I don't want to change myself? Anxiety and therapy related.

[OddSocksAndHollyhocks]

OK, odd one.

DH and I have been having marriage counselling, mostly to address our poor communication. Our relationship isn't terrible, in many ways it's good. But we have very different communication styles and both feel unvalidated and argue a lot.

Anyway. Therapist seems to have struggled to find a solution for us or to "solve" us as a couple. He's tried all the standards - finding shared passions, looking at our childhood and saying we're repeating parental patterns, suggesting mindfulness. In the last session, he seems to have settled on my anxiety and is now saying it's the cause of everything. He wanted me to name my anxiety and give it a colour and see it as separate to me...presumably so I could banish it.

The thing is, I've lived with my anxiety forever. I'm a very high functioning anxious person. I'm anxious about pretty much everything, have constant voices in my head BUT it doesn't stop me. I have a great career, friends. If I want to do something, i do it. It just often takes me a lot of self reasoning or finding a way I feel more comfortable with to achieve the same result. Its only when DH is in the equation that it gets more complicated as he thinks he's protecting me by just saying we won't do things that could make me anxious. When in reality, that's making me feel like I'm in a cage where I never get to actually live.

I don't feel like I need to get rid of my anxiety. But therapist has pinned it as the cause of all our problems. I feel like that's just an easy cop out. Not sure what to do next...

I don't suppose your counsellor does online sessions do they?

I've had hypnotherapy for some issues eg the fear of flying and it was fabulous but I don't feel it would work for me for the Generalised Anxiety as its too broad. It seemed more helpful for quite specific situations. I already use breathing techniques and have almost entirely stopped having panic attacks through this

Anxiety responds excellently to hypnotherapy.

How does your anxiety impact your husband? Living in close proximity with someone else's anxiety is exhausting ime.

You say you don't want to change yourself and yet you are in couples therapy. That sounds a little bit rigid of you.

Your therapist isn't externalising your anxiety in an attempt to banish it. Externalising the "problem" is a technique employed to ensure that the problem doesn't get located within the individual. So it's the opposite of saying that you are the issue.

It feels to me as if your therapist is failing to distinguish between your anxiety and your way of coping with anxiety.

Would if help to find a way of talking to your husband about it that emphasises it as a way of coping with anxiety rather than a manifestation of anxiety? There are plenty of terms you can use- punctiliousness, love of planning etc. He may find it all easier to cope with if he can see it as you managing rather than struggling.

Are there ways that you could manage your anxiety that affect your husband less, eg instead of talking things through repeatedly with him, write it down or talk to a friend?

If it’s not affecting your life but is affecting your husband, I’d be more inclined to focus on mitigating its effect on him rather than eradicating it by suppressing part of your personality. I’d worry that doing the latter might cause a lot more problems. I’d also question whether a marriage therapist is the right person to be advising you on this.

Let me introduce you to my mother. She has made a career out of it. And a martyr of herself

Fair enough, she doesn't want to change, she has to live her life in a way that makes her happiest but she cannot understand why I find her endless worrying and stressing and massively overthinking the slightest little thing depressing and draining. I minimise my time spent with her as a result. She's just very inward-focused and insular.

Are you my sister?!

You sound a bit self absorbed and in denial. It’s great you’re happy with your coping mechanisms but it sounds like it’s affecting your husband.

Unless you decide against future relationships you’ll probably find this problem cropping up with any future partner too and you’ll be back at square one.

Thank you, this feels like really helpful advice. I'd agree a marriage therapist is not right for this at all...I hadn't expected it to go down this route to be honest or this wouldn't have been the therapist we went with but now that it's been said, I feel like it'll sound like I'm in denial if I say I want to stop working with him

I want us to find better ways, as a partnership, to communicate so that he understands how to deal with me in a way that doesn't inflame situations or conversely cage me in. And I in turn then feel safer and more loved so flare up less and will also on my part make a concerted effort to manage my anxiety in ways that have less impact on him...although I suspect it may be very lonely if it means not talking to him about anything that worries me etc
Am sorry but that doesn't sound like a partnership? He has to change things about how he interacts with you so you don't 'flare' up. That sounds like you're saying its his fault you flare up if he doesn't deal with you in an exact way and you have no personal responsibility?

Have you had individual sessions with the therapist? Maybe your husband told him your anxiety was a problem and that’s why he’s bringing it up?

You say you don’t want to get rid of your anxiety, but that level of stress will take its toll on your body and mind, as it is doing on your relationship.

You can still be you, with all the same interests but not constantly questioning and going over everything in infinite detail repetitively. It is exhausting for others to endure, and must be for you too.

It’s as if you are anxious about not being anxious anymore as it’s a change and you don’t know what the what the outcome will be.

