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I trust your a good summer: I did not. On the day we were planning to take a vacation, I was stationed in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have necessary yet standard surgery, which meant our travel plans needed to be cancelled.

From this situation I gained insight valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things don't work out. I’m not talking about profound crises, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – without the ability to actually acknowledge them – will significantly depress us.

When we were meant 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 bump up against the reality that this holiday was permanently lost: my husband’s surgery necessitated frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an pleasant vacation on the Belgian coast. So, no vacation. Just discontent and annoyance, hurt and nurturing.

I know graver situations can happen, it's just a trip, what a privileged problem to have – I know because I tried that line too. But what I required was to be honest with myself. In those moments when I was able to stop fighting off the disappointment and we discussed it instead, it felt like we were facing it as a team. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to appear happy, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even was feasible to appreciate our moments at home together.

This reminded me of a desire I sometimes notice in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also witnessed in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could in some way undo our negative events, like hitting a reverse switch. But that arrow only goes in reverse. Acknowledging the reality that this is impossible and embracing the sorrow and anger for things not happening how we expected, rather than a insincere positive spin, can promote a transformation: from denial and depression, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be life-changing.

We view depression as being sad – but to my mind it’s a kind of dulling of all emotions, a suppressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of genuine feeling freedom and liberty.

I have frequently found myself stuck in this urge to erase events, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a first-time mom, I was at times burdened by the amazing requirements of my baby. Not only the nourishing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the outfit alterations, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the change you were changing. These everyday important activities among so many others – efficiency blended with affection – are a reassurance and a great honor. Though they’re also, at moments, unceasing and exhausting. What shocked me the most – aside from the sleep deprivation – were the psychological needs.

I had assumed my most important job as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she needed it. Her craving could seem endless; my milk could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she despised being changed, and wept as if she were descending into a gloomy abyss of despair. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the embraces we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were distant from us, that no solution we provided could aid.

I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to persevere, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings triggered by the impossibility of my guarding her from all discomfort. As she grew her ability to consume and process milk, she also had to build an ability to process her feelings and her suffering when the supply was insufficient, or when she was hurting, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to evolve with 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 emotional experience of things not going so well.

This was the difference, for her, between having someone who was trying to give her only pleasant sentiments, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the contrast, for me, between wanting to feel great about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead building the ability to tolerate my own imperfections in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my trying to stop her crying, and recognizing when she needed to cry.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the urge to hit “undo” and alter our history into one where all is perfect. I find faith in my awareness of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to comprehend that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I actually want is to sob.