Right, so to explain the context and navigation difficulties.

I believe your wife's heebie-jeebies experience ultimately comes from the memory loss. Too many holes in the memory and I have no familiar objects from which I can draw comfort and peace. I have nothing from which I can elicit reassurance. I am a stranger in my own home and neighborhood. Knowing this makes me feel worse.

What's more, familiar faces are often only that, occasionally not even that. In general, names elude me though I know I have a history with the person in question, sometimes an important and intimate history. Being socially adrift in this way adds to the anxiety because I know that not recognising friends, or failing the name test frustrates my wife. The tension is more than just names, though. That inability to recall moments in a relationship makes for awkward situations in the current relationship, but also makes for my own sense of guilt and discomfort. I still carry a black hole in my soul because at one point in 2015 I didn't recognise my wife of 24 years.

Another anxiety-causing side effect of ECT is poor word retrieval. This means I struggle to adequately express how I'm feeling, what I anticipate, fear, or hope for. Imagine trying to share with a loved one what you hope is the result of the treatment and though you know you once had a good vocabulary, you're now at a loss.

These things compound each other for a sum that is worse than the total of the individual parts. However, I want to reassure you that these things did diminish with time.