My mother, God love her, is a perfect example of the worry wheel, so let me tell you how this went just recently.
She is a tentative driver, always has been. Exceedingly careful by nature as a Capricorn, and British born, she was not raised comfortably behind the wheel of a car and didn't learn to drive until I turned sixteen. She is in her early seventies now. Her husband for the past twenty years has encouraged her phobia and has done all the driving. They are now separated. She had to get her license again, which she did. This took six months of encouragement, and it has taken six more months for her to begin to drive with it.
But! We just helped her get a new little car and she has been actually enjoying driving herself to and fro. She stays to side roads and obeys all the rules of course, and avoids the freeway. She has a little circuit of about 3 miles from home that she travels. She is not a big driver anyway. Her old car had 28,000 miles on it and it was a 1982 Nova and I put most of those on when I visited.
The other day she decided to go downtown to pay a bill and pulled into a terraced parking structure. This was a new adventure, a toe in a bigger pond! As she was going up an SUV was coming down and it was taking up more space so she tucked in closer to the right and as she came around the corner she scraped a pole crunching her door.
This shook her but she got out, inspected her car, realized she didn't hit a car but a pole, and went home.
No big deal. She called me, we laughed, congratulated her on getting the first scratch out of way so she can relax about where she parks now. That was it.
Three days later she had a panic attack behind the wheel while parked in the driveway and could not make herself put the key in the ignition. About what? Not about what actually happened at all. The panic attack was about the 'what if's - what if she had hit a child? She had almost continually IMAGINED circumstances much much worse than what had actually happened.
This had nothing to do with what happened and everything to do with the imagination run wild.
What if I had hit a child? That would be awful, SO I can never drive again. Now, to save the world and that imaginary child out there that was in danger, she couldn't let herself drive.
This is backwards thinking and the creation of fear. We do it all the time. This is the worry wheel. The mind running amuck, taking one thing that has happened, and expanding it into a fear field that cripples us.
Control your mind. Control your thoughts. But to control them, you have to hear them. It helps to write them down, and then look at the progression of one to another.
I hit a pole>it could have been a child>I can never drive again. The brain hooks this up, drops it into programming and we have a new limitation. Driving is dangerous>I am a dangerous driver>I can never drive again.
That panic attack-it's a new allergic reaction-meant to keep us safe. It's an 'away from' strategy and the payoff is 'saving the children of the world' from her predatory driving. Nightmares of the car running away from her, jumping curbs and running crowds of children over that are waiting at bus stops. Screams. Yep. You think I'm exaggerating? Nope. The mind is our biggest menace.
We worry about what hasn't happened-all the time.
We worry about the coulds. We worry about the mights. We worry about the what ifs.
Bring yourself back down off the edge by reviewing the actuals.
Breathe. Look UP. Find the memory of what DID happen, and let the worry wheel go away. The longer the brain runs the fantasy fear around the hippocampus, the more myelin the brain lays down on those neural pathways and the more real it FEELS. That doesn't mean it IS real, just that it FEELS real.
We get what we focus on. And having a full blown sweating, hyperventilating, panic attack with all sorts of physical sensory sensations does NOT mean it is real. It has been created by the brain in response to the mind's telling it to.
It does mean you have perhaps inadvertantly, created a survival strategy. In this case remember, the pay off is keeping her safe from killing helpless children, which was NOT based on hitting a child or even coming close to it. There was no one anywhere near!
The programming drops into the unconscious processing and we have a fear strategy meant to keep us safe. This is exactly why they say to get back on the horse.
My brother, bless him, encouraged her to drive to his house and he followed her in his car and told her he would tell her if she was too close to the side or if she was doing anything wrong. This in fact helped them both because he'd been worried about her driving too. (another worrier. If you have them in your family, they will absolutely argue that their worries are well founded so you just have to smile)
He realized much to his own surprise that she is a good driver! And his approval was all she needed to feel safe again behind the wheel and trust herself and her own judgment.
There is a difference between the brain and the mind...the brain does what the mind tells it to. The MIND creates the reasons and the MIND doesn't stay with real. The beauty of the MIND is that it is an ever expanding constellating field that connects up experiences and imagined experiences. The brain creates the program and says 'ok'. It doesn't care if it's real or not real. What's real anyway?
The reality was it was a pole. But the fear created in her neurology from the imagined scenario of hitting a child FELT real. Her mind had taken the adrenaline rush, the sound of the car crunching, the sweating of her palms as she realized she had hit something, and had layered it with imagined children screaming in terror. Wham slam dunk. Crippled.
Pay attention to your MIND...it's a field of incredible influence and it gathers information willy nilly sometimes. If you don't hear your thoughts, you won't know what you just asked for.