Too scared to take the wheel

Gavanndra Hodge can drive. But like growing numbers of women, crippling anxiety left her...

AT 5.40pm it was dark already, the rain pelting down in thick sheets, the branches of the trees lashing in the wind. I had to collect my children from school. Could I do it, I wondered, staring at the car keys on a hook in the hallway.

Could I get in the car to do the school run? I felt the familiar constriction in my sternum that signalled fear, the nausea that is the beginnings of panic.

No, I could not. I pulled on my coat, fetched the umbrella I knew would be whipped inside-out the moment I opened it, and headed into the squall for the 20-minute walk, trudging past our lovely, warm, dry Citroen.

I felt ashamed and stupid as well as cold and wet. I’ve had a driving licence for eight years and yet I am too scared to drive, preferring to expose my children to the elements rather than get in the car.

I started learning to drive in my late 20s, egged on by my boyfriend, now husband, who perhaps foresaw in my unwillingness to drive, a future in which he would always be the one at the wheel on tedious motorway journeys. He was right.

My first instructor smoked during lessons, had a bouncing vampire gonk on the dashboard and would tell me about his fantasies, featuring me wearing tight, white salopettes.

So I got a new instructor. This one would shout ‘What gear?! What gear?! What speed?! What speed?!’ continuously as we tootled about the streets stressing me out so much I developed eczema.

I failed my first driving test by reversing into a tree. I gave myself a driving sabbatical, had a baby, and then got a new instructor, Gavin, an unflappable pedant. I would scream at him as he took me onto the motorway, ‘Why are we doing this? Do you want to die?!’

‘No,’ he would reply, not laughing. Gavin and I spent many hours together. Expensive hours.

After three months and more than 40 lessons, I passed my driving test at eight months pregnant with my second daughter. I think the examiner felt pity for me in my vast and flustered state.

Gavin was certainly surprised. ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Let me see the piece of paper.’ Still, I found the idea of driving with two children challenging. I kept seeing images of their tender little bodies mangled in a pile of twisted metal, all because I was not so hot on the clutch.

On the rare occasions when I did try to drive with my daughters strapped into the seats behind me, their cries scrambled my synapses and made negotiating the narrow residential roads where I live, almost impossible.

The most humiliating moment was when a scaffolder called me ‘a complete Rodney’ after I told him I was too scared to reverse and could he please move his van.

‘I am a successful person with a classics degree from Cambridge University! I am nothing like Rodney Trotter,’ I wanted to shout. But I didn’t, because in a way he was right. When it comes to driving, I am a complete Rodney.

After that I stopped driving. But when my husband broke his kneecap in a cycling accident last summer, I booked a course of refresher lessons. I had not been behind a wheel for three years. My instructor would get hungry during our lessons and take me to the drive-thru McDonalds so she could get a chocolate milkshake and a McMuffin — ‘first gear, lots of clutch, take it really slow.’

But even though I could now navigate a drive-thru, I was still too scared to drive my family.

And I’m not alone. A whopping 39% of us admit to feeling scared, nervous or uncertain in general behind the wheel, according to a study by Nissan.

My ‘condition’ even has a name — vehophobia. It is often experienced by people who’ve been in car crashes and are too traumatised to get back in the vehicle.

It can also come out of the blue — a panic attack on the motorway afflicting people who have been confident drivers all their lives. Symptoms include palpitations, sweaty palms, disorientation, confusion, even dizziness.

Or there are the people like me, with the fear and discomfort around the idea of driving accumulating until it becomes an unmovable barrier. Apparently the condition is on the rise, too. ‘These days we are getting between six and seven enquiries a week about driving phobia,’ explains Steve Butler, founder of the Therapy Lounge and an expert on driving phobia.

‘It’s men and women of all ages, but the most common problem is sudden anxiety on the motorway. We are finding more and more people coming to us with fears and phobias.

‘Driving anxiety is part of this. It is a reflection of the fact that in 2019 our emotional health is at an all-time low.’

Steve suggests a fear of driving is often connected to other anxieties that are being suppressed. ‘The mind works on the basis that the environment we are in is primarily responsible for the way we are feeling,’ he adds.

‘So if you start to feel anxious while you are in a car, you blame the car, rather than examining deeper concerns.’

It is true that I have issues around control and fear. I had a chaotic childhood involving alcoholism and divorce, so feel uncomfortable when I am not in complete control. Driving is something I don’t have sufficient control over, so it scares me.

I know I can drive, but my subconscious is telling me I can’t. I didn’t need more lessons (I’d already spent €3,000 on them), I needed to persuade my subconscious to change the message.

Aaron Surtees is a clinical hypnotherapist who has been running his hypnosis clinic for 15 years and has treated many people with driving phobias. At his therapy room, I relaxed myself into a sumptuous recliner chair and closed my eyes.

He put on a soundtrack of gentle waves while instructing me in a low, almost mournful voice to relax my toes, legs, belly, arms, eyeballs, brain and so on.

I was then instructed to visualise getting into a lift that went down from the tenth floor to the ground floor, as my body felt heavier and heavier. Once at the bottom I had to imagine writing the word sleep on a blackboard and rubbing it off again and again, until my ‘inner eye’ blinked shut.

THEN Aaron began to speak to my subconscious, telling it that I could drive; that my fears were not rational; it is useful to be able to drive places; driving can be fun, especially when you play your favourite music; cars are nice private spaces; motorways are safe, not scary at all.

I felt very meditative but nonetheless alert, like my body was asleep but my mind awake and able to absorb these calming, simplistic messages. When Surtees ‘brought me round’, I was sure that the session had lasted only five minutes. It had been 30.

I recorded the session and Aaron suggested I listen to it a few more times to reinforce the process, as well as offering followups to make sure the re-tweaking of my subconscious narrative would stick.

I have to say I felt sceptical. Could whispering that it was fun to play music in a car change an ingrained belief of two decades?

There was only one way to find out. I had asked my husband to be there when I got home, so we could go for a drive straightaway. Even thinking about this on the train caused the familiar nervous tightening of my chest.

But although the feeling of fear was still there, it was more subtle and distant than before. And it didn’t prevent me fetching the keys and going out to the car.

‘I’ve forgotten how to do it,’ I said, as I turned on the ignition.

But I quickly realised I had not, and drove us to school, via a bit of kamikaze reversing and pulling out in front of a truck, but without crashing or getting called a Rodney. I felt triumphant.

I know this is just the start. I have to keep driving, capitalising on the fact that my fear has diminished, rather than giving it the space to bloom once more.

The aim is to do something often enough that it becomes boring.

You never feel afraid when you are bored. I might even consider listening to some nice music.