Asking more questions to understand where a person is coming from and why can be helpful to create and find bridges. When we relate to others by sharing our personal stories, we invite others to get to know us and also open up more so we can understand them in deeper ways.
Sometimes we engage with someone, they won't engage back or respond in the way we might expect someone to respond. This can be disappointing or even offputting and make us feel disconnected from them entirely. This a challenging pattern that can play out in conversations, especially online conversations since people can ghost you or ignore you altogether without any explanation.
It seem when that happens, most of the time we just try to interpret what it means based off our own speculations, assumptions, or conclusions about them. And maybe our conclusions are accurate. Or maybe not?
If we are really curious about the truth of a situation though, the only thing you can do it try to keep asking them as directly as possible. It might go something like:
"Why are you ignoring me?"
"I'm trying to talk with you. What is your problem?"
"I'm upset with you. Why are you behaving this way?"
"I'm trying to have a conversation with you. Why are you avoiding me?"
"I feel like you are playing games. Why won't you have a conversation with me about this?"
Of course they still may or may not respond to you.
The inward journey or Self-realization invites us to go within and meet all the feelings that sense of rejection brings up inside our self. This is obviously a very challenging and uncomfortable approach.
However, the benefit of the inward Self-realization approach, (if done to completion of the process) is that you will feel liberated and free from feeling their actions as personally against you, as them being an enemy, from needing something from them that they can't give, and also while still keeping your heart open to them, to their journey, and to life in general. There is a feeling of wholeness and completeness felt within yourself at the end of that inner-transformation process. And also, you are still able to engage with them in a way that doesn't harbor resentment, contempt, jealousy, disgust, or degradation.
This process is obviously challenging however, because to meet it to completion, you will have to face all the vulnerable feelings that get triggered when we feel rejected, alone, or wrong somehow. And you will have to face those feelings alone within yourself.
No one wants to feel rejected and all alone in their feelings. It's heart-breaking. Also, over time if these feelings are not fully resolved internally to completion (as explained above), then the physical body and mind will carry the stress of that wound, which ultimately causes mental health problems and leads to disease in the physical body. All feelings that are unresolved will find a way to express themselves and do have consequences to your health.
Another approach, however, might be to try to get back at the person who rejects or hurts you. Since it can seem obvious that their actions or inactions and behaviors caused you to feel hurt or feel rejected, then maybe that is the most logical and natural way move and respond? You would have to question things from many angles to discover what is actually true for you and for each specific situation.
If through your reflection and questioning process, you do discover that what you are feeling does have something to do with them and their behaviors primarily, then you could choose to retaliate in some way. That is a way to move and express the energy in your body-mind so you don't feel so heavy, full of stressful feelings, and alone in processing them by yourself. And the benefit is it also simultaneously gives them a consequence to their behavior. People having consequences to their behaviors is a way to seek justice and to try to get people to change their behaviors.
So if you choose that approach of retaliation, then their are many things you could choose to do. Maybe that might mean being passive aggressive somehow, or trying to call them out publicly, or telling other people about their behaviors and their bad qualities, or getting other people to believe they are wrong and go against them, or through shaming them publicly, or ridiculing them, or trying to embarrass them, or hurt their reputation somehow...
There are many ways to try to cause consequences to others, to try to seek justice, or to just try get back at someone somehow.
Sometimes, however, these conflicts may just be a simple misunderstanding that get blown up because of a mis-communication. And what a shame that would be if we sought to retaliate about something that was just simply misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Then we would unknowingly become the person who is hurting someone for no good reason.
We can't really know what is the truth though unless we try to find the truth out by asking questions and being persistent about getting to the bottom of things. That takes facing confrontation with someone. It means being direct. And it also means being vulnerable in expressing what we are experiencing and wanting from them in a clear way.
This approach of asking questions and being persistent in our engagement in conversations also means facing more feelings we might not want to feel, just like the inward Self-realization approach. So it's not necessarily an easy path at all.
This approach could be called the outward Self-realization approach. It happens through persistent communication and engagement and a desire to find the truth through continuously engaging in conversation with others - even when they are uncomfortable conversations.
The benefit of this approach, however, (if done to completion) is that you will feel a resolve within yourself and have more consciousness, clarity, and understanding of why things are appearing in your experience the way that they are. Once you see how you are responsible for these patterns appearing in your experience, then you do not have to keep unconsciously drawing them in. You will discover and clearly understand what your responsibility is/was through the reflection and learning process that happens through these conversations and engagements. This leads to more wisdom for the future you to know how to resolve these patterns before they ever have to play out.
The best thing about this approach if you stick with it consistently, is that it leads to you gaining more authentic friendships, relationships, and deep and nourishing connections with others than ever before. That happens because when you do this approach, it means you are not accepting anything less than that from others, while also becoming the type of person that can sustain deep and meaningful, real and true interpersonal-relationships that are built from a foundation of truth.
I guess to figure out what the best approach is for your situation though would be to consider your specific situation and also consider your values. It would be useful to consider how important it is for you to feel connection and understanding with others, or with the person you are feeling disconnected from or rejected by specifically.
It would also be useful to consider how important it is for you to get to the truth of why this patten is even happening and appearing in your experience at all. Based off my experience, however, that type of true psychological driver of seeking the real truth in our relational interactions and conversations doesn't happen until we reach a threshold where our cognitive biases, personal agendas, and self-affirming stories and conclusions will no longer work. It's a threshold where only the truth will work.
Often times the truth is very hard to face.