Autism and Driving Anxiety
It's a whole THING, so why don't we talk about it?
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today I am sharing a bit of my personal narrative around my driving anxiety, in the hopes that people will be able to explore their own stressors — and necessary accommodations —when it comes to navigating this subject. As always, this is a reader-supported publication and I couldn’t do this without you! So thank you so much for liking, subscribing, and sharing :)
Summer of Accommodations: Driving Edition
It’s June and here in the northern hemisphere we are entering into the summer months. Every summer, I like to categorize my writing into a theme of sorts. And this summer, all I can think of is accommodations.
To kick off my summer of accommodations series, I thought I could dive into an issue that impacts my life personally that is pretty hard for me to talk about. And that issue is: DRIVING.
When I posted about autism and driving anxiety in my Instagram stories last week, I was overwhelmed by how many people responded with their own stories, questions, and fears. This is obviously an issue that impacts a lot of people but there are very few articles written about this particular stressor. I am wondering if that is related to how car-centric the United States is, and how obtaining and using a driver’s license is equated with intellectual maturity. Whatever the reason, there is some stigma about talking about issues with driving that impact so many folks — from teenagers to the elderly.
Now, I don’t have the energy to wade through the research and the statistics with my usual fervor, but I will try to link and source people who are using more current scientific studies—with all the caveats that research around autism can be fraught.
In general here is a snapshot of the research: it seems that one third of able autistic people drive independently. In comparison, about 80 percent of non-autistic people get their driver’s license. Another study showed that despite high levels of interest, only one in three autistic adolescents obtain their driving license1.
The most common reason autistic people choose not to drive a car is due to fear and anxiety, whether due to executive dysfunction, overstimulation, hypervigilance, anticipatory anxiety, or other factors2. What is hard is that for many people in a car-centric society like the US, a driver’s license can be key to mobility, employment, and social interactions — which all impact mental health. Public transport can also be non-existent, overstimulating, or simply inaccessible to autistic people, leaving people to be dependent on cars to get their basic needs met.
But here in the U.S., most teenagers are pressured or at least encouraged to obtain their driver’s license as a sign they are entering “adulthood.” So what happens when this isn’t a possibility for us — or when driving causes us more harm than we realize? Perhaps today we can slowly begin to ask questions about the systems that capitalism claims are normal (and beneficial), but which impact marginalized people more than others3.
Like many people who were socialized as female in the 1980s and 90s, I was never flagged as being autistic. This could be because I was homeschooled and didn’t have much interaction with adults beyond my parents and their church communities as a child, or it could be because I was book smart and incredibly shy and that was enough to fly under the radar4. Even though autism was a part of my family story (my older brother was diagnosed autistic in the 1980s and had more of a “stereotypical” presentation) there was no understanding back then that autism was genetic and ran in families.
Besides my shyness / social anxiety and my intense commitment to religious devotion, one of the big autism flags that stands out to me was my relationship to driving. When I was in 11th grade my family moved to central Oregon to a small town named Sisters. I started attending the local high school (my first time in public school!). I slowly recognized how behind I was socially, which I just chalked up to being homeschooled. One extra wrinkle in all of this is that my mother was an end times conspiracy theorist who believed that Y2K was going to usher in the end times. Y2K happened halfway through my senior year in high school, and because I had been brought up to believe that God talked to my mother and that everything she said was correct, I was pretty darn stressed out my senior year and had a hard time focusing on making long-term plans.
What future did I even have to look forward to? My mom was full of doom and gloom and persecution and tribulations, stockpiling thousands of dollars worth of bulk food to prepare for the end. Getting a driver’s license or planning for college was the last thing on my mind, so I pushed all of these pesky adult responsibilities out of my mind and tried to survive high school while preparing for the end of the world.
