Accepting Life's Unexpected Setbacks: The Reason You Can't Simply Click 'Undo'

I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: mine was not. On the day we were scheduled to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have prompt but common surgery, which meant our getaway ideas needed to be cancelled.

From this experience I gained insight important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept feeling a tug 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 didn't improve, just a bit down. 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 short period for an enjoyable break on the Belgium's beaches. So, no getaway. Just letdown and irritation, suffering and attention.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning 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 feeling depressed and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve granted myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a wish I sometimes observe in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a individual in analysis: that therapy could perhaps erase our difficult moments, like pressing a reset button. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is impossible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have often found myself stuck in this desire to erase events, but my young child is supporting my evolution. As a new mother, I was at times swamped by the incredible needs of my baby. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even ended the task you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a solace and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most key role 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 required it. Her appetite could seem endless; my nourishment could not arrive quickly, or it was too abundant. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she despised being changed, and cried as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed comforted 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 help.

I soon realized that my most crucial role as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the intense emotions provoked by the unattainability of my protecting her from all distress. As she enhanced her skill to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to ensure everything was perfect, but to support in creating understanding to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a skill to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have great about executing ideally as a ideal parent, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have evolved past this together, I feel reduced the wish to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where things are ideal. I find faith in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to realize that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I actually want is to cry.