hello do you have a fear of driving on highways where you get this feeling of panic if there is
nowhere to pull over do you find that when you're driving on a fast road and there isn't going to be
an exit to a junction for another 10 or 20 minutes you start to panic and get really nervous and you
just want to break and stop and do anything to get off the road even if that means stopping in the
middle of a live busy line of traffic and leaving your car you may find that even just watching
this video playing in the background makes you feel anxious but if you've got that feeling then
don't worry because it's very very common and in this video i'm going to share some details
about where it comes from and how to get rid of it my name's paul i work online with people
all over the world to help them overcome their fear of driving and this is definitely in the
top three things that people say to me it's so common that people say i just don't understand it
even when i'm coming up to a motorized junction i just start getting nervous and if i go round the
roundabout i feel fine but as soon as i start to go on a fast road and as soon as i start to join
from the slip road on the on-ramp whatever you call it wherever you are in the world i just feel
terrified i get this overwhelming feeling of panic my hands start sweating my heart starts racing my
stomach feels like it's got butterflies and when i join the road i often just have to stay as far
to the side as i can and i even drive partly off the road with my car bouncing up and down
off the verge because i just feel panic whenever lorries are passing me or whenever i need to
overtake someone well it's really important you understand that what's causing this is
not driving as i'll say in all of my videos the fear of driving has nothing to do with driving
what's causing this is a trapped emotion from your past there is something that's happened in
your life which is some kind of unresolved issue now exactly what this is well it could be anything
it can be relationships work stress it can be something to do with your childhood it could
be something from school it could be something to do with when you left home it can be many
many things and the thing is that only you know what the cause is so what's so different about
my therapy is i base my sessions on you now i'll say sessions but very often this only
takes one session to get rid of and people say to me how is that possible i've been in cbt for
months i've had psychotherapy for years i've had counselling i've done all these different things
i've even done hypnotherapy before and nothing has worked well i've got many other videos explaining
why that can be but simply the way that i do it is different because i base it on you and your needs
people normally struggle to get over this because of two things first of all the therapist makes
the mistake of working on the symptom so your driving anxiety is a symptom of another problem
if you're working on the symptom then you'll never get rid of the real problem because you
may feel better for a few days or even a few weeks but then the problem will return because
all you've done is just stuck a plaster over the symptom you haven't fixed the real problem
the other reason it doesn't work is because many therapists use what we call techniques
so they'll do things like they'll take you back to your childhood and they'll get you to remember a
time when something happened or they might get you to imagine that the problem is a symbol inside of
you and the symbol is coming out from your body and it's being pushed into a car and carried off
down the road now don't get me wrong sometimes those things are required but the problem is
that when you are properly trained in therapy and you understand where those things come from
where those techniques come from you'll understand why they don't work i spent years as a therapist
thinking why is this not working i'm doing my techniques i'm doing what i was trained to do i'm
doing what it says in the books but it just isn't working well now i fully understand how it works
and i understand why techniques do and don't work so if you go to a therapist who does a technique
on your symptom there are two things going wrong first of all they're using a technique which
often won't work because it's just something to make the therapist feel more comfortable
they've got their nice step one step two step three plan which is great for them because
it's nice and calm and relaxing for them but it doesn't actually work and they're applying that to
your symptom which isn't the problem anyway you see you're using a technique that doesn't work
on something that isn't even the problem anyway and that's why it often fails where i'm different
is in two main ways firstly i've been one of the uk's top driving instructors for over 20
years i've taught over a thousand people to drive which means i've been there in the car with people
having panic attacks i always specialised in anxious drivers and i know exactly what it's
like because unlike other therapists who have never even been in a car with someone with a
fear of driving i have, hundreds of times, and i know exactly what it's like i know how you
feel and i know how annoying it is when people say just push through you'll be okay just keep going
and i've got a video explaining why exposure therapy doesn't work which i'll link to on
the screen now and in the description and at the end of this video the other thing that makes me
different is i've trained well beyond the standard than most therapists are at i went and got the
highest qualification possible for hypnotherapy in the uk and as soon as i qualified with that
i realised it was rubbish he was never going to work. The things they teach you are nonsense so i
went off and trained with someone who is a master and they have taught me things that are absolutely
incredible and the way i work now is so efficient that i can often get results in under two hours
very often under one hour and i've actually done it in as little as 20 minutes not always
not for everyone but that's what i can do and if anyone ever says that's not possible
you can't do that well that's what people always say back in the days of the horse and cart people
said cars? what, these thing called cars with four wheels? No one's ever gonna buy them they'll never
take off and recently people have said the same thing about electric cars oh that'll never work
it's impossible you can't have an electric car you can only go for two miles and no one's going
to have them and what about self-driving cars that's impossible apparently it can't be done
except it has been done the impossible always seems impossible until it's done
and you can overcome this fear and you can do it quickly not every time it does depend
on what the real cause of the problem is so if you want to overcome your fear of driving
online anywhere in the world contact me through my website 1stdrive.com check out these other
videos on the screen now thanks for watching and as always i'll see you again soon for more videos