The EMDR Revolution by Croitoru Tal;

Author:Croitoru, Tal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Driving anxiety, flying anxiety and other anxieties

Bob

Bob, 25 years old, finished a Bachelor’s degree in computer sciences but had a difficult time finding a suitable job. When at last he found one, it required him to commute a long way to work. He did not have the possibility to get to work by public transportation, and had not driven since the army. While in the army, he was driving with other passengers in the car, and had been in a near-fatal accident. This was a traumatic experience for him and he avoided driving. Bob had several additional problems, but the reason he came to therapy was to start driving again and start working to gain experience in his field.

He was a strong man with good coping skills. Since the reason for his avoiding driving was a relatively recent one, therapy was particularly short. We met twice: once to process the memory of the accident in the army, and the other to work on the future. With EMDR, we work on future readiness with a therapeutic protocol built especially for this purpose, in which a client is instructed to imagine situations in the future taking place as he would like them to (This technique is very useful when helping athletes before a competition, musicians before a performance, or business people before requests for a raise or promotion. I will get into more detail in the next chapter). Working with Bob, we focused on his ability to get into a car and drive.

After two sessions, Bob took a refresher driving lesson, which he had previously not been able to do. Since then he has been driving himself to and from work. After three years, I checked up on him. He was still driving and doing well.

Daniel

Daniel, a 30-year-old, told me that he was flying overseas in two weeks to visit family. He mentioned his distaste for flying since he did not react well to it. When asked what he meant by that, he told me that during flights he becomes nauseous and vomits. I ask him if this occurred both when flying to and from Israel. He replied that this only occurred in flights when he returns to Israel.

In order to focus his problem and to be accurate with my diagnosis, I kept asking differentiating questions that would help me in ruling out unrelated options. I asked if he always suffered from this, or only since a specific point in his life. He replied that the feeling only started when he turned 18. Before that, flying had not affected him at all. When we started looking into what had happened at that age, he recalled a memory of making Aliyah (moving to Israel from another country), at a young age, and being placed in a boarding school where he was abused by other boys. When he was 18 and returning to Israel from a visit to Russia, he found one of his abusers on the flight with him. This led him to associate flying with the trauma in his youth and subsequently he developed anxiety.

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