Healing Our Freeways

Doctor: Hello, nice to meet you.  What seems to be the problem?

Patient:  Well, you see, Doc, it’s the guy in the green Tahoe, he cut me off this morning in the freeway merge lane and it was clearly my turn to go.

Doctor:  Sounds serious, tell me more.

Patient: And there’s the blonde in the yellow Mustang.  She’s always talking on her cellphone, smoking a cigarette, and she totally doesn’t look where she’s going and I have to get out of her way.

Doctor:  Wow, this is intense.  What else?

Patient:  And another thing, there’s the old lady in the Buick who can’t even see over the steering wheel and she’s going 12 miles per hour down Baseline Rd. and she’s drifting from lane to lane like she owns the whole darn street herself!  Oooh, it makes me so mad!

Road rage.  It seems to be an epidemic in the Valley, but in all honesty, I’ve never had a session that sounded anything like that.  No one ever comes to a therapists’ office and seriously wants to address the traffic issue.  They want to talk about their bosses, their husbands, their kids, their wives, their futures, their pasts, but not their driving experience.

Why is that?  Why does our time on the road get it’s own, private life, separate from anything else that we do on a daily basis?  Because lots of the drivers aren’t really “there.”  People have gotten to the point where they realize the commute is a necessary evil and they do their best to avoid experiencing it in any real way.  They talk on the phone, listen to funny DJ’s, crank the tunes, do their make-up or perform other ‘personal hygiene’ tasks (Ewww!), eat meals, plan what they’re going to do for the rest of the day, drink caffeine-loaded ‘energy’ drinks, or even read books or newspapers!

Each of those behaviors is what we would call “dissociative.”  When a person “dissociates,” it means that his or her consciousness isn’t fully in his or her body at the moment.  Parts of the person’s energy are just ‘elsewhere.’  The most notable events that lead to dissociation are severe traumas, things like hurricanes, rapes, fires, or animal attacks.  When someone experiences a life-threatening trauma, often to preserve their own sanity, they automatically ‘dissociate.’  Their mind rescues them and they sorta just ‘go away’ for a little while, and they have a decreased experience of the trauma.  Have you heard people say that they simply can’t remember what happened to them during a traumatic event?  That’s likely because they were dissociating.

Dissociating is a last-ditch-effort on your body’s part to save your sanity.  We should only be pulling out that heavy hitter when our lives or our personal integrity are seriously at risk – when an armed madman is demanding our wallet, when we pull up to the house to find it in flames, when we get the phone call that a loved one was suddenly killed.  This is not a technique that should be used at 70 miles per hour.

Why is it being so widely used, then, on our roads?  Because people are viewing the commute as a life-threatening trauma.  And, they’re right because when you have hundreds of people operating thousands of pounds of machinery, many of them not really present in their own minds and bodies, your life is, most certainly, in danger.

The part you can play in the solution is to really ‘be there’ when you drive.  Let yourself have the experience of noticing how your car feels on the road, what the air smells like.  Look at fellow commuters and smile.  Enjoy the sunrise, or sunset.  Leave early enough that you are not in so much of a hurry.  Share the road.  Just be there.  The life you save could very well be your own or those of your children.

Marlo Archer, Ph.D.
Down to Earth Enterprises
1250 E. Baseline Rd., Suite 102
Tempe, AZ 85283
(480) 705-5007