Breaking Past the Surface

an essay by Michael G. Rosenthal

“But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth” — Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language”

The little boy sat at the edge of the community swimming pool with his bone-dry swimmies firmly fixed to him. He was not my little boy. Two years later, I can’t recall his name but I will never forget him. My then six-year-old son Mason was in the pool fully participating in swimming lessons with the other twelve children. The little boy with dry swimmines remained tightly bound to the steps at edge of the pool, only getting his feet wet. By the third week of swim lessons, he was sitting on a step in the pool. The swim teachers and the other parents and children treated him with kindness. However, besides the boy’s parents, no one was pulling for this little boy to overcome his fear of the swimming pool more than me during those three weeks. I was unusually involved with this little boy’s struggle because I was also fighting a battle of my own with a debilitating and confusing fear: a fear of highway driving.

A few months earlier, I made my first solo road trip after over a year of COVID isolation. My first stop that day was to visit some longtime friends. They live in Cornwall-on-Hudson, just south of Newburgh, New York about two hours from where I live. At the end of our enjoyable reunion, I casually asked for the best route to my in-laws’ house about forty-five minutes away in Suffern. He suggested I take the scenic route, Highway 218, that runs over the ridge of Storm King Mountain right beside West Point. I knew the route and had traveled it several times. But that was “back in the day,” at least ten years prior. I had no idea of what was lurking out for me in the craggy crevasses of that mountain. 

Highway 218 South sharply ascends after Cornwall-on-Hudson. Before I knew it, I was faced with a massive 100 foot stone wall just past my right window and then the steep cliff’s edge above the Hudson River on the left. As I drove around the first curve of the ridge I was seized by an overpowering feeling of dread. All of a sudden, Darth Vader was using his force powers to pull my heart through my throat. I felt like I was driving on the edge of the mountain instead of on a well-paved local highway. Death by driving over the cliff’s edge seemed imminent as waves of pulsating fear surged through my nervous system. My palms turned into clammy wet socks. There was no pulloff area for me to gather myself. I was imprisoned by the narrow gates of fear; my heart was sprinting. I felt so utterly alone. I struggled mightily to get hold of myself. I wanted to take a break but I wasn’t going to stop traffic in the middle of the road. I had no other choice but to push through. I grimly white-knuckled my way to the top of the mountain, barely overcoming the seismic fears enough to stay between the white lines. I arrived at my in-laws’ house in one piece–well physically at least. Mentally though, I was cracked wide open by the shocking panic attack on the side of the mountain. 

A few months after that nightmarish drive, I decided to take an Amtrak train to see some other dear friends in Utica instead of testing my mysterious fears with another long solo drive. I was upbeat about traveling by train and enjoying a few meditative hours with my beloved upstate New York landscape careening by outside my window on a lazy summer afternoon. However, a nasty storm destroyed my fond plans. Downed trees on the tracks kept causing my train to be delayed. My train had been delayed by three hours and my friends in Utica were urging me to drive there. Buckets of rain were dumping down. I didn’t want to drive to Utica that day to begin with but I definitely didn’t want slog through to Utica in a torrential rainstorm. The clock was ticking and I had to make a judgment call. Just like on Storm King Mountain, that demonic fear gnawed into me like a pitbull. 

After giving up on the non-existent train and refunding my ticket, I found myself alone in the basement-level entrance to the parking garage. I was overcome by anxiety and shame, pacing in circles, the unwilling lead actor in a psycho-drama. In hindsight, it was truly the “coming out party” for my driving phobia. The phobia thrived under the white-hot lights of the spotlight, exposing itself, prancing and preening before my bewildered loved ones. I found myself frantically doggy-paddling in the deathly waves of another panic attack made worse by the element of shame. A trip which I had been extraordinarily excited for now seemed to be slithering down the drain with me helplessly watching. My close friend Trisha vowed to to stay on the phone with me for the entire ninety-minute drive. My parents and wife were concerned and urged me to come back home. 

As I continued to pace in circles with my blood pressure elevating by the minute, I stepped outside myself and was embarrassed at the spectacle my life had become. It was like the inside of my brain had suddenly mutated into the back of an electrician’s truck: wires of my brain strewn around haphazardly, no reason or core stability in sight. How did this happen to me? If the panic attack could have transformed into a living person, I would have throttled it unmericifully right there in the station basement. How could this thing I didn’t understand abuse and torment me so badly? The phobia was a heartless and maniacal thief, robbing me of my peace of mind and ability to have a joyous reunion with my friends. After what seemed like hours in this mental abyss, I decided to cancel the trip and return home. Shame and humiliation kept me company on the familiar, safe drive back to my house. 

A few weeks after the psycho-drama at the train station, I experienced a moment of clarity where I knew I had to seek professional treatment. My highway phobia was so oppressive that I couldn’t will myself to drive on the Mass Turnpike for ten miles from one exit to the next one. This was when I reached out to the Boston University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders for help.

I had to wait for well over a month before I could actually begin treatment for my highway driving phobia. During this limbo period, my mind doggedly tried to make coherent sense of root causes of the phobia. How did this happen? Why did this happen? I used to love highway driving. I lived for highway driving. It was deeply woven into my identity. I used to call myself “road warrior.” I’ve driven from Albany, New York to Pittsburgh–seven hours– by myself in one day. I drove by myself from Albany to Tennessee in a multiple-day road trip. I’ve driven up and down the East Coast multiple times, sometimes driving a moving truck. And those drives never fazed me, they were fun adventures. For decades, getting in the car and driving the 150-mile-drive from Albany to New York City at any time of day or night was as natural to me as singing along to a Grateful Dead song on my car stereo. And now I couldn’t even drive a measely ten miles on the highway? How could this happen? It was like a longtime lover had betrayed me. Or had I betrayed my love for the open road? What was my problem? Why was I suddenly unworthy and incapable of enjoying one of my cherished pastimes?

