One year after a very painful breakup, I still felt completely stuck. How could he just forget about me and move on so quickly with another girl? Didn’t I mean anything to him? Wasn’t I enough?

I hadn’t been “enough” for him because I believed that I wasn’t “good enough” for anyone – myself included. It’s hard to make someone see in you things that you can’t even see in yourself.

I was devastated. So what did I do? I would go involve myself with another emotionally unavailable guy or a new friend that I felt like I had to “win over” and somehow compete for their love and attention. And as long as I involved myself with people like this, I never had to deal with the pain of my past. Even though I was in pain, I wasn’t really doing anything to get to the root of it.

I didn’t know how to stop hurting. My pain was a weed that I kept spraying the repellent of denial on – instead of taking the time to get the right tools and uproot it, once and for all.

How do you get unstuck when you don’t know how to stop hurting?

What kept me stuck was a lack of self-love. I had zero belief that I could get or feel any better. My confidence was gone. And even though I felt like I was dealing with my pain just because I always felt it, I wasn’t. At all. Constantly feeling is not dealing.

You would never treat your physical health this way so why continue operating at the cost of your emotional body?

I was like a car running for a year with the break alert light on. My breaks finally gave out and I hit a wall. When I learned how to properly feel my way through the pain, I started to embrace those feelings. This allowed me to stop emotionally shutting down whenever something made me feel vulnerable or when I felt like I was at risk of being abandoned or rejected.

This is exactly why I’m such an advocate for not contacting your ex after a breakup. Even though you miss him and are heartbroken, you must grieve. Grieve the death of the person that you realize, does not exist. Know that they have not changed and understand that this is a symptom of you needing to turn inward. You have a real shot at having the kind of relationships, friendships, and life that you’ve always dreamed of. Don’t let it pass you by.

If you don’t know how to stop hurting, the only way to unclog that nasty toilet for good is to feel the pain and work through it by taking action and facing your fears, head-on. Heal, deal, and release. Flush the sh*t.

If you acknowledge that you are hurting and that pain is residing within you, what will happen to that pain? If you stop fighting it, acknowledge that it’s there, and commit to feeling it and working through it, what will be of the pain then?

Just like the house alarm that goes crazy when you walk in and it won’t stop blaring until you enter the passcode, you’ll begin to disarm the pain and the hold it has on you.

The reason you can’t stop hurting and feel trapped in your feelings is the same reason that you keep revisiting and attracting the same, hurtful dynamics and relationships. This is all you know. It’s familiar and to you – it’s home.

Sometimes home is NOT where the heart is. Sometimes home is a dirty, painful, and f*cked up place that needs a deep cleaning.

To move past this once and for all, you need to honor and acknowledge the bad, the ugly, the painful, the good… everything. 

Yes, of course, remembering the pain was hard. But it allowed me to make the commitment to myself to work through my unresolved feelings, as opposed to working against them.

Your great, great, great, great grandparents kicked their asses to stay strong and stay alive so that YOU could be here and decide to take action now. Not so you could live a life of “destined” misery, get rejected by undeserving people, and be forever broken. The End.

You are built to prevail and you can get out of the pain. 

You are never alone; we’ve got each other.

Written by: Natasha Adamo