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No one talks about how the worst part of any breakup is the crushing sense of rejection. Or maybe it’s just me. When you have a history of abandonment issues and an anxious attachment style, rejection sensitivity is already a problem. To compound it with the finality of a breakup is excruciating.

When someone breaks up with us, the rejection is multilayered. We’re being rejected as a life partner, a lover, and a friend. What’s worse is that the feeling doesn’t hit all at once. It’s those little moments of realizing that this person is okay if we date someone else and likely is interested in dating other people. This person is willing to lose us — as both friend and lover, to never see or speak to us again, and to never again wake up with our face on the opposite pillow. The feeling of rejection intensifies with each realization and can become all-consuming.

It doesn’t matter if we’re normally rational human beings. We’re innately driven to connect, and when a connection is severed, it hurts as much as any physical pain. The rejection aspect of the breakup doesn’t just bruise the ego; it also attacks our sense of self-worth, which can be amplified if we’ve had to recover from prior grief and loss.

The last breakup hit harder than any that came before — likely because I had already dealt with divorce, an abusive relationship, and a history of childhood trauma. I wanted to feel safe, emotionally secure, and loved. Instead, I was asked to downgrade a relationship with someone I loved to a friendship instead. I’ll be honest — I loved him enough to try to take those steps back, but my heart was broken and reeling from the rejection. I couldn’t be a friend to him because I was too busy trying to patch up a badly damaged heart.

If I’m honest, that sense of rejection still hits when I least expect it. I can go weeks without a thought of it, and then I’m sitting up in bed in the middle of the night with silent tears streaming down my face. When a relationship is long-distance, there’s an additional layer of rejection wrapped inside a breakup. With a colleague or person living nearby, there’s a chance we might run into them again. We can even sit down face-to-face and have a relationship moratorium. There’s at least a little hope that the last time we saw them won’t be the last time we ever do.

With distance factored in, I know it’s unlikely I will ever see my former partner again. It was one of the earliest thoughts to gut-punch me during the breakup. Every word he uttered was kind, but underneath those words, all I could think about was the fact that he never wanted to see me again. While that might not be wholly representative of his feelings, the breakup signified that he was willing to take that risk to be free of a relationship with me.

It hurt like hell. Sometimes, it still does.

I wish I was a person who got over the loss more easily, but that’s not the hand I’ve been dealt. I’m working on it. Intellectual acceptance of the end of the relationship was the easiest part. I could accept that he was free to not love me back and to end the relationship. I could support the fact that he was making the best decision for himself and even applaud that choice.

But emotionally — I was wrecked. My acceptance of his decision warred with the pain of losing a relationship I badly wanted to keep. I had to mourn lost dreams while trying to dream new ones. So, even if I could find acceptance on the surface, I was still struggling with the overwhelming sense of rejection.

He wasn’t in the wrong for ending the relationship, but that fact doesn’t cancel out the feeling of complete and utter abandonment and rejection. Within 24 hours of the breakup, friends were urging me to move on — even going as far as to suggest who I might choose to move on with, but all I could think about was this person who wasn’t just my partner and lover but my best friend. I’d lost so much in the course of one phone call, but everyone around me kept moving forward and questioning why I seemed stuck in place.

7 Ways to Recover from the Rejection of a Breakup

Healing from rejection isn’t as easy as intellectually processing the facts of a breakup. I wish it was. I’d love to be able to acknowledge that the rejection wasn’t personal and then proceed not to take it personally, but that would invalidate the very real feelings I have about what happened. I can tell myself all I want is that it doesn’t reflect on my character, but it doesn’t change how I feel. So, I try this instead.

1. Accept and Validate Feelings

We have enough people judging us for not moving forward. We don’t need to be one of them. Quite frankly, feeling our feelings is moving forward. We know the relationship is over. We’re just allowed to have feelings about that, and we don’t have control over how long it takes to process them. Accepting how we feel and acknowledging that those emotions are completely valid even if they aren’t rational is the first step. We don’t need to involve shame in the process.

2. Assess Personal Support

We can easily exhaust our support system when we’re grieving. People don’t mean to be insensitive. They can just only handle the same topic for so long, particularly when we’re rehashing the same old thoughts and feelings. The boundaries of our support system can feel like another form of rejection, but it helps to assess our personal support systems to determine who might have space to listen to us without judgment — and who might be overwhelmed with their own lives and issues at the moment.

For instance, someone who is in the middle of a magical love story might not want to hear hours of tales of how ours crashed and burned. They might want some time to process the good things happening in their lives, not endlessly rehash the heartache. That’s understandable. It’s important to be a sensitive friend and to acknowledge that we can’t just dump our feelings onto people and expect them to be happy about it. We need to make sure they have the space and time to handle it before we just start unloading on them.

