Facing Our Unplanned Setbacks: Why You Can't Simply Press 'Undo'

I trust your a pleasant summer: my experience was different. That day we were supposed to be take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, expecting him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight significant, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more everyday, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull towards looking for silver linings: “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 blue. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no holiday. Just letdown and irritation, hurt and nurturing.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those times 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 given myself permission all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and aversion and wrath, which at least appeared genuine. At times, it even turned out to enjoy our time at home together.

This brought to mind of a desire I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not turning out how we anticipated, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from rejection and low mood, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and vitality, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have often found myself caught in this desire to reverse things, but my young child is assisting me in moving past it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even ended the change you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had believed my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions caused by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity 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 hurting, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to evolve with her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things being less than perfect.

This was the distinction, for her, between being with someone who was seeking to offer her only positive emotions, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between desiring to experience wonderful about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to endure my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and grasp my daughter’s letdown and frustration with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she required to weep.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where all is perfect. I find optimism in my sense of a ability evolving internally to recognise that this is impossible, and to understand that, when I’m occupied with attempting to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to weep.