The following post is totally conjecture, but it seems to have worked for me, so maybe it will work for you too.
Physical pain is the body’s way of alerting you that something is wrong and you need to take action. Emotional pain is the same.
Therefore, if you want to shorten the impact of emotional pain, the best way to do that is to take action in a similar manner to what you would do with physical pain. Figure out what the problem is, and try to solve it.
So the first step in fixing your emotional pain is to identify what is wrong. It seems simple, but most people just live with the pain, and don’t take the time to concretely figure out what is really bothering them.
To do this, you’ll need to journal and brainstorm, so take out your pencil and paper, and ask yourself, why am I in pain. What is the root cause of the pain? What are all of the secondary causes of the pain? What are the losses that I am afraid of? What are my fears? What are my concerns? Put this list down on paper and then rank them in order of importance.
Once this exercise is complete, you have now taken your fears from an abstract fear to a concrete fear, and I think you will already find that the next day you will feel better since a lot of pain is just from the fear of the unknown and feeling that comes from being overwhelmed with a situation due to it being unknown.
If you take the exercise one step further, however, you can further impact your own personal pain, by actually taking each point and answering yourself about how bad each thing really is. Some things of course will be really bad. However, others, you will find aren’t that bad, or are rather manageable. At that point, you can logically tell yourself, that the only thing you really need to worry about are the few points that you decided are really bad, which probably are just one or two things.
The neat thing about this exercise is that you have now gone from total emotional pain to one or two items that really are the essence of the pain – and that is a very manageable amount of things for you to deal with.
Now that you have your few items, you have two options, some things will be items that are in your control. If they are, that’s great! Put a plan in place to take care of things. Then they are off your plate and don’t need to be worried about. If they are not in your control, there is nothing you can do about it, so simply recognize that fact, and give yourself over to that fact.
As I mentioned, all of the above exercise is best done in a journal, since the whole idea of the exercise is to take ambiguous fears and turn them into concrete thoughts about what our real fear(s) really is that are causing us pain, and what we are going to do about them. The journal allows us to concretely see the outcome.
I think you will find that by doing the above exercise, you can quickly help yourself overcome pain, and move forward productively with your life, with minimal disruption, and pain!