3. Feel But Don’t Wallow

I like a good pity party as much as the next person, but I’m careful not to wallow in my feelings. I feel them fully, but I’m not trying to encourage my sad state by dwelling on it. Eventually, feelings will pass if we let them. Other feelings will come. Dwelling on bad things will only build pain and resentment. It never makes us happier or better adjusted. Finding that balance between feeling our pain and wallowing in it is important. Some people never realize the difference and simply prolong the grieving process.

4. Build Stronger Self-Worth

It’s probably not true that he had no feelings about me moving on with someone else or doing so himself. It’s probably not even true that he never wanted to see me again. But that’s how it felt. To love someone so much and to feel so wholly rejected was devastating, but I began to realize the necessity of building stronger self-worth in the face of that devastation.

I needed reminders that I was still loveable, desirable, and worthy of love and belonging. I needed those reminders to come from myself and not be conditional on anyone else’s acceptance or approval. I had to recognize that heartbreak hurts, but the other person isn’t saying that we aren’t worthy of love. They are only saying they aren’t the right match for us. It might hurt, but it also sets us free to find someone who might be more compatible with us.

5. Accept and Trust the Process

It was incredibly defeating to wake up in the middle of the night years after the breakup to find myself still devastated by a sense of rejection. To be fair, there were some extenuating circumstances. I was overstimulated and overwrought when I went to sleep. My anxiety was already high. I just didn’t expect to be moved right back to the start of that pain, and I can’t even say why that thought hit me with such poignancy at that moment.

I’m learning to both accept and trust the process. Healing isn’t a linear path, and there are days when it feels like we’re moving backward more than forward. I feel like I’m losing at the healing version of Chutes and Ladders, but I know that this is part of the process, not a departure from it. Healing takes time, and it just doesn’t happen all at once. There are things we’ll still be healing our way through years later — and that’s okay. I know one day all the steps I’m taking now will culminate in true recovery from that sense of rejection and heartache.

6. Grow Through What You Go Through

One of the game-changers in my healing process was when I began to be accountable for my behavior. I started asking myself if there were things that I had done that might have left him with a sense of rejection long before the breakup. Times when I didn’t listen or didn’t listen well. Times when I misunderstood him or failed to see the importance of something significant. Times when I tried to love him in one way when he wanted love expressed in another.

While I can’t change any of it, I can allow it to help me grow as a person. I know I wasn’t a perfect partner no matter how hard I tried. No one can be. But I also know that I did my best. Now, I’m learning more, and my best has leveled up again. I’ll make mistakes, but I hope I’m at least learning from them.

Part of growing also involves learning the lessons. I don’t just mean the ones we perceive as negative. The positive lessons count, too. That relationship taught me how to practice talking through conflict without letting it devolve into unkindness. It taught me how important it is to have shared interests and to allow people to share their interests with us so that we expand our worldview. I learned the ways I show up well in relationships and the ways I don’t but need to work on. Time spent in that relationship wasn’t a waste. It was an incredibly precious part of my life, and I’m grateful even on the days when grief rears its ugly head, and it hurts.

7. Make a List, Check It Thrice

I’m a fan of journaling and lists. It can help organize our thoughts. Sometimes, it helps to find relief and closure in putting a pen to paper and writing down how we feel — not to send it out into the world for an ex to read but because we badly need to get it off our chests. It can even help to write a list of each component that makes up that sense of rejection and then write a way to address it. Frankly, many people take that sense of physical rejection and go to sleep with someone else to feel better about themselves. The rebound might highlight our desirability, but it doesn’t usually cancel out the feelings of rejection.

Whether we make a list or journal about what we’re going through, it’s important to have some type of outlet where we’re not wearing down our social support or firing off messages to our exes every time the hurt hits. We need a place where we can be completely honest about how we’re feeling without fear, insecurity, or judgment. It doesn’t have to be rational. Feelings often aren’t. It just needs to be authentic to our experience.

If I’d gotten up in the middle of the night instead of trying to go back to sleep, I might have written something like this. It hurts to still be hurting even after all this time. It hurts that I didn’t know the last time I saw him would be the last time. I miss when I had a lover who was my best friend, and sometimes I’m afraid I’ll never have that again. I’m sad about what I lost, and I hate the silence that exists between us. I’m tired, and my emotional state hasn’t been helped by dreaming of a painful past.

Or something like that. I don’t know. I was exhausted and nearly delirious with it. But the feeling of rejection was so significant it lingered hours later when I woke up. I’m still healing, but I’m hopeful. One day, the pain will lessen, and I know that I am capable of loving again. I both look forward to and fear that day because I know that everything we love can be lost. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

Rejection recovery might not get a lot of attention, but it’s an essential part of dealing with heartbreak. While I’ve talked about romantic relationships, we can even go through this process when we lose a job or have a dream fall apart in our hands. It can happen when we lose friends or fail to make the one we want. It’s painful, and to heal from the loss, we’re going to need to recover from the rejection of it.

Originally published on Medium