This was an exchange I had with a husband, picking his wife up from my office.
I knew that he wasn’t being deliberately cruel, it was just frustration and simply not understanding how anxiety was. It’s very difficult to explain to somebody why his previously confident wife now struggled with going the supermarket on her own.
She could describe to me in perfect detail how, stood in the queue at the supermarket checkout, anxiety would slowly increase until the point that she wanted to run outside in case she fainted in the queue.
I understand exactly how this is, how it feels, and how it permeates every single bit of your life. But explaining this to somebody that sails through life easily, is tricky, especially when your significant other looks at you like you’ve lost the plot.
The truth is that EVERYONE has experienced anxiety at some point in time and I use this to try and explain what people go through.
All of us have been nervous about an interview or public speaking. We’ve all had that near miss incident in a car that’s made us feel a little bit sick. I get significant others to remember how this feels and then get them to imagine how it would feel if this sickly, panicky, horrible feeling was their everyday, 24/7 normal.
If your significant other struggles to understand what you go through, try explaining it to them as I do, and be honest with them about what you go through.