October 2020 post 9 - Plans

One of my anxiety triggers is when plans go awry. 

I’m not talking about when you plan to make chicken for dinner and it goes spoiled and you can’t make it, but bigger picture plans. I can adapt to day to day changes yet struggle when we have to shift trajectory on our “buying a new car” plan or “fixing up the house” plan.

My husband doesn’t understand it, and I have begun to take my hands off the reigns, let him do whatever he wants, and periodically make passive aggrieved remarks if there’s something I’m not in agreement with. Healthy, right?

Don’t get me wrong, I do try to speak my mind, but when someone doesn’t understand your anxiety trigger because their mind doesn't work the same way, you’re just shouting into a void. It’s better to just coast along with it sometimes, especially when it takes some of the pressure off of you. It helps calm the panic. 

Tyler not understanding my anxiety triggers is probably the #1 argument starter in our marriage. He also suffers from anxiety, but his manifests as head aches and crabbiness. Mine is more intense and impossible to ignore at its worst; nausea, tears, shakes, inability to function, inability to think or speak in complete sentences, severe anger, severe sadness, rocking, exhaustion, and more. He gets a little cranky and his head hurts, and he doesn’t understand my reactions. His go to is “just calm down.”

I have no expectation of him understanding, and I am trying very hard to be able to vocalize my anxiety better. It’s just not that simple. When I say “I thought we had a plan”, I mean, “I don’t like how you’ve changed our plan and it’s upsetting my internal balance.” If I say the latter, he will try to logic his way out of it. That’s his go to; he tries to apply logic to something illogical. Mental health ya’ll. What a mind fuck.

So, today I’m sitting on the couch, rocking (at a faster pace than usual), and trying to figure out a logical way to explain to my husband that the decisions he’s been making for the last month are giving me so much anxiety that I’m having chest pain. (No, I’m not having a heart attack.) He won’t stop what he’s doing, he’ll just feel bad about it for an hour. That doesn’t do either of us any good, so how do I approach this? So far, I’ve pretty much repeated the words “do whatever you want” way too many times this week. There HAS to be a better way to not be so anxious over changes to big plans, right? 

There has to be... Something better than “get over it” and “calm down”. There has to be.