How Trauma Showed Up Behind the Wheel
When I first learned to drive back in high school, guess who decided they were going to teach me? It definitely wasn’t my mom. So lucky me, my father took on the job. Learning to drive became one of the more traumatic experiences of my life.
It’s funny because I can even recall being very young, perhaps age 10 and having this low, buzzing fear around the idea of learning to drive. Not because I didn’t believe I could do it. It was because I sensed that the teaching process would be horrible at best. I was 100% correct in that assumption.
Imagine being taught how to drive by someone who is angry, with a drink in hand, and in a suburban, of all things. I had never driven anything in my life, let alone a vehicle that felt like a small ship. There was much yelling, screaming, and frustration in the learning process. This is just how it was in general growing up. Learning for me was not relaxing or safe. Most kids I knew were so excited to learn how to drive. Not me. Not excited at all.
Caution
It’s not surprising then that I’ve grown into a very cautious driver. I drive slowly, I give people space, I don’t dart into lanes or speed through yellow lights. I’m the kind of driver people love to criticize. “You should go around this car. Why did you park so far away? Why don’t you just take the shortcut?” The list goes on.
Every comment from a passenger pulls me right back into that early place, where driving meant being scrutinized, rushed, or made to feel like I didn’t know what I was doing (which…I didn’t know what I was doing because I was a new driver? But I’m being too critical and logical, aren’t I?). I don’t just hear a suggestion. I feel the threat of failure all over again.
Probably the biggest way I’ve been coping with having nervous system dysregulation has been to isolate and to always be cautious about pretty much everything from people to the kinds of environments I place myself in. Over the years, I have found that I really prefer it if I drive 100% by myself. The criticisms I’ve received in my driving style really throws me into a bad place. Being alone means that I can handle it however I want to.
Today’s Awful Experience
Then there was today. Thanks GOD I was alone today…
I was leaving a sleepy suburb and heading toward a much busier city, trying to merge onto a major highway. The rental car I was using had horrible acceleration when I tried hitting the gas to speed up. This threw me into a panic.
I missed the lane because there were so many cars. I was suddenly swept into the downtown area. My nervous system couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t think clearly. I couldn’t make a decision. Full freeze was in effect.
I had my GPS running, and it was trying its best to redirect me. “Turn right, turn left” but every instruction felt impossible. The traffic was thick, the construction unpredictable, certain turns had 3 places you could make a left at… I couldn’t find my way back to myself, let alone the freeway.
So…. I just kept going straight.
Just keep going straight. I did that for nearly ten miles, I didn’t turn, I didn’t try to force a fix. I just moved forward in a straight line, hoping things would settle. And they did….an hour later….I really cannot imagine if someone else would have been in the car with me. It would have been understandable if they potentially would have been just as panicked as I was, but it would have made it so much worse…This is the frustrating thing about having these kinds of issues is always defaulting to isolation as the solution. It’s a very lonely disease.
Eventually, I got back on the highway. But by then, I had lost an hour, and rush hour was fast approaching. I was too drained, physically, emotionally, to keep pushing forward. So, I decided to pull off and get a hotel for the night. It wasn’t what I planned. It wasn’t ideal. But it was kind. And I needed that more than anything. Even finding the hotel felt like a monumental task. The traffic. The exhaustion. The lingering freeze. It all made something simple feel impossibly hard.
I Can’t Suppress Anymore
I’m at a point in my nervous system dysregulation healing process where I simply can’t suppress the feelings anymore. In that moment, my body was clearly telling me that everything needed to stop. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pause everything I was doing, so continuing on autopilot for over an hour was the best I could manage.
If this had happened 10 years ago, I probably would’ve just pushed through. Looking back, I can see how much my nervous system was bypassing and overriding back then, even when it was completely overwhelmed. Somehow, it still managed to function. But my nervous system can’t do that anymore. It will not allow it.
I suppose this might be a sign that my body and my mind are finally catching up with one another. I’m hoping that it’s not a sign that I am getting worse. For me personally, everything I’ve been feeling in my body has been so scary and overwhelming. The only thing that I wanted was for all the symptoms and sensations to stop.
But I am now realizing that I have to allow these things to happen. I can’t force it to stop, I can’t force it to heal, I can’t force it to do anything other than what it needs to do to find its own way. Allowing. This is something new that I have learned and something I have to constantly remind myself of. I am trying to remind myself now, while I’m still recovering from this.
Freeze Response at Work and Emotional Well-being – Astra Speaks
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