"Learn to be able to connect to sadness. This is so important because it bridges the gap between what you actually got and what you should have [had]," Marianne Trent, a clinical psychologist who specialises in grief and trauma and author of The Grief Collective: Stories of Life, Loss, and Learning to Heal, told POPSUGAR. Validating those emotions can actually help you learn to better manage them.
If your instinct is to run from what you're feeling, try breathing through it. "It's highly likely you can manage to purposefully hold in mind something mildly distressing for the length of time it takes you to take three deep, slow breaths in and three deep, slow breaths out," Dr. Trent said. "Once you've done that, you can distract yourself in the way you usually would." This is an example of a distress tolerance activity found in dialectical behaviour therapy. The idea is to help you realise that your pain isn't as overwhelming as it may seem.