A very warm welcome to you at this upsetting and incredibly challenging time in your life and relationship ❤️
I think when someone manages their own challenges through what's addictive for them, others around them can suffer in significant ways. Whether it involves a phone or tablet, alcohol, some other drug, risk taking or extreme interests or something else, the dopamine high that comes from such things is, in itself, addictive. In a way it becomes about 'When I'm high, I'm not low. When I'm up, I'm not down and if this is the only thing that leads me to feel high or up then nothing and no one's going to take it away from me'. I suppose it's a matter of someone threatening to take away our only coping mechanism. Makes the aggressive or defensive nature more understandable. Of course, knowing this doesn't lessen the struggles that those around an addict face.
I wonder whether your husband's tried in the past to address what's depressing him or stressing him, without any significant success, and he turns to his phone out of desperation. I wonder whether no one, including himself, has been able to pinpoint the reason or reasons for the depression and anxiety. As a gal who drank my way (to various degrees) through years in depression, it wasn't until I woke up to the reasons for why I was depressed that I actually stopped drinking as a way of 'managing' my emotions. Looking back, it was serious mismanagement at times.
It can feel like such a catch 22 when it comes to emotions. It's like 'The only way I can effectively manage depressing emotions (addressing them) is by feeling them and I don't want to feel them because they're depressing and/or stressful'. So there's a tendency to avoid them in a search for 'happiness' or 'relief' or a sense of peace. The problem with this can involve those around us being left to suffer through this type of avoidance. From my own experience, I've found and addiction becomes a welcomed habit. It's about the habit of avoiding or the habit of trying to feel anything other than 'down'. One of the toughest things in life would have to involve raising our self up and out of 'down', that black hole of depression.
At the end of the day, I believe we're not designed to feel high all the time. It's in our nature to feel a whole range of emotions, including the tough ones. This means putting the phone down occasionally, which can be easier said than done for some.
