Smile With Your Eyes

Living With Anxiety- Advice From A Surviving Spouse

Written by my dad, Bill Hunt.

I learned a few things, living with Robin. Some of it was even helpful, I think, and I’m willing to share, for those interested.

I’m somewhat reluctant to give general advice. I can only share what seemed to work for Robin. Most common advice for anxiety sufferers failed Robin. She was a hard case.

First, let’s talk about regrets. In serious retrospect, I don’t have any. For years I lamented that if I had had a crystal ball I would have insisted that Robin avoid teaching. It was too stressful, and lead her to a growing dependence on both benzodiazepine and stimulants. All of that stress and the drugs ruined her health, eventually. Without teaching it is possible that she would have had a calmer life. Heck, I would have had a calmer life.

But when going through her personal affects I came across hundreds of pictures of her classroom, filled with happy students. If there were compromises to make, Robin clearly made them, but to the benefit of so many kids that I think, I know, she would do it again.

So would I. In fact, after 40-years of marriage to Robin I would gladly do it again. All of it.

So, what helped?

Well, love helped. And love is another tricky subject. After all, there are loads of anxiety sufferers who have real trouble both giving and getting their fair share of love. Rock piles are full of broken marriages as a result of anxiety disorder.

Robin and I experienced love differently. For Robin, love was a feeling, mostly. It was a noun. She needed to be reminded that she had it, and that she was worthy of having it. For me, love was mostly a verb, expressed through action.

What I know is this: love will not stick around if people forget why they got together in the first place. For Robin and I, love transcended the illness, and that helped. It meant that she would listen to me when I had something valuable to say. And it meant that she would always try to be there for me, if physically and mentally able. We were best friends, and the love was always there.

If I could give advice to young couples, with or without disability issues, it would be this. Ask your mate what symbolizes love. Ask them what they really appreciate from their mate, that reminds them that they are loved, even if the answers might seem a tad childish.

For me it was sandwiches. I loved it when Robin made me a sandwich, and I often told her that. I think it must have reminded me of the kind of attention I got from my mother. But I wish Robin had put it on her calendar to make me a sandwich at least two or three times a week. It made me feel loved, without words.

For Robin it was probably fresh-cut flowers. I knew that much sooner than I started getting good at bringing them home. Had I to do it over again, I would have been better about that, and it would have been on my calendar every week.

My point is, love has to feel welcome to really stick around. People need to be reminded that they are loved, and words don’t always do the trick.

On the other hand, Robin needed to hear the words much more often that I was willing to use the words. Early in our marriage, we devised a code for “I Love You”. It was three squeezes of the hand. In that way, I don’t think there was a day that Robin and I did not say that we loved each other.

Ok, that is probably not the advice you expected to hear from me, but over the years that is what sustained me in my marriage to a woman with persistent anxiety and depression.

And I’m not interested in condemning any spouse who has left a partner over anxiety disorder. Being married to a life of anxiety can be suffocating. I get that. Robin needed external validation, and she was willing (when she was healthy) to really work hard for praise. But not everyone is as talented as Robin was. Others are just needy. When they start to self-medicate with alcohol…well, that can bring down the curtain on a relationship pretty fast.

I can assure you that I wanted Robin to learn how to self-validate, how to stroke herself, how to be confident in her right to live and breathe no matter what. But I learned over time that she couldn’t do that. She clearly had no control over her anxiety or depression.

I heard many doctors and friends and even myself attempt to motivate Robin to somehow take control, to somehow pull herself up by her bootstraps, to somehow “will” her way into a better place.

What a waste of time. To an anxiety sufferer, that stance amounts to character assassination. When you say “take control”, they hear “If I were a good person I would take control.”

A big issue for Robin was “acceptance”, or rather her inability to accept things as they are, without trying to change things a tad. Anxiety sufferers are in a rejection mode most of the time, it seems. Acceptance of people, events, places, things and acceptance of that deep inside core value of self-worthiness, is not a package that Robin could manage very well. Everything that really mattered was worthy of “fitzing with”. I think Robin and her mother before her thought criticism is a mother’s way of expressing love. Moms can mess with anything. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Right?

Well, not when it comes off as being obsessive and hypercritical. Praise almost always works better. Criticism can cut like a knife.

Any parent suffering from anxiety needs to understand that, and watch their words very carefully. Hypercritical parenting tends to self-perpetuate anxiety disorder through multiple generations. I really think Robin had a physical predisposition to anxiety, due to some unknown body chemistry, possibly inherited- but her hypercritical mother and passive father really created a path for the perfect storm.

But knowing that, Robin still could not practice acceptance very well. Better than her mother, but not very well.

It is a lucky anxiety sufferer who has someone around who accepts their problem without judgment. I learned to accept Robin’s condition, and that was important. I never really understood it, because it was outside my personal experience. But I accepted it for what it was, and I always started from there.

Oh, just so you understand, I’m not without fear. I understand anxiety and panic, I just don’t understand those ugly feelings in the absence of good cause. When I was in Vietnam I felt anxiety each day for twelve months. It felt like I was numb inside. It was characterized by hypervigilance.

In war, that state of mind can keep you alive. Under primitive conditions, it’s a gift.

Panic is something else again. That was unwelcome on the battlefield, and also unavoidable. After my first run-in with panic I learned why the best soldiers in every army have no imagination whatsoever. Panic happens when your imagination runs wild.

It was a Viet Cong teenager with way too much ammunition who taught me about imagination as a critical component of fear. He was there to harass me one evening while I was relaxing. The rip of bullets came close, and while I was on the ground my body weighed about 1000 pounds. My mind was instantly convinced that within moments I was going to be overrun and killed.

The whole terrifying moment only lasted about a minute. Maybe less. When it was all over, and we realized it was just harassment from our perimeter- probably only one brave, or crazy, enemy sniper- there was relief and laughter.

I had been shot at before and I would be shot at again many times, but I had never been this surprised, and I had never let my imagination go wild.

It was the worst feeling of my life. Well, it was about as bad as the time my first born, Erika, at the age of three, came up missing on a camping trip with her mom and dad. That lasted about two minutes, when we found her playing in the back of the car. I’ll never forget that total feeling of helplessness.

So, I understand panic, when it is justified. And I understood how bad Robin felt most of her life.

I used to be able to talk Robin out an attack, though it took quite awhile sometimes, by talking to her gently about real reasons for anxiety. Sometimes I would point out that if your house is not surrounded by sand bags because you are worried about people shooting at you, you probably have no reason be afraid.

That actually worked. It would engage her brain, her reason, and she would feel better. When Robin was teaching small children she never had anxiety until the end of the day. While her brain was engaged in rationale thinking, she had no room for anxiety. When she was thinking only about the welfare of others, like her students, or like her grandchild, she had no room for anxiety.

Anyway, that is what worked for Robin. I would be nice if someone finds that helpful.

And it would be nice if some smart research team would find a way to purge this ugly disability from all of our lives, forever.