All of this is important backstory, because autism or other neurodivergences don’t happen in a vacuum. All of us are bringing our entire histories with us—genetic and social and generational trauma to boot. So for my story, growing up with an end-times conspiracy theory parent means that I took her and her prophetic utterances seriously while my two siblings did not. And since I was raised in a religious authoritarian home5, I had been trained to believe and obey my parents always—and that included NOT planning for the future if there wasn’t one to plan for. This impacted my life in a myriad of ways, including not preparing for college, not allowing myself to consider romantic relationships, and not preparing for a future by getting a driver’s license.
But wouldn’t you know it—the end times did not happen halfway through my senior year. My mother never told me she was wrong and as a family we just . . . never discussed it. Over the years we quietly ate through the rice and beans stockpiled in our shed and eventually my mom became interested in other conspiracy theories. I was left to pick up the pieces on my own and figure out what to do next with my life. My mother in particular did not seem eager for me to go to college or become independent in any way, but in my senior year my dad started taking me for practice drives and helped me sign up for my permit test and then eventually my driving test.
I was so nervous to take my driving test—I mostly drove with my dad in the tiny town of Sisters (pop. 911) where there wasn’t even a single traffic light, much less a round-about. My dad was breezily confident that I would pass my driver’s exam and I tried to carry that energy with me. But when we drove to the bigger town 30 minutes away and I got behind the wheel with the DMV instructor next to me, I felt as though I was floating. It didn’t feel like I was driving, but like I was playing a video game. Immediately I turned the wrong way down a one-way street, ran through a stop sign, and hit the curb while making a right turn. The instructor had me pull over, switched spots with me, and drove me back to the DMV. “Did I pass?” I managed to shakily ask. No, she said, voice clipped.
I cried to my dad and he took me to a pizza buffet to boost my spirits6. And then he made me drive the 30 minutes back home to “Get back on the horse” and I white-knuckled it back7. I went on to fail the driver’s test one more time (again I seemed to disassociate due to anxiety and fear, I have no clue what happened the second time) but on my THIRD try I finally (barely) passed. By this point I had already graduated high school, and even though I got my driver’s license I was a pro at sweet-talking other people into driving me everywhere.
Any chance I could get, I was trying to get other people to drive my car or I would bum rides off of other people. My older sister was the main person in my life who has always driven me around but I would try and get ANYONE else to drive all throughout my 20s. Since I was squarely in my manic-pixie-dream-autistic phase, people must have just thought I was quirky, I guess? What didn’t help was the fact that I never had money and most of the cars I drove were pieces of junk (some without power steering) and I also got in a succession of minor fender benders during these years.
Fast forward to getting married and having kids, and all of the sudden I had a new level of anxiety when driving. There was precious cargo on board! And I was still driving cars that tended to break down every once in a while, but because I was now a mom I felt like I had to buck up and just learn how to drive everywhere. We moved to Minneapolis and I got pretty good at navigating a new city, but when I got pregnant for the second time (and it was a very stressful high-risk pregnancy) I started to recognize how much I truly hated driving. I could barely force myself to drive to my doctor’s appointments once every few days, and as I drove I felt like my world was narrowing in. Smaller smaller smaller. I didn’t want to go anywhere and I felt sickening dread at the thought of driving, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone. This isn’t how a grown-ass adult is supposed to feel, right?
We moved back to Oregon when my second child was just three weeks old. I thought I would get back to driving since I was in a place and a neighborhood that I was familiar with. No more inner-city Minneapolis driving, this was the Portland Oregon suburbs baby! And for a while, it seemed manageable. I also tried to utilize the public transportation around me, but over the years it became more and more stressful for me (CPTSD hypervigilance + lots of folks having mental health issues on public transport = stressful trips for me). Then eventually COVID happened and I didn’t find myself driving very much at all (or going anywhere, really) and realized how much I loved it.
