You don’t. Distracting yourself from the emotional experience is how you develop supressed emotions that will keep cropping up for years to come. Instead of trying to distract yourself from these emotions, when they crop up, just take a moment to notice how it feels, and accept it. First be courageous to feel your difficult emotions, then be willing to feel them completely. As you sit with your feelings, they will tend to dissipate over the course of a few seconds or minutes. Then later, the feeling will come back, and you may again feel an aversion to feeling it. And then, again, you can sit with it. Note that there is no pressure to “do it right” any time you feel these emotions since, after all, the emotions will just keep coming back until you have fully processed them.
You note in another comment that you don’t know how to embrace something that hurts you. But it isn’t complicated. Pain and discomfort are just feelings, and we can accept them with equanimity. It just takes practice.
You don’t. Distracting yourself from the emotional experience is how you develop supressed emotions that will keep cropping up for years to come. Instead of trying to distract yourself from these emotions, when they crop up, just take a moment to notice how it feels, and accept it. First be courageous to feel your difficult emotions, then be willing to feel them completely. As you sit with your feelings, they will tend to dissipate over the course of a few seconds or minutes. Then later, the feeling will come back, and you may again feel an aversion to feeling it. And then, again, you can sit with it. Note that there is no pressure to “do it right” any time you feel these emotions since, after all, the emotions will just keep coming back until you have fully processed them.
You note in another comment that you don’t know how to embrace something that hurts you. But it isn’t complicated. Pain and discomfort are just feelings, and we can accept them with equanimity. It just takes practice.