Anxiety driven issues

@LTBama

What a beautiful question!

Of course I have no idea what will help your partner. But I can tell you my experience, as someone who deals with anxiety.

My first suggestion is to think carefully about boundaries. What exactly is whose responsibility? When we love someone, we naturally want to help them, but this is her problem to solve. Don't make the mistake of taking responsibility for it. It won't help in the long run. Support includes allowing someone to learn from their own mistakes. I found AA/Al-anon's approach to "enabling" eye opening.

Remember self care. You can't take the splinter out of someone else's eye before taking the log out of your own. You will be more help if you tend to your own emotional needs first.

Do the active listener course. And extra training. Active listening felt really weird at first. But it validates the other person, which is massive in empowering them to solve their own problems.

Remember that the other response to fear is fight. In my experience, people trying to solve a fear/anxiety issue try different options along the way and one of these is often anger. If you can learn to sit with anger, letting it go past, recognising it as the other person trying (badly!, but trying!) to solve a problem they have, ie not taking responsibility for it and just listen, that is a huge gift to avoiding escalation. How do you respond to criticism?

Oh, and practice on other people. This might sound a bit callous, but you can use things like the sharing circle and being a listener, to practice on people where it won't affect your life if you make a mistake. Hopefully you will do some good in the process, but it's also a fantastic way to learn how to handle challenging situations. 

Thank you for wanting to be supportive and to learn.

@LTBama

The biggest thing for me when I'm having an anxiety attack is that I want to be comforted and listened to.  I want to feel "not alone." And when you are spiraling, you may not be speaking clearly or thinking clearly and to be able to tell someone what's going on in your head and have them be there to tell you it's going to be okay - that's priceless.

I'm not necessarily asking to someone else to solve my problem (if there is an actual problem). I just want to talk, and keep talking until I can think more clearly.  Anxiety can make you feel so alone at times and if no one is there to listen - it makes anxiety ten times as bad.

It's also important that your partner has multiple people to reach out to.  I have my spouse, but sometimes he just doesn't understand or I just can't talk to him about certain things - especially things I have mentioned a million times before.  He's burned out from hearing it so he doesn't provide the comfort I need in those situations.

My best friend is another line of support.  We talk a lot, about the same things over and over and she's always ready to listen to me and I'm always ready to listen to her.  We even have a special word that either of us can text (heard about doing this from a coach online) that if anyone else sees it they won't know what it means, but we know it means "I'm having a really terrible, tough time - can we please talk asap."

And finally, therapy.  My therapist is a scheduled "listening" session where I get an outside perspective on my thoughts and feelings.

Again, it's all about someone listening and comforting.