On the occasion of DWDD with Professor Erik Scherder about fears I could not resist writing a piece again. May be shared.I worked abroad regularly for years.
For this I had to make quite some trips by car on the motorway. I don't know why, but I got more and more trouble with it. I was opposed to having to go on that long journey.
I've been very lucky and I've never experienced a serious accident.
In fact, I was so lucky I was never involved in an accident.
Well, once on vacation, I doubted at a crossroads and got hit from behind.
So an accident experienced cannot be the cause.
There is another incident I remember.
When I was 18 years old and on vacation in Austria we got damage to the car. My father was driving and the roads in the mountains were very narrow. You couldn't do whole pieces with two side by side.
The week before, a P.O. Box had gone off the road, they had told us. My dad drove up on such a narrow road, had to sway for an oncoming vehicle and hit a pole. Could happen, not something to really worry about.
Apparently it had made quite an impression on me. Maybe because I just got my driver's license and this was the first vacation I got to drive my dad's car.
We slept in friends' houses in a room with bunk beds.
I slept on the top bed. I dreamed I was driving but the brake stopped working. I had to push the brake deeper and deeper. Until I woke everyone up because I was tipped down from the bunk bed because the brake wasn't there. It's strange that I never forgot this.
At one point I had trouble driving on the motorway. I felt insecure and the feeling that an accident would happen came to mind again and again. I could have a good or bad mood when I was on the road, every time the fear of an accident came in my head.
Since the last few years I worked I was on the road almost every day, this became very difficult. You can think of something else, reassure yourself, you name it, that image appears again and again.
During my time when I worked in Germany and had to drive 400 km on Monday and Friday. I had music cassettes, who remembers them, in the car with an audiobook by Emiel Ratelband, The Firerunner.
This book is about NLP. Neuro Logistic Programming.
The principle is: you can re-evoke a positive feeling that you once experienced by linking a gesture to this feeling. When you feel less well, you evoke the positive feeling by making this gesture.
When I found it harder and harder to drive a car on the motorway, I had to find a solution for my annoying thoughts.
I bought two plush frogs. One I gave to a very sweet friend, one of them was in the car, next to me in the passenger's seat.
If there was an image in my head that something bad would happen, the plush frog stroked.
This gave the good, safe, soft, warm feeling of the cuddly toys when I was little. This has helped me many times not to panic and reach my destination.
I still find it hard to drive on the highway. Nowadays, I can only drive small pieces. Because of this, I don't get on the motorway so often. I may also avoid the motorway.
The frog is always on the Dashboard. It was once bright green, but it's getting greyer. I'm glad that with this frog I had the opportunity to control this fear.
Who knows, you might be able to take advantage of this.

Greetings Hub