Embracing Our Unexpected Setbacks: The Reason You Cannot Simply Click 'Undo'

I wish you enjoyed a enjoyable summer: I did not. The very day we were planning to take a vacation, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which resulted in our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth important, all over again, about how difficult it is for me to experience sadness when things don't work out. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant to be on holiday but could not be, I kept experiencing a pull 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 confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a limited time window for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, hurt and nurturing.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's merely a vacation, an enviable dilemma to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be truthful to myself. In those moments when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were sharing an experience. Instead of being down and trying to appear happy, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and hatred and rage, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could perhaps undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only goes in reverse. Confronting the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the pain and fury for things not happening how we hoped, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of deadening of all emotions, a pressing down of frustration and sorrow and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself trapped in this urge to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even finished the task you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What surprised me the most – aside from the lack of rest – were the psychological needs.

I had believed my most key role as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my supply could not arrive quickly, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to alter her clothes – but she despised being changed, and wept 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 lost to us, that no comfort we gave could assist.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to support her in managing the powerful sentiments triggered by the infeasibility of my guarding her from all distress. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her distress when the milk didn’t come, or when she was hurting, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) irritation, anger, hopelessness, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to make things go well, but to assist in finding significance to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

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 feel every emotion. It was the difference, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about executing ideally as a flawless caregiver, and instead building the ability to accept my own shortcomings in order to do a sufficiently well – and comprehend my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to press reverse and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my awareness of a skill developing within to recognise that this is unattainable, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to sob.