You can’t just press ‘undo’ on your life. To move forward, you must first feel your grief and rage | Mental health

I I hope you had a good summer: I didn’t do it. The day we were supposed to go on vacation, I was sitting in A & e with my husband, waiting for him to undergo urgent but routine surgery, which meant that our travel plans had to be canceled.

From this experience, I learned something precious, again, how difficult it is to feel bad when things go wrong. I am not talking about trauma that changes life, but the more the disappointments more every day and quietly devastating – unless we can feel them – will really increase us.

When we were supposed to be on vacation but no, I kept feeling a tug to find the positive: “I can book a replacement trip”; “At least we have travel insurance”; “It will give me something to write.” But I never felt better, just a little depressed. And then I encountered the reality that this party had really disappeared: my husband’s surgery required frequent changes of dying dressing, and there is a limited time window for a pleasant break on the Belgian coast. So no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know that worse things can happen is just a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I also tried this line. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In these moments when I was able to stop fighting disappointment and we talked about it instead, I felt like I was going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I allowed myself of all kinds of unwanted feelings, including, but without limiting myself, bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which felt at least real. Sometimes it has even become possible to enjoy our time at home together.

It reminded me of a wish that I sometimes see in my patients in psychotherapy, and that I also saw in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: this therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, as clicking on “Cancel”. But this arrow only points to the back. To face the reality that this is not possible and allow sorrow and rage for things that do not turn out to be how we expected, rather than a dishonest “cropping”, can facilitate a change of current: denial and depression, growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it takes time – it can change life.

We believe that depression felt bad – but in my opinion, it is a kind of numbness of all emotions, a pressing of anger, sadness and disappointment and joy and vital force, and everything else. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling anyway, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.

I frequently found myself stuck in this wish to click on “Cancel”, but my toddler helps me to get out of it. As a new mother, I was sometimes overwhelmed by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only food – sometimes for more than an hour at a time, then even less than an hour after that – and not only the change, then the change before having finished the change you change. These precious daily tasks among many – the practice wrapped in care – are comfort and enormous privilege. Although they are also, at times, relentless and drained. What shocked me the most – apart from sleep deprivation – These are the emotional requirements.

I had thought that my most important work as a mother was to meet the needs of my baby. But I quickly realized that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs when she demanded it. His hunger might seem unshakable; My milk could not come quickly enough, where it arrived too fast. And then we had to change it – but she hated being changed and crying as if she fell into a dark vortex of Doom. And even if sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs that we gave her, at other times, it seemed that she was lost for us, that nothing we had to offer could help.

I quickly discovered that my most important work as a mother was first to survive, then help her digest the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of protecting her from any discomfort. While she developed her ability to resume and digest milk, she also had to develop an ability to digest her emotions and suffering when milk did not come, or when she suffered, or any other difficult and confused experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, hatred, disappointment. My job was not to make things go well, but to help bring meaning to your emotional experience of things that are not going so well.

It was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and who rather helped to increase the ability to feel all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel good to do a perfect job as a perfect mother, and to develop the ability to tolerate my own ideal away from my daughter with me. The difference between my trying to prevent her from crying and understanding when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown up together, I feel the wish to hit “cancel” and rewrite our story in a story where everything is going well. I find the hope in my sense of an ability that increases in me to recognize that it is not possible, and to understand that, when I am busy trying to link holidays, what I really need is to cry.

Moya Sarner is a psychotherapist of the NHS and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations with adults looking for adulthood

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