Course after accident?

[davgen7]

Hi guys,

About a week and a half ago I was involved in my first ever car accident - most certainly not major or particularly expensive, but regardless of blame (that's a different subject) I will be paying the £650 to repair the other party's car as keeping insurance uninvolved at my age will end up actually being cheaper in the long run, whether I'm at fault or not.

The problem is that I am facing a fair amount of anxiety. When I'm actually driving I am fine, but when I'm not I become extremely stressed about it and obsess over it. I can't help but replay it in my head, worrying about what I did wrong - could I have not had an accident if I'd not reversed here? Should I have been in a different position? Did I make the wrong decision? WAS IT MY FAULT??? - over and over again. Needless to say, it's having a bad effect on my life even though in practice I didn't cause the accident (I don't think - I'm young but I have a much greater amount of experience than most others my age and if I were going to have a typical young driver at-fault accident it wouldn't have happened under such bizarre circumstances).

However, I'm trying to find a way to combat the stress as I can't really think of anything else. I'm having a diffucult time dealing with the personal shame and humiliation despite being confident that in practice this was not my fault. I'm pretty confident that the other driver wasn't actually looking where they were going, even.

I guess this is because I took such pride in my sensibleness and capability - without being overconfident - that I feel that this has really screwed up my credibility, and left me feeling like I have to explain to people why it wasn't my fault.

Would doing some kind of advanced/defensive driving course help me to regain trust in myself? This has messed me up much more than I feel it should have, especially for such a trivial incident.

I'm hurting guys.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Edited by davgen7 on Tuesday 6th September 22:23

[davgen7]

Petrolhead_Rich said:

Pass-Plus might be an in-expensive confidence boost, bit of motorway driving and assessment to re-assure you you can still drive (or advise you to give up now! )

As for obsessing over it, don't, just try to learn from it!

I've been driving since I was 7 years old but yet had a few minor bumps once I'd passed my test, they happen, you are human, you make mistakes, observation wise cars come from un-expected places and you might miss them, occasionally these result in a collision. Long-term you will learn to look for these un-expected cars and become more aware of these possible hazards, just because you've had a bump doesn't make you a bad driver, just an unlucky one (you might also be totally crap, I don't know! )

This has made me feel a good amount better. Thanks, I appreciate it.
I've had jobs specifically driving before so I don't think I'm a bad driver. I drove vans between Birmingham and other parts of the country, around in central London in rush hour traffic, consistently reversing a brand new long-wheelbase Mercedes Sprinter through gaps it most certainly wasn't intended to fit through and never had any problems. I also delivered pizzas around for a while in whatever car the owners of the shop had lying around (covered by business insurance), generally at night, and also never had an issue. I'd also add that my car is a Mondeo ST, but seen as I've actually had the freak incident that's stressing me out so much in that very car I don't feel good about bringing that up to back up my point.

Course-wise, maybe I should go for something a bit more advanced? I'm not knocking the PassPlus, but I just can't see it doing much to reassure me of my abilities for some reason. I guess I feel like I'm past the initial "just passed your test" stage. On that note though, I feel so guilty (for no real reason) about the incident that I also feel like I'm not in a position to rule it out.

The accident was exceptionally weird... It almost pains me to type out a description of what happened. Maybe the weirdness is what's troubling me. I'm either horrendously unfortunate or the powers that be hate me in order for what happened to actually happen, and perhaps not really knowing what happened is what's causing me so many problems. I'm trying so hard to take some kind of lesson from all this, but I haven't found one yet.

Edited by davgen7 on Tuesday 6th September 23:03

[davgen7]

I'd like to say my sincere thanks to everyone on this thread for giving up some time to help me out. I guess the mix of the expense, damaged ego/self-esteem and randomness of the actual incident ended up getting the better of me. (Probably didn't help that the other bloke wasn't paying attention, yet I'm paying anyway in order to cut my losses over the long-term).

I feel a lot better knowing I can restore my self-satisfaction with some additional training and courses, because I REALLY don't want to be disillusioned with cars and driving anymore.

Thanks to everyone for all the advice - I will be acting on the suggestions given very soon.

Cheers guys.

David