I worked out a nifty trick to deal with pain. I'm not sure if this is very good advice or not but hey it worked for me (but take this idea with a grain of salt). The key is, you transform it into anger. Anger is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to deal with than pain. And its easy to let go of too. So what I did was I concentrated on the specific things regarding the pain that p1ssed me off. Eg. If it was someone repeatedly telling you you were a horrible person, you think to yourself "How DARE you say that to me? what makes you better than me? Look at you, you are ugly/unemployed/whatever irks you about this person" etc etc. Really get yourself riled up. And then in the future whenever you think of this pain you just automatically get angry instead of sad. It doesn't take all that long to do this either.

Then when you want to "let go" of the anger all you have to do is exercise or go and bash up a pillow or punching bag or whatever, and boom its gone. Wayyyyyy easier than to deal with the pain itself. I would not recommend doing this with multiple issues at once though because it changes you into a really horrible angry person. But one issue at a time is fine. If you did it with one issue at a time, serial style, I think it would be a very beneficial technique. And the bonus of this technique is that you don't have to sit in front of a therapist as a snivelling mess to deal with the issue, you can do it in the privacy of your own home!