When I was 16, I did what most kids do: I enrolled in driving class, got my learner's permit, and took the driver's test. And I failed. I was horrified and embarrassed, of course, but I dutifully took it again several months later. And I failed again. I can still remember driving home, my driving instructor telling me some totally inappropriate story about having sex with her boyfriend, and feeling numb. How could I have failed the driver's test TWICE?
After that, good old avoidance kicked in and I never went back to take the test again. I felt like such a failure as a teenager, so incompetent, and so humiliated, that I just gave up rather than face the discomfort of failing another test. So I grew up, and I never got my driver's license. I lived in Berkeley, California, where the public transportation system, though far from perfect, is robust. There are buses and trains going most of the places you'd want to go. I went to college in a small town where you could walk from one end of town to another, and when I wanted to go back home, I took Greyhound. After graduation, I came home, got my own apartment at a major intersection and worked at a bookstore two blocks away. Throughout my adult life, I just made do. I would even sometimes go on vacation by myself, using trains, planes, buses and the occasional taxi cab to get around. Once, I went on a first date on the bus, got stood up, and had to take the bus all the way back home. That was a five-hour misadventure. I got onto my career track as a book editor, and took the train and buses to work. About seven years ago, I even bought my own home, several towns over from where I work. For about four or five years, I would walk to the train station, about a mile (and it really WAS uphill both ways), and then I'd take a bus to the office. It took me two hours. But I never had to give a thought to joining a gym to get exercise!
Eventually, my avoidance of driving developed into a full-blown phobia. Every once in awhile, one of my friends would offer to teach me to drive, or I'd think about finally getting my license. I'd get cold chills, and feel shaky and nauseous as soon as I so much as thought about getting behind the wheel. I had recurring nightmares about having to drive someone somewhere - like to the hospital - and of not being able to.
Then, New Harbinger started to publish books on this new third-wave type of therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It fascinated me from the get-go. The idea that we can't change our emotions or argue ourselves out of them, but that we can accept them, feel them, and still live the lives we want to live, was eye-opening. You mean I didn't have to fix myself before I could live the life I wanted?
Eventually, as not having a car got more and more unworkable, it dawned on me that I could use what I learned from ACT to learn to drive. I could have my intense anxiety and trepidation and still take the steps to get my license and finally let go of this albatross of fear that I had been carrying around for twenty years. My best friend once again offered to teach me how to drive, and this time I said yes. I remember on one of our first outings, we drove to a small island town nearby that had an abandoned naval station. But of course, "we" meant "I", and I not only had to drive around the abandoned station, but I had to drive through town to get there! After that session, my legs were literally shaking, I was drenched in sweat, and I almost couldn't stand up when I got out of the car to hand the wheel over to my friend. But I was so proud of myself for doing it anyway, for sitting with the panic and fear and not letting it derail me. It helped that my friend couldn't have been more patient, calm and good-natured about the whole business.
I did pass my third driver's test and was only docked one point during my test. I would have contested that, but I figured I should quit while I was ahead. At age 36, I was finally a licensed driver, only twenty years later than my peers. Now I really enjoy driving, and can't remember what I was so afraid of. I'm so grateful to the founders of ACT, and for my colleagues for publishing some of the first books on it, which gave me the tools with which to open up my world.