Do you know where it comes from? Depending on if it’s childhood trauma, neurodiversity etc you will respond differently to different types of treatment like medication, EMDR or CBT.

It sounds like to me that you think you deal with your anxiety really well, but that's only because you've been even worse in the past, so you don't have a real concept of what 'normal' or 'abnormal' is, particularly as you don't ever remember not being anxious.

Your DH knows you didn't used to go to London on a plane etc so you really can't be surprised he doesn't expect you to do things that make you anxious. He probably also struggles with you going over and over it with him so doesn't want to put you in that position. I wonder if you just don't realise how abnormal the extent you do this to is, you go over and over it with him and you hide behind the fact you have a good job and friends so convince yourself you must be fine.

To be fair to your counsellor, issues often go back to childhood and i think he's probably hit the nail on the head with your anxiety (based on what you've told us). If it's not due to things in your childhood that you have developed the anxiety then I would look at genes, anxiety is inheritable, what are your parents/grandparents like?

If you don't want to medicate which is entirely your choice then I think you need to look at other ways to not unwittingly use your DH as a therapist to handle your issues. I think you need to consider counselling for yourself every week where you can offload all your anxieties. You have to only mention anything you're anxious about once to your DH and not go over and over things. I don't think your DH realises how unhealthy this all is either as it's being going on so long it's become his normal too.

Except that it wasn't my husband who stated it as an issue. It was the therapist. Having already tried - but failed - to find some other typical therapy pigeon hole to fit our communication issues into. Like I said previously, if my DH had been the one raising this, I would have taken it much more seriously but he didn't. But now the therapist HAS raised it, it's like I can't just put that back in the box. I'm sad that I had really high hopes therapy would help us (& we've spent a lot of £ with this guy already). And I feel like I've just been scapegoated here. Maybe I am in denial. But I'm not self absorbed, or I wouldn't be in couples therapy - I'm there to improve the two way communication, not just to "make my husband change". I just didn't expect to be told to basically reinvent myself.

I also think you're looking to your therapist to fix you and DH - no therapist can just fix you, that's not how it works. I think your expectations are unrealistic as you don't seem to want to change in anyway.

100% not his fault. However, I do know things that make me better / worse and it's not that hard to manage really. Simple things like being totally honest with me at all times as I react really badly to white lies (childhood of being gas lighted). Don't shout at me, as I go into fight or flight mode...but nobody should be shouted at anyway. And some admittedly irritating particularities like I'll only fly on certain airlines so no point even looking at others...but it's not like there's only 1, there's loads, and I've communicated which ones I'm OK with.

It may not be debilitating, but it's probably really bloody tedious to live with.

Why do you not want to recover from anxiety? It’s obviously one of the causes of why you and your DH fight. You’re probably using your DH as an unwilling therapist. He keeps his concerns to himself and then he can’t stand it anymore so he lashes out at you. How do I know this? I was in that position. I knew I had to face my trauma and stop it from ruining my relationships with people.

i think so - I’ve been trying to PM you and it won’t let me.

This is very thought provoking, thank you. We did have individual sessions and I hadn't considered that it originated directly from DH because he didn't say so. But as he hates confrontation, he wouldn't. I think I'll ask him, as if it did come from him that makes things very different. Currently I just feel cross and disappointed with the therapist but if DH actually brought this to therapist as a huge issue for him, I would absolutely try to do something about it.

Yes, I think I am anxious about not being anxious anymore. As another poster said earlier, it's been my coping mechanism for as long as I can remember and I genuinely don't feel I will be myself without it. The moment therapist mentioned giving it a name and externalising it, I started to feel...well...anxious.

I know exactly where it comes from and have already had lots of therapy re: childhood trauma. Which I personally feel has been very successful and brought me to the point I'm at now in life. What it's never done is factor in how it impacts my relationship. Literally the only option left to me that I haven't tried is medication and I flat out refuse to consider that.

Are you on mobile or desktop? I think can only PM on desktop?

With kindness, it does sound as though your anxiety controls everything. You have ways of managing it for you - but they require everyone else to fall in with them. You don't want to change it or think about changing it, you don't want to think about the impact it has on others.

You don't want to consider that any of your interpersonal patterns are anything to do with your families of origin, so there's no talking about your relational templates, which effectively wipes out most of the ways couples therapy can help.

It sounds like your anxiety manifests as a need to control your environment (including other people's behaviour, and what can be talked about in therapy) to soothe your own difficulties with uncertainty. It's not reasonable or healthy to expect a partner to enable this and validate your anxious feelings and participate in your rituals of explaining and talking things through over and over.

If you are not willing to think about changing things you do, how are you hoping relationship therapy will help? How do you imagine it should work?

Mobile