You can’t just press ‘undo’ on your life. To move forward, y...

I hope you had a good summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be going on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren’t, I kept feeling a tug towards finding the positive: “I can book a replacement trip”; “At least we have travel insurance”; “This’ll give me something to write about”. But I never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, 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 less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks among so many others – practicality wrapped up in care – are a comfort 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 emotional demands.

I had thought my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled 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 discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was in pain, or any other difficult and confusing experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment, hunger. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.

• Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood

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