Hello!

I’m a 30 year old male living with my wife on a 3rd world country. We have no help from our families and we’ve been through some very difficult times, but we managed to get by. My wife had a severe case of depression and even tried to take her own life at a point.

Now things got a little better, even though we are in a tight financial situation. We both feel a lot better and we even managed to get off our meds (it’s nice to be able to save the money and get rid of the side-effects).

But, there is something weird that came as a consequence of all those bad times. Whenever I receive a text message from my wife, my heart races and my anxiety goes through the roof. It’s an irrational fear that the message will be bad news.

I don’t really know if there is such a thing as “text phobia”, but that’s how it feels (english is not my main language, so it’s kinda hard to explain). I alread mentioned this to my wife and I think it made her feel bad because she thinks it’s her fault. Of course I said it’s not her fault, but now I’m kinda afraid to bring this up again with her. We both are trying so hard to be strong for each other.

I wonder if anyone else had a similar problem and I would be very grateful if someone could give me some tips on how to work on this problem.

Thanks a lot and I hope you have a great day.

  • @HandOfDoomOPEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    Yeah, I think you are right, it may be PTSD. I didn’t think it was PTSD at first because I thought that my experiences weren’t as traumatizing as those war-related PTSD stories that we see a lot online. But now, looking back after some time, I realize how bad things actually were and no one would come out of it unscarred.

    Unfortunately I just can’t add any medical expenses now, because money is one of our biggest anxiety causes and this month we are happy because we managed to save up a little. But knowing it may be PTSD can help me look for new ways to deal with it. Thanks a lot for the help.