Facing Life's Unplanned Challenges: Why You Cannot Simply Press 'Undo'

I trust your a enjoyable summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to experience sadness when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, quietly devastating disappointments that – if we don't actually experience them – will truly burden us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept feeling a tug 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 never felt better, just a bit blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those instances when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of being down and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and hatred and rage, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only looks to the past. Confronting the reality that this is not possible and allowing the pain and fury for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can enable a shift: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as experiencing negativity – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of honest emotional expression and release.

I have often found myself caught in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a recent parent, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the diaper swaps, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even completed the change you were doing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a solace and a significant blessing. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

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 satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her appetite could seem endless; my milk could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a shadowy pit of misery. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon discovered that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the powerful sentiments triggered by the impossibility of my guarding her from all unease. As she grew her ability to ingest and absorb milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her pain when the nourishment was delayed, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the contrast, for her, between experiencing someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the distinction, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to endure my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and grasp my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my attempting to halt her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel less keenly the desire to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find optimism in my feeling of a ability growing inside me to recognise that this is unattainable, and to comprehend that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.