Emotional trauma after a car accident often comes as a surprise. Unexplained symptoms can linger in one’s nervous system, such as anxiety, trauma (PTSD), chronic pain, or what appear to be “random” triggers. Even if they sustained no physical injuries at the time, people often continue to experience anxiety and trauma after a car accident. I know, because that’s what happened to me.
Read on to learn about how I utilized Somatic Experiencing Therapy to overcome my own trauma after a car accident.
A Day Like Any Other Day
There was just one errand left to finish up before heading home to pack for my much anticipated vacation in Spain that would begin the next day. I was driving on a road I have traveled on nearly every day for the past 17 years. It was rush hour and the roads were packed with traffic. I had pulled into a turning lane and was waiting to make a left turn, watching traffic hurry by on both sides of me.
Out of the corner of my eye to my right I saw a car jet out of an adjacent parking lot, weaving its way through traffic and heading toward the turning lane. Heading right towards me! I felt a shiver of fear run through my body, but thought, surely, they would see me. Right? I glanced over to my left and began to panic, knowing that if they hit me hard enough, I could be pushed out into the oncoming traffic. Sure enough, soon enough, I heard two horrible sounds: the crunching metal of their car colliding with my own and the sound of my own scream.
In the end we were both extremely lucky. I wasn’t pushed into the oncoming traffic and no one in either car was injured in the accident. We pulled over and exchanged information and the driver of the other car was caring and concerned. I then went home, fell into a big hug from my husband and didn’t think of the car accident very much afterwards. The next morning I got a ride to the airport and spent a lovely two weeks in Spain.
The Monday morning after I returned home I got back into my car again and I could feel that I was a little more jittery. Something wasn’t quite settled. I seemed to have lost the expectation that other cars would actually stop when they were supposed to.
One day about a month after my car accident, I was going to meet up with some friends for dinner on the same street where it happened. Traffic was heavy again and everything seemed to be going so fast. I pulled into the turning lane and watched the traffic fly by to my left and to my right. I could feel that panicky feeling returning. I managed to park the car safely but, when I got out, I was on the verge of tears. My whole body was shaky. Clearly, in my mind I had moved on from the accident but it was still very present in my nervous system.
Luckily, being a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP), I understood this mind/body connection and that a Somatic Experiencing therapy session could help resolve it. So, I quickly set up an appointment.
What exactly is trauma, though?
In mental health, trauma is term that is often used to describe a spectrum of emotional responses to distressing events, situations or conditions that result in lingering emotional, physical, psychological and behavioral symptoms. Trauma can be thought of as a nervous system response to anything that is too much, too fast or too soon to handle.
Trauma is not in the event, it occurs in the body and it shows up when we are unable to complete a self protective response. Essentially we are stuck in fight, flight or freeze and this dysregulation can affect our daily lives. It’s important to note that this experience is subjective – two people may walk away from a car accident with completely different nervous system responses.
Using Somatic Therapy to Heal Trauma After a Car Accident
During my SE session, there were a few things I remembered that were especially helpful. As I began to tell my SE therapist the story of the accident, she slowed me down. Without realizing it I was using my hands to show her how jittery I felt. She asked me to take a moment and feel my hands. I started to cry, to really begin to let it out.
It then occurred to me that, even though I had been telling the story of my car accident to friends and family as one with a safe and happy ending, when I felt my hands in the slowed down moment, I could really feel and recall how scared I actually was at the time.
One of the things that happens during a car accident is that there are boundary ruptures. For example, things don’t stop when they’re supposed to. We did a lot of work in that session around repairing the boundary through visualizing how I would push the car back, feeling what my body wanted to do in the moment and letting the body do what it wanted. As we did all of this, we went slow, allowing my nervous system to feel the activation and then feel it settle again.
An important aspect of this experience was the lucid memory I had of the sounds. The sound of the metal crashing. The sound of my scream. My SEP helped me use what is known as a pendulation, where I would hear those sounds and then think of a different sound that felt more like a resource. So, I imagined the calming sound of a lazy stream passing by and then moved back and forth between those two sounds. Pendulation is a particularly useful technique to utilize when addressing the trauma after a car accident.
Hear Somatic Experiencing® creator Peter A Levine, PhD explain pendulation.
Another interesting sensation I had been noticing was that, while I was driving, it felt like there was a surge of energy coming up through my leg. I couldn’t make sense of it because it felt like it was coming from the front of my leg instead of the side, where I was hit. As we slowed it down, we noticed this as a thwarted survival instinct my leg had wanted to do in that moment. Sitting there in the turning lane – with nowhere to go and no control over the incoming car – I had been wanting to hit the gas with my foot and move out of the way. But there was nowhere to go!
In our session, we used my imagination to clear the traffic on the left side, really feel my foot push into the gas, and visualize myself move out of the way. While I was driving home after that session I immediately noticed that something felt different and more normal. I felt less anxious, more settled, the energy in my leg was gone. I could once again drive in heavy traffic without feeling like I’m on the edge of tears.
Curious if Somatic Experiencing therapy might help you resolve trauma after a car accident?
My experience of lingering anxiety and trauma after a car accident is not uncommon. Sadly, there are a lot of people who have been through much worse and then carry around undischarged survival energy for years. There is hope though!
Curious to see if Somatic Experiencing therapy can help you resolve trauma after a car accident and restore resilience and vitality to your nervous system? Click here to learn how SE helps us to slow down in the moments when we feel triggered.
