The thing about painful emotions is that you just can't reason with them. Before I started my recovery journey, most of my life was devoted to finding ways not to feel.
Bless them always, but neither of my parents were into expressing "negative" feelings—not ours and not theirs. Messages like "Dry those tears" and "Oh, just never mind" and the popular-back-then admonition "I'll give you something to cry for" were ever-present in our home.
In early recovery, I spent a lot of time exploring my feelings intellectually but still trying to avoid experiencing them. That worked for a short while.
Over time, I became willing to excavate the deep, dark, painful feelings that I had buried for so long. Working through those feelings meant a lot of tear-soaked days in therapy, crying so hard that every muscle in my face ached.
Feeling hard feelings is exhausting, but not as exhausting as running from them. Bringing those dark emotions to the surface, feeling them, and then releasing them is an act of self-love.