So yesterday I wrote a blog post about hurt. Today I wanted to finish up with the second half of the article I found on IQ Matrix that discusses ways to overcome. The word overcome is such a powerful word in my opinion. It means to succeed in dealing with a problem or difficulty but it can also mean overcome or overwhelm. These are truly active and strong suggestions. Succeeding in dealing with a problem! Wow. That means you won the battle. Maybe not the war just yet but you are a step closer. Feeling a sense of success is a very powerful and very motivating sensation. It elevates our spirits and allows us to believe that YES! We can do something. How empowering and how motivating. I love it. But overcome can also be deflating as well. Being overcome with emotion or overwhelmed can manifest in lack of action. We can freeze, hide, become defeated and afraid. In as much as that is also a reality of our lives, I am choosing the more positive look at overcome today!
So here are some tips on how we can try and move forward and overcome the hurt inflicted upon us by someone we love.
I hope you will take the time to work on these. I will hold you all in my thoughts and pray that you find the strength to battle on. Please do the same for me.

Suggestions for Overcoming Hurt

Feeling hurt is never an easy emotion to deal with. It’s painful and makes life seem absolutely miserable. However, there are certain things you can do that will help you to minimize your feelings of hurt, and hopefully lay down the groundwork to help you work through your emotions successfully.

Focus on Blessings

When you’re feeling hurt, it’s easy to blow things out of proportion and make certain of aspects of your life larger and more important then they should be. You get so caught up in your feelings of hurt that nothing else seems to matter. However, things do matter. And in fact, if you take time to think about it, there are probably a lot of things that matter, and a lot of things that you can be grateful for.

When feeling hurt, focus on your blessings, and on the things you are most grateful for. This will hopefully put your feelings into their proper context. It may even effectively help you re-prioritize and shift your focus onto more important and meaningful things that will bring you greater happiness and fulfillment in the long-run.

Focus on Your Strengths

In order to find direction during moments of hurt, it’s important that you remind yourself of your strengths and the things that have brought you to this point in your life. Your strengths might be your optimism, faith, patience, forgiveness, honesty, compassion, self-belief, etc. These are the things that will get you through this difficult time. In fact, these qualities can help you regain the confidence you need within yourself to move beyond this painful experience.

It’s therefore important to re-direct your energies away from what is hurting you, and instead focus-in on your strongest qualities that can help you get through this difficult situation successfully.

Let Go of Past Hurts

Are you holding onto things that hurt you years ago? Maybe you’re holding onto these hurts because you feel as though you were unjustly wronged in some way. However, what’s the point? Can you do anything about these hurts right here, right now? If you can’t, then what’s the point of holding onto them? Whatever happened in the past, happened in the past. Let go of these things and move on with your life. This of course doesn’t mean that you should forget everything. By all means don’t forget these important moments. Learn from them, and use them to make better decisions in the present, however don’t allow your past hurts to haunt and aggravate the life you’re living today.

Smile More Often

Being hurt is a state-of-mind. You are feeling hurt because you are perceiving events, circumstances and people’s intentions in a certain way that makes you feel absolutely miserable. Is it possible that another person might see things differently? What hurts you might not even phase them. It’s all a state-of-mind.

To transform your state-of-mind, try smiling a little more and see how that changes how you feel about the situation. Maybe your feelings of hurt will turn into curiosity. And when this happens, a whole new world of possibilities will open up for you.

Always Accept Responsibility

Your pain feels at its worst when you feel as though you had very little control over the situation. You feel as though someone else is to blame and you become the victim of circumstance. This makes you feel powerless and makes it very difficult to move past your feelings of hurt.

One way to instantly feel better about yourself is to accept responsibility for what happened and for how events transpired. In fact, you probably in some way — directly or indirectly — played a part in creating this situation. Recognize this. You are at least partly responsible for what happened, and this is a good thing, because with responsibility comes the willingness to make positive changes.

Once you feel at least partly responsible, this gives you the strength you need to potentially make things better — to right the wrongs. You now have the power to mend your relationships and lay down a path for a more positive future.

Surround Yourself with Positive People

One of the best ways to make yourself feel better almost instantly is to talk about your feelings with other people. Have a chat with a close family member or friend and explain what happened. Get their perspective and opinion about the situation, and maybe even work together with them to try and resolve your feelings. There is no telling how much better you will feel once you get things off your chest. And who knows, maybe the other person can convince you that there is nothing really here that justifies your feelings of hurt. And maybe that’s all you need to help you move forward through this moment of your life.

Don’t Take Things Personally

You will always end up feeling hurt if you continue to take things personally. Sometimes people say and do things because they are trying to work through their own personal insecurities and problems. In fact, what they say and do might have very little — if anything — to do with you, and all to do with them and their issues. For this reason it’s important that you step outside yourself during moments of hurt and look at the full picture from their perspective as well as from an outsider’s perspective. Maybe this will help you to understand that there is nothing here to feel hurt about. Instead, show a little compassion for the other person and try to help them work through their own personal insecurities.

People Make Mistakes

Sooner or later someone will hurt you. There’s no denying this. It will happen. However, more often then not, people won’t hurt you intentionally. People make mistakes. People make blunders and errors, and end up regretting some of the things they do and say. Of course, they might not own up immediately to these mistakes. To do so would wound their pride. What they need is compassion and understanding, and maybe a little patience on your part. Eventually they will come around and admit their mistakes, but it might take some time. Be there for them and accept them wholeheartedly, because you might very well be in their shoes at some point in the future.

Learn More About Yourself

Every hurt you experience, gives you an opportunity to learn more about yourself. It gives you an opportunity to learn more about your values, rules and personal expectations. It gives you an opportunity to learn more about others and about how you relate to other people socially and intimately. It gives you insight into people’s motives, feelings and intentions. It even helps you get to know yourself and your emotional tendencies at a deeper level. And as you learn, you grow, and as you grow you will make better choices and decisions in the future that will help you to manage and minimize your feelings of hurt far more effectively.