As my kids got older and started asking to go more places, it started to really stress me out. I imagined the accidents I would get into. I would worry about the parking8. I would be navigating a freeway when my children would be pestering me about some deep and important subject and I wouldn’t be able to follow along and they would get mad at me and I would snap at them and then feel horribly guilty. Trucks in my neighborhood are huge and loud and for a while there a bunch of them were flying Trump flags and had tons of stickers with guns on them which would trigger my existential dread every time I saw them. A few years ago I also developed a terror of driving on bridges and have even had a few anxiety attacks while just being a passenger in a car going over a bridge9. Sometimes, when I was alone in the car I didn’t feel fully present. I was terrified I was dissociating, or would eventually dissociate and end up hurting other people.
Friends would ask to meet up somewhere and when I showed up inwardly I would be a mess from the journey, but unable to process or even admit how stressful it was for me to drive to another neighborhood or a new-to-me location. I felt so embarrassed by the amount of anxiety driving caused me, and I often felt like I was the only person in the world who couldn’t seem to get a handle on this one element of being an “adult”.
But now, a few years into my autism diagnosis and learning about disability, I can start to offer myself a bit of curiosity and compassion. I think about the last few decades of my life when it comes to driving and I see: anticipatory anxiety, executive dysfunction, dissociation, intrusive thoughts, emotional overwhelm, anxiety attacks, triggering of past driving-related traumas . . . and wow. No wonder that when my life gets more stressful my ability to drive without anxiety seems to fly right out the window.
For me, I don’t know how to “fix” my driving anxiety. All I can do is manage a balance of accommodations and exposure therapy (a tricky balance indeed!). I have worked with therapists in the past who were worried that if I “gave in” to my driving anxiety my world would get smaller and smaller. Like my dad, they seemed to believe that “getting back on the horse” was the only way to deal with this kind of anxiety. I am familiar with OCD and exposure therapy methods, and in some ways I see how this is true—but it also doesn’t quite seem to be the entire picture10.
For now, I am doing something in-between: I am working on continuing to drive to the places I know I can handle, and I am saying no to driving to places I know are crowded or cause me stress or are new to me (if I can manage it). Here are a few of the other accommodations I am working on: I carry extra sour candies in my purse and in my car in case of a surprise bridge or anxiety attack11. I do deep breathing and remind myself of my “back body” when the anxiety is shimmering—I feel the steering wheel in my hand, I feel my back and my butt pressed into the seat, and my feet pressed to the floor of the car. I make sure I build in recovery time for when I come home after a stressful drive, instead of shaming myself for needing it.
I’ve also started asking friends to meet up in my neck of the woods or asking if they mind driving to events. This can be difficult and embarrassing for me but it is well worth it for me to be able to be relaxed and present and enjoy myself (and also, since many of my friends are also autistic, they don’t seem to mind when I ask for accommodations like this, and they are good at letting me know if driving is also difficult for them). Krispin does as much driving as possible for our family, even shifting his work schedule around to be able to do school pick ups when he can. He also does the majority of running errands and grocery shopping these days, which is a huge relief for me in multiple ways, and is a privilege I know that many do not have.
I wish I lived in a walkable city but I don’t. America is a car-centric place, and my driving anxiety seems to be just one more way I feel out of step with the expected pace of capitalist and neurotypical norms. I don’t want to work all day, I don’t want my weekends spent shuffling children from activity to activity, I don’t want to sit in traffic, I don’t want to exploit or harm people to get my basic needs met, and I don’t want to have to live in a place where I can’t access what I need without getting extremely stressed out. I don’t want to be overstimulated in order to live my life, but that is my reality right now. So all I can do is try and find some accommodations, and keep learning what works best for me and my family.
Just this week I drove somewhere that was stressful for me because one of my kids really wanted me to. I ended up developing a migraine, and not being able to work for 24 hours. Disability really is a push and pull situation, and we are all learning the new limits of our bodies every day. But I am astonished at the lack of research, resources, and spaces for people to process their driving anxiety and how it impacts their life. Next week I will be putting up a post that rounds up the comments and stories people have shared with me about their own experience of being autistic or ADHD or OCD and driving, because I think it is important to keep having this conversation.
