🔗 Share this article

I wish you enjoyed a good summer: mine was not. On the day we were planning to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren't, I kept experiencing a pull towards seeking optimism: “I can {book a replacement trip|schedule another vacation|arrange a different getaway”; “At least we have {travel insurance|coverage for trips|protection for journeys”; “This’ll give me {something to write about|material for an article|content for a story”. But I didn't improve, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This brought to mind of a hope I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could in some way reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the pain and fury for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a false optimism, can enable a shift: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and frustration and delight and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the changing again before you’ve even ended the task you were handling. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a comfort and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her hunger could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments provoked by the impossibility of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she enhanced her skill to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a skill to feel every emotion. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own imperfections in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and recognizing when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my feeling of a skill growing inside me to recognise that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m occupied with attempting to reschedule a vacation, what I truly require is to sob.