Car Crash Anxiety
TRIGGER WARNING I got into a car crash a little over a year ago now. No one was seriously injured, but I still have a hard time with people driving me and I have lots of nightmares involving car crashes. What happened was a friend was driving and wasn’t paying attention for a second. When he wasn’t looking at the road a person started walking across the road and he we hit the person. I saw him hit the windshield and hit the ground. I honestly thought he was dead for a minute. Luckily he ended up being fine but I still think about that moment. My other friends involved in the crash are mentally fine and make fun of me for still having anxiety over the whole thing. Any one else experience anything like this?
I've had my fair share, and then some so I can relate to how you are feeling. For some reason I am a sort of magnet for freak accidents.
Due to all the experiences I've had I learned to "avoid eye contact with the road", so to speak when I'm a passanger. I look out the side window or look at the GPS and follow the route, anything to not be hypervigilant. It's the only way I avoid ending up being a ball of clenched muscles by the time we reach the destination.
We all process things in different ways and on our own time and for some of us it's not just a simple matter of "getting past" things that easily. Granted, if it starts to severely undermine your daily life, it may be a good idea to seek counseling but other than that, you don't need to appologise or feel bad over how you react to situations.
There's a multitude of possible explanations for why your friends react the way they do. They might not understand and be unsure of how to handle it so they try to "lighten the mood" for your benifit. They may even have the same fears as you and hide behind joking around about it or, they may just be typical friends, joking and fooling around and there just happen to be nothing else interisting to clown around over.
Either way, no matter their motivation, it's not your responsibility to change something you might not have controll over, for their sake, and if they don't / can't put in the effort to try and understand, then that's fine too.
We can't controll how people act, but we can controll how we react to them.
@silo24
This sounds more like PTSD than simple anxiety for me. But this still needs to be diagnosed by a doctor. Everyone has a different reaction to traumatic experiences. Is normal that you have a different feeling than your friend. If the nightmare situation seriously interrupts your life, consider asking for professional help. Wish you the best.
That is scary. I think the anxiety stems from the what if questions. Like what if the situation had been different? I have these thoughts about a lot of things, like things from the past that I can't change. Sometimes they are things that I have done that I wish I could do differently. You don't deserve to be made fun of, especially for something you can't control.