Facing Our Unexpected Challenges: The Reason You Can't Simply Click 'Undo'

I hope you had a pleasant summer: my experience was different. The very day we were supposed to be travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our vacation arrangements needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more common, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will truly burden us.

When we were expected to be on holiday but could not be, I kept sensing an urge towards finding the positive: “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 never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday had truly vanished: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the shores of Belgium. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I needed was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to smile, I’ve granted myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that option only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and life force, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have frequently found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my toddler is assisting me in moving past it. As a first-time mom, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the change you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem unmeetable; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and sobbed as if she were falling into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon learned that my most crucial role as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions provoked by the infeasibility of my protecting her from all distress. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her distress when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to assist in finding significance to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only positive emotions, and instead being assisted in developing a ability to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a good enough job – and grasp my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The distinction between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to press reverse and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my awareness of a skill evolving internally to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.