It's uncommon for abusive parents to allow or pay for you to learn to drive; they don't want you to have a skill that could lead to independence. In my case I was allowed to, it was paid, but I would soon find out why. My father was the only parent capable of driving, and he did not feel like doing any of the driving chroes. So, as soon as I was qualified, I was responsible for getting every other family member to the school, grocery store, hospital, meeting, cemetery, to visit family. I wasn't allowed to take the car for myself, but I had to do driving tasks every day. Sometimes the father would even call me to walk somewhere to drive him home because 'he was tired'.
Having to be in the car with him meant that he was essentially driving trough me. I was micromanaged to the smallest step. If I had pressed the gas or the break a second sooner or later than he hypotetically would, I would be reprimanded. I would not be told where to go because 'I should already know the way, how old am I?' and then would be berated after taking a wrong turn. I experienceted getting yelled at, screamed at to the point of tears, slapped and sabotaged with hand-break while I was actively driving drivng. When he was driving nobody was allowed to talk to him because he needed to 'focus on the road'.
Driving with him in the car was not only stressful, but sometime life-threatening. After completing the driving school, I could tell how many laws and regulations he was breaking, and he would expect me to break them too. I would have to fight him on each one, and wage my instincts to stay safe on the road vs safe from his rage.
There's a specific story I want to tell that revealed just how much he cared about 'being right' vs 'the lives of his family members', and it coincidentally was the first time I had proof of his gaslighting.
I was driving most of the family into a big city, where drivers were all agressive and decisive, and I needed to drive that way too, in order to not disrupt traffic, I was told. He was telling me what to do and how to drive the entire time, yelling at me for things out of my control and adding 'you should have done x' way after the opportunity or the moment for it passed, just to add guilt and shame for not predicting the future.
So we get to this huge roundabout, and I've never been in that situation before, I wasn't sure what to do. It had 3 lanes, getting in and out of it seemed tricky. He instructed me to get in, and then change lanes by cutting someone else off, claiming we had 'the right of way'. We didn't have the right of way, and I knew this. I didn't want to cut the person off. He insisted, yelled, and then screamed at me with intense urgency to get in there. And I became unsure if I was right. He was screaing. I felt terrified, both of him, and of crashing into the car that was going for the exact same spot, except the other driver had the right of way.
I cut into the lane under intense pressure. The other driver went there too. We were about to crash. I swerved the car violently to avoid colision and somehow got out of that roundabout, heart beating wildly. Everyone in the car was frozen.
Everyone needed a second to realize that we did not crash, as they all expected us to. Even father was mute for a second, hands protectively perched over his head, then looking around wildly to verify we were still in one peace. "We didn't crash?" he asked, and mother, in shock from nearly dying, had the sense to acknowledge "We would have, if x didn't swerve out of the way".
He recovered in a minute and didn't accept this conclusion. He insisted that he was in fact, right, that we absolutely had the right of way (we didn't), and that it was the other driver's fault for not letting us trough (it wasn't, we were cutting them off). I argued my points, because we almost fucking died. Since I would not back down, he decided we would later sit down and draw a map of what happened to prove that he was correct.
And so we did, we sat around a piece of paper where I drew exactly what happened and elaborated that no, you cannot cut off someone from the inner lane in a roundabout. He argued against me until a light turned on in his head, upon which he drew a different image, with a different roundabout, and a whole different situation than what we were in, to argue that this is actually what happened, and he was right all along.
And I caught this, and went "I knew it. This is what you do when you're proven wrong. You make up a whole different situation so you could pretend you were right. I freaking knew it."
He doubled down and never admitted to it. But I had it confirmed that he was a big fat liar. And not only that. Not only he was incompetent, stupid, forceful and dangerous on the road, he was ready to sacrifice the lives of his entire family just to get his way, to force me to cut someone off in a situation where there was no need to do that. He wanted to show off how right he was to the point of putting us all in deadly peril, he put me in a situation where I had to save us all from getting dead or permanently disabled in traffic. Just so he could be right once. And even after having the near-death experience by his own fault, he would rather lie and pretend something entirely different happened just to evade responsibility, just to keep pretending he's smarter than everyone else! We almost died and his ego was still more important than anything in the picture. We could have all been in the grave and he'd be standing there going "I was right!"
Seeing how this played out, I became more confident in my own driving instincts and started to ignore and dismiss his orders in favour of doing what I felt was safe. This led to yelling, screaming, tantrum throwing and violence that resulted in further danger to all passangers. People's lives just weren't the priority, road safety wasn't the priority. Him getting his way was held on higher ground than any human life, any human liberty.
I became anxious and started losing my breath and vision during driving. I expected to crash anytime. I would sometimes be driven to tears while he was in the car to the point where I couldn't see the road anymore, and I would be expected to navigate the highway in this condition.
This led to me repeatedly refusing to drive, and when this was met with force, blackmail and violence, I would threaten to crash on purpose and damage his car – miraculously this worked, he cared about his car's safety to the point where my threats hit home and he begrudgingly went to drive it himself just to make sure I don't damage it. (I never had an accident or damaged the car, while he has, multiple times, done both).
I haven't driven a car after escaping. I no longer feel safe or wanting to control a vehicle. Remembering all the times I was close to death following a violent idiot's orders makes me sick. It feels like a death trap, not freedom or convenience anymore. I wondered if abusers did this to anyone else with driving a car? Did it become a nightmare you just want to crawl out of, instead of a skill that leads to independence?
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