For today, I’m curious—if you are autistic, or suspect you are -- what is your relationship to driving? Does it cause you anxiety? Does it relax you? What kind of accommodations do you make for yourself when it comes to driving? Are you one of the two-thirds of autistic people that don’t drive?
Let us know in the comments!
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This is a great article that unpacks multiple facets of this conversation around autism and driving: https://www.neurodiverging.com/all-about-driving-with-autism/
We can’t discuss driving anxiety without discussing how this disproportionately impacts people of color — and in the U.S., Black people in particular — who have always been the targets of racial profiling while driving. You can check out the documentary Driving While Black or read this document from the ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/publications/driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways
Was I shy or was I selectively mute and in a state of flight freeze for much of my childhood due to the stressors I was under? Who’s to say! I’m certainly not a very shy person in real life, but I do experience situational anxiety.
Which is a really sweet memory for me. Pizza buffets cure a lot of heartache.
I have never understood this expression! Especially because for a few years of my childhood we lived in Wyoming and I was on horses an awful lot and fell off of horses a time or two. The LAST THING I wanted to do was immediately get back on the horse that I had fallen off of, but this phrase was uttered to me constantly and I was told I would never get over my fear if I didn’t immediately conquer it. Same thing when I fell off my bike (I have always been terrible at balance!!!) and the same thing when I was failing my driver’s license tests. Maybe we could just let clumsy anxious people not be forced to ride horses?!?!?!
So. Many. Worries. About. Parking.
It’s hard to explain my panic that happens when I am driving over bridges. I developed flying anxiety a few years ago that eventually went away and it seems kinda similar. It is almost as if my body and brain is SUPER aware that we are not tethered to the earth and then anxiety sort of freezes me up. I end up clutching the steering wheel, gritting my teeth, and just desperately trying to get to the other side to get back to “land” where I will be safe.
I am by no means a medical professional, nor am I an OCD expert. Please seek out experts that you trust on these issues, I am simply sharing my personal story here!
Sour candies really help me and my kids when we are experiencing an anxiety attack! My favorite candies are the Noble Super Cola Candy (you can get them at a variety of places, including Costplus World Market or even Amazon).
Thank you for sharing all of this with us. As an autistic person growing up in an authoritarian, abusive home, I actually enjoyed driving because it was a means of freedom for me to escape my home of origin. We did a homeschool driving program for drivers ed which was very helpful. I grew up in Houston but my dad was a country boy so starting around 12 he’d throw me behind the wheel when we’d visit the country or on our suburban neighborhood streets. Bc drivers ed was homeschooled I never had to have a stranger in the passenger seat fail or pass me which I’m so grateful for. I just had to take a book test. But once I got my drivers license, as the already parentified older sibling, the parentification got worse from my mother who demanded I take my siblings to dr appointments, activities, and made me run her errands. And if I didn’t I’d be inappropriately punished. So I just used those opportunities to drive and stay away from her. The older I’ve gotten the harder it is for me to drive places I’m not familiar with. It’s like my nervous system got maxed out after years of masking so things that were once “easier” for me are more challenging now. Parking is ALWAYS a stressor and I try to do as much research as I can to figure out the parking situation before I set out. Although the driving to escape my abusive home of origin is a sad origin story, I am grateful that overall driving has been mostly an escape for me rather than a massive source of anxiety. I like to listen to music or books and just set out on an easy drive. As long as there’s certain criteria like I’m driving a car I’m comfortable with, the roads aren’t too small, the passengers aren’t sensory overwhelming me, and the parking is known and manageable…I can manage driving.
I have poor vision and depth perception and my parents chalked my driving anxiety up to that (certainly part of the problem!). Driving a tiny car (a Fiat) has helped me a lot. I didn't drive at all until my late twenties (though I had my license- I barely passed a driving course in high school) and had to relearn from a friend's mom. I have a hard boundary of not driving on freeways/highways which means it takes more time for me to get places in my pretty big city but I'd rather that than a panic attack. I loved not driving during the pandemic.