My name is Anne and I have PTSD and bipolar.  My partner Caroline shares the same diagnoses.

There's no literature out there on couples.  I doubt that we're the only ones, though.

Although we have our fights, and although we don't always understand exactly what the other one is going through, Caroline is my best friend as well as my spouse.

I've read so many of your wonderful stories that I thought I'd start my own. Maybe a bit garbled, or confusing, as I've never quite written this out or even tried to piece it together in my head...but here goes...

Sometimes it is impossible for me to draw the line between general anxiety and panic. While my panic disorder didn't start for 5 or 6 years later, my anxiety hit me early.

You might laugh...but I first became a nervous wreck started at Disney World. No, I was not traumatized by the giant cartoon characters, or the rollercoasters, or hordes of people and their screaming children. I grew up in a small (ok, TINY!) town in New York state, in the mountains (you literally had to drive 40 minutes just to buy groceries), and my parents would take us on vacations every so often to get us out of the woods. Sounds nice, right? For the most part, it was. With one exception.

I don't know if I qualify as a "survivor".  This is all new to me.  I am a decent man with no history of any psychological maladjustment.

But since about middle of 2006 I've been suffering from anxiety.

When I was younger and I felt stress i could sort of talk myself down to earth.

Later as an adult, while in seminary I began preaching and discovered that my sermon would not get off the ground as I wished. I fumbled around over my own thoughts, repleted with “like you know” and “um lemme see”  I was afraid I didn’t have what it would take to be a real preacher... my so-called lifetime dream. 

I lived in the shadows of silent anguish for years.  As I drive to work each day, my eyes would fix upon a disfigured man who primarily suffered from a facial deformity around the mouth, so that he seemed to be making a funny face on purpose, but an expression that would never leave him. He used dark sunglasses to deflect attention, but everyone noticed anyway.  He limped somewhat.  I took many mental snapshot of this disfigured man and wondered why it hurt me so much to think about his hurt.  I came to the conclusion that it was because I also struggled to overcome a kind of internal deformity, a proneness to anxiety… perhaps even shame-based for lack of a better term.