FreshCaffeine

When I was 5 I was in a car accident where I was thrown out the back hatch of the car. You know the days when our parents let us sit on the center console of the front seat so that we could see better. Luckily I wasn't wearing a seat belt or I wouldn't have gotten my one and only concussion. I ended up in the hospital and it was determined that I would forever have trouble with short-term memory (this explains why I never remember what me and my husband talk about, it frustrates him at times but I have an excuse now)

When I was 14, I was in my boyfriends car and it caught on fire and I couldn't become conscious of the situation and open the door and he wasn't a hero and open the door for me, he just ran and some one who saw me ran over to the car and got me out. The flames were coming out of the air vents and the plastic even melted to my shoes. That was something that made people think I was a witch but that is a completely different story.

Then when I was first learning to drive (I was 18) and I had my daughter in the car. She was only about 15 months old and I really didn't know better then to put her in the passenger seat. I was taking my mom's car for a drive while she way away on vacation. I was going around a sharp turn and a drunk driver pulled into my lane and believe it or not there was a telephone poll in the shoulder of the road. In the actual asphalt of the road and I hit it. I realized that I almost killed my daughter. From then on I was always afraid to have her in the car and I always put her in the back seat from then on. I am still more nervous when my kids are in the car then any other time.

Then about 3 years later (I have told this story a thousand time and you can read more details somewhere else on my blog) I had an accident where my brother almost died because I did not see him coming out of the woods on the back of a dirt bike and I was driving by at the wrong time. He spent a long time in the hospital and he became a different person after that. I blamed (and still do sometimes) myself for why he can't live the life he wants and that I almost killed him.

Then another 3 to 4 years later I had a very terrifying situation happen to me, I was driving on an 8 lane highway going into Baltimore and my car started to smoke and flames started to come out of the hood and then the car just died. I lost control of the car and I was in the middle lane. I had to make my way to the center of the road where the cement barriers are. Then I had to get out of my car and run across 4 lanes of traffic. Then I had to walk down an embankment into one of the worst neighborhoods in the city by myself. Then I had to stand around for an hour or more until someone could come and get me. It wasn't fun, this was before we could afford cellphones.

I think that after the last incident I have just been too afraid to go too far from home or take sharp turns very fast (only turns that are the same direction as the accident that I had with the electric pole).

If these are the causes for my fear of driving, what do I do? It means that it isn't just some illogical fear that I can just go see a shrink and get over. Jemal suggested hypnosis, maybe he doesn't remember that just a few months ago when I was thinking about using hypnosis to quit smoking, he said it didn't work unless you had a weak mind.

So, there is my story. I have it all figured out, I just don't know what to do with it. Where do I go from here? What can I do to fix it. I don't want to be like this forever. I want to be normal, you know? I want to have a normal life. I want to be able to do all of the things that other people do.

If anyone has any good, hell bad, ideas just let me know, I am willing to try anything.