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I trust your a enjoyable summer: my experience was different. On the day we were scheduled to go on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have urgent but routine surgery, which caused our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I learned something valuable, all over again, about how challenging it is for me to acknowledge pain when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more routine, subtly crushing disappointments that – if we don't actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed 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 never felt better, just a bit down. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent uncomfortable wound care, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tested that argument too. But what I required was to be sincere with my feelings. In those times when I was able to halt battling the disappointment and we talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to hostility and displeasure and loathing and fury, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to enjoy our time at home together.

This recalled of a desire I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also seen in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like clicking “undo”. But that option only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we hoped, rather than a false optimism, can promote a transformation: from rejection and low mood, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and frustration and delight and vitality, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but acknowledging every sentiment, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this urge 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 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 doing it once more before you’ve even finished the change you were handling. These everyday important activities 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 exhaustion – 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 satisfy every my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to swap her diaper – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were plunging into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no comfort we gave could aid.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings triggered by the infeasibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to develop a capacity to manage her sentiments and her pain 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 guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her feelings journey of things not going so well.

This was the distinction, for her, between having someone who was seeking to offer her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a skill to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between aiming to have wonderful about performing flawlessly as a flawless caregiver, and instead cultivating the skill to accept my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a adequately performed – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The contrast between my attempting to halt her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the urge to hit “undo” and change our narrative into one where all is perfect. I find hope in my feeling of a skill developing within to acknowledge that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rearrange a trip, what I truly require is to cry.