Why Can't I Stop Replaying What They Did to Me?

How to feel the hurt of being wronged by someone without getting stuck going in circles.

I will let you in on something. I have my own rocky relationships, and when I am in the thick of one, my first instinct is that it is entirely their fault and not mine at all. I say that with a smile, but you know the feeling. Someone close to us does something that lands as unfair, and the mind goes to work building the case.

I have been on the receiving end of some real wrongs in my life. People who ripped me off, betrayed me, let me down. And what I eventually learned, often the slow way, is that the path through was not to win the argument in my head. It was to let myself, including some very young parts of myself, feel the rawness of it.

That is not where most of us go first. Most of us go to the replay.

You know the replay. Something happens, maybe you get ganged up on, maybe you are the one being cut off, and afterward you cannot stop thinking about it. You rehash the scene. You rehearse what you should have said. You assemble the evidence for the hundredth time. It feels like you are working the problem. Mostly you are just going around the track again.

Here is what I have come to understand about that. One of the functions of obsessing and ruminating is that it defends against feelings. As long as you are up in the case, running the analysis, you do not have to drop down into the hurt underneath it. And the trouble is that the track wears in. The more laps we do around the rumination track, the deeper the track gets, because neurons that fire together wire together. You are not getting free. You are practicing.

So the way out is a little counterintuitive. The way out of too much rumination is to let yourself feel the raw feelings, to the degree that you safely can. In a phrase I offered someone recently that I think holds up: feel more, ruminate less.

I want to be careful here. This is not about spiritual bypassing or pretending the wrong did not happen. If someone treated you badly, that is real, and we do not want to lie about reality. We are social mammals. When rejection or betrayal or unwarranted criticism comes at us, of course it affects us. It is understandable to have feelings about it. The question is whether those feelings move through you, or whether they get walled off behind an endless case you keep making against the other person.

This came up recently on a live call inside my course, Change Your Mind, where I walked a brave volunteer through the whole of it: how to resource yourself, feel the hurt without drowning in it, name the wrong fairly, and finally give yourself a pass. It is the part that tends to bring the relief. If you would like to work through this kind of thing with me, the next cohort starts August 8, though you can join anytime. As a reader here, you can take 10% off with the code substack10.

Below, I will walk you through that same practice, step by step.