Not only can you click on “retreat” in your life. To move forward, you must first feel sad and angry Mental health

I I hope you have a good summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to go on vacation, I was sitting in A& E with my husband, waiting for an urgent but routine surgery, which means that our travel plans should be canceled.

From this experience, I learned something valuable, again, about how difficult it is bad when things get worse. I am not talking about the shocks of changing life, but the more disappointment every day is destroyed quietly destroying it-what we could not actually feel it-will really weigh us.

When we were supposed to be on vacation, but it wasn’t, I was concerned about finding the positivity: “I can book an alternative trip”; “At least we have travel insurance”; “This will give me something to write about.” But I never felt a little depression. After that, I was influencing the fact that this vacation has already been: my husband’s surgery requires frequent changes in wearing clothes, and there is a limited time window to spend a fun holiday on the Belgian coast. Therefore, not a vacation. Just disappointment, frustration, pain and care.

I know the worst things can happen, it’s just a vacation, what is a distinct problem – I know that because I also tried this line. But what I need is to be honest with myself. In those moments in which I managed to stop fighting about the disappointment and talked about it instead, I felt that we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I allowed myself to all kinds of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness, resentment, hatred and anger, which I felt at least real. Sometimes, it is possible to enjoy our time at home together.

This reminded me of a desire to see it sometimes in my sickness in psychotherapy, and that I also saw in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: this treatment can somehow our unwanted experiences, such as clicking on “retreat.” But this arrow only indicates back. In the face of the fact that this is not possible and allows sadness and anger over things that do not emerge how we expected, instead of a kind of “reformulation”, the current can be easy to change: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time-and of course, it takes time-this can be an unchanged life.

We think about depression as a bad feeling – but in my opinion, it is a kind of obstacles from all feelings, pressure on anger, sadness, disappointment, hope and strength of life, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but the feeling of everything that exists, a kind of spontaneity and sincere emotional freedom.

I found myself repeatedly stuck in this desire to click on “retreat”, but my child helps me to grow from it. As a new mother, I was sometimes soaked in amazing demands for my child. Not only nutrition – sometimes for more than an hour at one time, then again after less than an hour – not just the change, then the change again before you finish the change you changed. These precious daily tasks are among many others-the practical application that has ended in care-a tremendous comfort and privilege. Although they are also, in moments, there is no relentlessness and drain. The most shocked me – regardless of sleep deprivation – was emotional demands.

I thought my most important job as a mother was to meet the needs of my child. But I soon realized that it was not possible to meet all the needs of my child while I demanded. Its hunger can seem uncomfortable. Milk could not come quickly enough, or it came very quickly. Then we needed to change it – but she hated her change, and she cried as if it were in a dark cycle of death. Although she sometimes looked condolences by the budgets that we gave her, at other times she felt as if she was lost to us, that nothing should offer can help.

Soon I discovered that my most important job as a mother was the first to survive, then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings that the impossibility of protecting her from all discomfort. While developing her ability to eat and digest milk, she also had to develop the ability to digest her emotions and suffering when milk did not come, or when she was in pain, or any difficult and other confusing experience – and she had to grow by frustrating her (my son), anger, despair, disappointment. My job was not to go well, but to help achieve the meaning of her emotional experience in things that are not going well.

This was the difference for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead helps to increase the ability to try all feelings. This was the difference, for me, between the desire to feel satisfied with the perfect work as an ideal mother, and instead, developing the ability to withstand my far away from the ideal in order to do a good job enough-and they are disappointed by my daughter and anger me. The difference between my attempt to stop crying, and understand when she needed to cry.

Now that I have grown through this together, I feel less related to the desire to reach “retreat” and rewrite our story to a story in which everything is going well. I find hope for my sense of the ability to grow inside me to realize that this is not possible, and I understand that when I am busy trying to re -book a vacation, what I really need is crying.

Moya Sarner is a psychologist in NHS and his author When greater – conversations with adults in search of adulthood

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