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I trust your 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 necessary yet standard surgery, which caused our getaway ideas were forced to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to experience sadness when things take a turn. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually experience them – will significantly depress us.

When we were supposed to be on holiday but were not, 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 depressed. And then I would face the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent painful bandage replacements, and there is a short period for an relaxing trip on the Belgium's beaches. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, pain and care.

I know more serious issues can happen, it's just a trip, an enviable dilemma 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 addressed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve given myself permission all sorts of unpleasant emotions, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and loathing and fury, which at least felt real. At times, it even was feasible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes see in my therapy clients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that option only points backwards. Acknowledging the reality that this is unattainable and allowing the sorrow and anger for things not working out how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to development and opportunity. Over time – and, of course, it needs duration – this can be profoundly impactful.

We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a suppressing of frustration and sorrow and letdown and happiness and energy, and all the rest. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and freedom.

I have often found myself stuck in this wish to reverse things, but my young child is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the nursing – sometimes for more than 60 minutes at a time, and then again under 60 minutes after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the doing it once more before you’ve even completed the swap you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, relentless and draining. What astounded me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most key role as a mother was to fulfill my infant's requirements. But I soon understood that it was not possible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed comforted by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were separated from us, that no solution we provided could help.

I soon learned that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to endure, and then to assist her process the overwhelming feelings triggered by the unattainability of my shielding her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to consume and process milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to manage her sentiments and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was in pain, or any other challenging and perplexing experience – and I had to develop alongside her (and my) frustration, rage, despair, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to help bring meaning to her sentimental path of things being less than perfect.

This was the contrast, for her, between having someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being supported in building a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel excellent about performing flawlessly as a ideal parent, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a sufficiently well – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and comprehending when she had to sob.

Now that we have developed beyond this together, I feel reduced the urge to press reverse and change our narrative into one where things are ideal. I find hope in my sense of a skill growing inside me to understand that this is impossible, and to comprehend that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to cry.