I hope you had a good summer: I did not. On the day we were supposed to be going on holiday, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, waiting for him to have urgent but routine surgery, which meant our travel plans had to be cancelled.
希望您度过了愉快的夏天：我没有。在我们本应去度假的那天，我坐在急诊室里，和丈夫一起等待他进行紧急但常规的手术，这意味着我们的旅行计划不得不取消。
From this experience I learned something valuable, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about life-altering traumas, but the more everyday, quietly devastating disappointments that – unless we can actually feel them – will really weigh us down.
从这次经历中，我再次学到了一些宝贵的经验，那就是当事情出错时，我感到难过有多么困难。我说的不是改变一生的创伤，而是那些更加日常、悄无声息的失望——除非我们真正感受到它们，否则它们真的会让我们感到沉重。
When we were supposed to be on holiday but weren’t, I kept feeling a tug towards finding the positive: “I can book a replacement trip”; “At least we have travel insurance”; “This’ll give me something to write about”. But I never felt better, just a bit depressed. And then I would bump up against the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery required frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a limited time window for an enjoyable break on the Belgian coast. So, no holiday. Just disappointment and frustration, pain and care.
当我们本应度假却未能如愿时，我总是试图寻找积极的一面：“我可以预订替代旅行”；“至少我们有旅行保险”；“这会给我一些写作的素材”。但我从未感觉好转，只是有点沮丧。然后我会撞上现实，这个假期真的已经消失了：我丈夫的手术需要频繁的痛苦换药，而在比利时海岸享受假期的最佳时间窗口是有限的。所以，没有假期。只有失望和挫败，痛苦和关怀。
I know worse things can happen, it’s only a holiday, what a privileged problem 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 talked about it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of feeling depressed and trying to smile, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of unwanted feelings, including but not limited to bitterness and resentment and hatred and rage, which at least felt real. At times, it even became possible to enjoy our time at home together.
我知道更糟糕的事情会发生，这只是一个假期，有什么特权问题要解决——我知道，因为我也曾尝试过这样的说法。但真正需要的是对自己诚实。在我能够停止抵抗失望的那一刻，我们谈论了它，感觉就像我们一起经历了一些事情。与其感到沮丧并试图微笑，我让自己感受到了各种不受欢迎的情绪，包括但不限于苦涩、怨恨、仇恨和愤怒，至少这些感觉是真实的。有时，甚至可以享受我们在一起的时光。
This reminded me of a wish I sometimes see in my psychotherapy patients, and that I have also seen in myself as a patient in psychoanalysis: that therapy could somehow reverse our unwanted experiences, like clicking “undo”. But that arrow only points backwards. Facing the reality that this is not possible and allowing the grief and rage for things not turning out how we expected, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from denial and depression, to growth and possibility. Over time – and, of course, it does take time – this can be life-changing.
这让我想起了我在心理治疗患者中有时看到的一个愿望，也曾在自己作为心理分析患者时看到过：希望治疗能够以某种方式逆转我们不希望的经历，就像点击“撤销”。但这个箭头只指向过去。面对这个现实，允许我们对事情没有按照预期发展感到悲伤和愤怒，而不是一种不诚实的“重构”，可以促进当前状态的转变：从否认和抑郁，到成长和可能性。随着时间的推移——当然，这需要时间——这可以改变生活。
We think of depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a pressing down of anger and sadness and disappointment and joy and life force, and all the rest. The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom.
抑郁症在我们看来是感到不好——但在我看来，它是一种对所有情绪的麻木，是愤怒、悲伤、失望、喜悦和生命力以及所有其他情绪的压制。抑郁症的替代品不是快乐，而是感受所有存在的东西，一种真实的情感自发性与自由。
I have frequently found myself stuck in this wish to click “undo”, but my toddler is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the astonishing demands of my infant. Not only the feeding – sometimes for over an hour at a time, and then again less than an hour after that – and not only the changing, and then the changing again before you’ve even finished the change you were changing. These day-to-day precious tasks 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 sleep deprivation – were the emotional demands.
我常常发现自己陷入想要点击“撤销”的愿望，但我的幼儿正在帮助我摆脱这种情绪。作为一名新手妈妈，我有时会被我婴儿惊人的需求所压倒。不仅是喂食——有时一次要超过一个小时，然后不到一个小时后又开始了——还有换尿布，在你完成换尿布之前又要换。在这些日常的珍贵任务中——包裹在关怀中的实用性——是一种安慰和巨大的特权。尽管它们在某个时刻也是无情的、耗尽的。除了睡眠不足之外，最让我震惊的是情感上的需求。
I had thought my most important job as a mother was to meet my baby’s needs. But I soon came to realise that it was not possible to meet all of my baby’s needs at the time she demanded it. Her hunger could seem unmeetable; my milk could not come fast enough, or it came too fast. And then we needed to change her – but she hated being changed, and cried as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed consoled by the cuddles we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that nothing we had to offer could help.
我以为作为母亲最重要的工作就是满足孩子的需求。但很快我就意识到，在孩子需要的时候，不可能满足她所有的需求。她的饥饿似乎无法满足；我的奶水不够快，或者来得太快。然后我们需要给她换尿布——但她讨厌换尿布，哭得像是要掉进一个黑暗的深渊。有时候，她似乎会因为我们的拥抱而得到安慰，但有时又感觉她离我们远去，我们提供的任何帮助似乎都无法帮助她。
I soon discovered that my most important job as a mother was first to survive, and then to help her digest the overwhelming feelings provoked by the impossibility of my protecting her from all discomfort. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to develop a capacity to digest her emotions and her suffering 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 make things go well, but to help bring meaning to her emotional experience of things not going so well.
我很快发现，作为母亲，我最重要的工作首先是生存，然后是帮助她消化由我无法保护她免受所有不适而产生的强烈情感。随着她吸收和消化牛奶的能力发展，她也必须发展消化自己的情感和痛苦的能力，无论是牛奶不来时，还是她感到疼痛时，或是任何其他困难和令人困惑的经历——而我必须通过她的（以及我的）挫折、愤怒、绝望、仇恨、失望和饥饿来成长。我的工作不是让事情变得顺利，而是帮助赋予她情感体验中事情不顺利的意义。
This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was trying to give her only good feelings, and instead being helped to grow a capacity to experience all feelings. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel great about doing a perfect job as a perfect mother, and instead developing the capacity to tolerate my own far-from-ideal-ness in order to do a good enough job – and understand my daughter’s disappointment and anger with me. The difference between my trying to stop her crying, and understanding when she needed to cry.
这是她与试图只给她带来美好感受的人在一起，与被帮助培养体验所有感受的能力之间的区别。这对我来说，是想要在完美地完成作为完美母亲的工作时感到无比自豪，与培养出容忍自己远非理想的自我，以便做好足够的工作——并理解女儿对我失望和愤怒的能力之间的区别。是我试图阻止她哭泣，与理解她需要哭泣的时刻之间的区别。
Now that we have grown through this together, I feel less keenly the wish to hit “undo” and rewrite our story into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a capacity growing inside me to recognise that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m busy trying to rebook a holiday, what I really need is to cry.
现在我们一起成长了，我不再那么渴望按下“撤销”键，重新编写我们的故事，让它一切顺利。我发现希望在于我内心深处逐渐增长的能力，认识到这是不可能的，并理解当我忙于重新预订假期时，我真正需要的是哭泣。
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
莫亚·萨纳是 NHS 心理治疗师，也是《当我长大》一书的作者，书中与寻求成年的成年人进行对话