Every morning as this feverish soul searching was going on, I watched the little boy with the dry swimmies refusing to budge from his perch on the top stair. I was rooting for him to break past the surface of the water with the same intensity as I was rooting for myself to overcome my driving phobia. It gave me acute psychic pain to see this little boy dominated by his fears just as I was being dominated by my fears. I heard a voice inside me willing him, “Come on buddy, just get your head wet. You’re not going to drown!” Maybe I didn’t know if I was cheering for him or for myself. In my despondent state of mind, it had really become indistinguishable. Why do fears oppress us so completely? I was struggling to come to terms with what I had become. 

 After the summer ended and the first winds of fall began to blow, I started treatment with Brittany, an exposure therapist who would speak with me over the phone while I drove on the highway. Underneath her calm demeanor was a rock-bottom confidence in me and in her methods. Her belief in me meant everything in this vulnerable early stage of my treatment. I quickly learned that Brittany didn’t just want to get me back on the highway again, she wanted to push me to be able to drive in any circumstance, especially when I was bringing my own stressors to the drive. She guaranteed I would be able to drive on any road at any time. She may as well have told me that I would be able to walk on water or take a nap on a cloud. It sounded so far-fetched to me then but her confidence was alluring nevertheless. She kept pushing me further each session, especially when I was bringing other life stressors to the wheel. She instilled in me the belief that driving when I was feeling shaky was actually a valuable test of my ability to remain calm in stressful circumstances. After months of three-hour driving sessions, my resolve improved and Brittany decided I had completed exposure therapy. However, my work was not done.  

After I stopped my sessions with Brittany, I began to address my driving phobia in traditional psychotherapy. I discovered that those first edgy and terrifying six months of COVID where I was around my two small children all the time, largely stuck in our home, had caused me to develop a serious case of separation anxiety. For six months, I had basically been trapped inside of a snow globe with two small children almost entirely dependent on me. My separation anxiety merged with the death anxiety that was triggered that spring day on Storm King Mountain. The resulting creation was a paralyzing highway driving phobia. 

My therapist helped me connect the dots. That first solo trip to see my friends in Cornwall-on-Hudson? I was truly alone for the first time in many months. The second reunion trip to Utica a few months later? That would have been my first night away from my wife and children since COVID began. My being alone was the connecting thread. And it wasn’t just being alone that was triggering. It was all of the accumulated pressures and fears that COVID generated like the spells of an evil witch. Having clear targets to pursue in therapy made an enormous difference in strengthening my psyche enough to bear through the driving anxieties. It began to dawn on me that my psyche had been pushed to the brink of collapse by COVID. Fortunately, therapy helped me come back from the brink. I began to work on managing my separation anxiety and coping with death anxiety. My therapists helped me to develop coping strategies for reducing my irrational fears of something deadly happening to me on the highway. My capacity for managing my driving phobia, separation anxiety and death anxiety steadily improved but I still had tests laying ahead of me.  

Throughout the last two years, I have had several trials where my ability to manage my highway driving phobia has been tested. The most significant trial occurred this past June after I lost my mother-in-law. I had been working on my driving phobia with therapists for almost two years at this point. It was also just over two years since that overwhelming and life-altering panic attack on Storm King Mountain. With a mixture of confidence and trepidation, I told my wife that I would drive our children separately to her parents’ town two and a half hours away so that we could have two cars on hand during the hectic mourning period. 

The pressure was on my shoulders, just as Brittany would have wanted it to be. I was making a commitment to my wife and my family during a time of immense loss and heartbreak. I didn’t want to surrender to my driving phobia and put an undue burden on my wife during this solemn time. Yet I was honestly anxious that the demon would rear its head on the road as it had in the past. Still, I believed in the hard work and sacrifices I had made in the two years of facing my phobias with assistance. I had faith that my growth would outweigh my anxieties. It was time for me to truly put my growth to the test. It felt like the final exam of my exposure therapy and the pressure was real. I knew I wasn’t the scared and perplexed man-child in the train station basement. I had undergone an inner transformation, excruciating at times but I never backed down from wanting to grow and get better. 

When the big day of the road trip arrived, I packed my boys into the car and made the drive without any serious panic or distress. For most people, that drive would be so normal as to be dull and instantly forgettable but for me it might as well have been winning the Olympic decathlon. Pulling into the Crown Plaza Hotel in Suffern was like taking a victory lap with the gold medal draped around my neck. I wouldn’t trade that feeling of accomplishment for anything in the world. 

After years of hard work, I have gone from paralyzing panic to a feeling a renewed sense of security behind the wheel on any highway. My thoughts still turn to that scared little boy by the side of the pool in his swimmies. I wish I could tell him how much stronger he will feel when he breaks past the surface and confronts his fear. I would tell him that if I could win my fight, he could too. I pray that he is in a better place with his fears just as I am now. 

I am proud to claim that I am not who I am because of my fears. I am who I am because of the lengths I have taken to better manage my fears. I am grateful to hold the wheel in my hands with my phobia shrinking in the rearview mirror. Now I find myself driving onwards, a smile forming in the crease of my lips, forever grateful for breaking past the surface.