Fear of Driving After a North Carolina Car Crash
Whether you sustained a major injury in a North Carolina car crash, or you just suffered some fender bender type damage and emotional shock after getting rear-ended by a truck at a traffic light, you’re trying to come up with an appropriate way to process what you’ve been through.
This is difficult because, even if your friends and family members are sympathetic and if you have resources on your side like a competent North Carolina car crash law firm, the experience of being a victim can be incredibly isolating and terrifying. When we don’t process the accident correctly, from an emotional point of view, we can find ourselves hemmed in by our own irrational fears for months or even years after the disaster.
For instance, you might find yourself remarkably and paralyzingly afraid of getting behind the wheel again. The trauma of the accident is just too fresh and potent. On an intellectual level, you’d like to conquer this fear and get back out there. After all, you have a job to do, bills to pay, people to see, and errands to run. But on an emotional level, you’re having a very difficult time conceptualizing your limitations and getting beyond them. Maybe you’ve even tried things like hypnotherapy, talking therapy, cognitive behavioral approaches, etc to some effect.
Step one to dealing with fears like this is to acknowledge the extent and scope of the problem – as well as the limits that this problem are putting on your life. Be compassionate with yourself. Sure, you may suffer through thoughts to the effect “I’m so stupid, why am I so scared of something as silly as the prospect of driving to a 7-11?”
Fears like this – which may seem silly or irrational to others or even to yourself — often stem from far deeper and more complicated root causes. Just knowing that your accident was somehow involved won’t necessarily make the problem go away, either. You need to put attention on the problem and potentially try out various therapies and modalities to restore some balance and equilibrium in your life.
You may also need time. We live in a world in which we expect results instantly – not only from ourselves but also from our therapists and doctors and lawyers. But the reality is that, in some situations, you may need to invest a lot of time and energy just to make a problem go away. In some cases, success may not even be fully possible! In other words, it is at least conceivable that you may be afraid of driving for the reminder of your days. To reconcile with all this, you need to start to think about various ways you can reengineer your life.
For instance, you could try to make your driving fears less debilitating. You could also think about alternative tactics to use in your life to compensate. For instance, maybe your spouse could take care of all highway driving from here on out. Or maybe you could do more business and shopping online to avoid traveling via car. Or maybe you could take the bus to work or car pool.
In other words, your strategy could be a two-front approach:
1) Work on the fear itself. Find its root cause, and see what you can do to get over it or make it less debilitating.
2) Develop workarounds in your life to make things easier and less complicated for you.
More Web Resources:
The Fear of Driving
Getting Over Phobias
