Getting Rid of a Phobia. (Article 23 of the history of my epilepsy.)

Getting rid of a phobia

One of my doubts as an epileptic have been how to meet the requirements to obtain / maintain a driving license. The formal requirement has been to have been free from seizures during three years, to be confirmed by a neurologist who has the responsibility to make testing and follow the medical treatment. For me literally to meet these requirements could have meant that I had not been able to experience the revolution that the dynamic therapy has meant. Of course, I could have chosen to be without a license, but to act as highly mobile change consultant and manager without access to a car that hadn’t got my total equation to make ends meet. So, during 50 years, then and now, from a formal point of view, I have violated the relevant rules.

However, I have been extremely conscious of this and made an effort with my full ability to avoid most of the time to put myself in risky situations. So for example, I have preferred to let others run if there were alternatives. My wives or partners have always run a lot more than I did. So my 50 years in traffic have fortunately been free from accidents.

This has meant that when precautions exceptionally have failed then I have been lucky. It has, for example, been fascinating but frightening to experience an epileptic disorder with all its complications, while driving a car with the complex manipulations that this requires. Having experienced how the brain seemingly effortlessly can handle multiple processes simultaneously and coordinate and translate through its various centers where conscience and empathy interpret that what I am doing is no good either legally or morally, while I switch, brake and make over takings. Finally, one can say that these split-vision experiences are typical for my entire, neurotic life in all fields. Both with regard to the complexity of my existence and considering the compulsions that have propelled me.

20 years ago I suffered from a phobia and could not overtake a truck without getting very tense and scared, and sometimes I then got a feeling of being stunned. Because it was uncomfortable to overtake a truck I avoided for this reason often to do so. However, a late night in 1982 (this was after my epileptic seizures had begun turning into birth primals) so I made a compulsive departure.

In a heavy rain/snow I drove on a narrow forest road in the North east corner of Scania, and I was in a rush home, and I felt generally pressured. Visibility was lousy due to the darkness and the rain, and suddenly I had to slow down because I had a big truck with a trailer in front of me. The feeling of being pressured and trapped (as intense as the experience in a birth primal) increased dramatically. The pressure was growing in so far as I could not stop myself from overtaking the truck. That I could accept a decision to overtake a truck with a trailer in the pouring rain and darkness, on a narrow forest road without vision, I can only explain by referring to the magnitude of the pain-driven terror, which has been imprinted in my brain since birth. I could have driven myself to death on that occasion and caused, which would have been even worse, a manslaughter.

Just as I crossed the cab of the truck, I experienced a petit mall, type hallucination, in which a classmate, Lars, from primary school turned into a very clear flash back while he was hit by a truck and got his leg broken. After overtaking and having remembered the overwhelming and frightening accident with Lars, I felt an indescribable relief. The accident occurred during my first school year, 1947, and in more than 35 years the painful incident had remained imprinted and unaddressed and caused the reason for my phobia. From this incident in 1982 so I've had, what I would characterize as, normal anxiety when I have had to overtake a truck.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Sigmund Freud