“What if he is no longer alive?” The woman who sits on the couch in front of me is tearing up every few minutes. She hasn’t slept for five days because her husband is on a challenging high altitude trek in the Himalayas without any network and she fears every second that he’s fallen into a crevasse and died.  He does this trek every year and every year she surrenders to being sleepless for a fortnight. It takes her months to recover. 

“Do you express to him how this trek makes you feel?” I ask.

She admits she has tried to forbid him from going and is angry he doesn’t listen. She also used to get angry when he would go for long distance cycling trips. He finally only stopped when his doctor told him that his heart might give way. Would she now have to wait till his knees gave out to stop feeling this anxiety?

Together we work to find the source of this anxiety. We stitch together patterns in her  behavior. Her need to check when he was last seen on WhatsApp even when he is in the city and in the confines of his own office a few kilometers away from home.  “Had it always been this way through their 20 year marriage?” I ask

 “No,” she tells me. She used to be the happiest person in the world. Never a moment of anxiety or doubt about her life, even when she stopped working. She had the perfect man and two beautiful children. This despair is new to her and she wants it to stop. 

“What if I assure you your husband is safe, but won’t be coming back for another month? How does that make you feel?” I explore.

The question makes her angry. “How dare he stay away!” she expresses. Together, we step into that anger. In that anger we find her helplessness at his absence. In that anger we find the emptiness in her life. In that anger we find her deep-seated frustration at having given up on her perfect career when she found her perfect man. 

In that anger, we find her.