Depression
Guest Post: Psychological Impact of a DUI Charge
Got a reader submission from John who wanted to talk about the psychological impact of all this - Tom
Psychological Impact of a DUI Charge
A DUI charge can lead to dire legal consequences, but that is not the only concern at the time of arrest. The DUI testing, police questions, license confiscation, and the overall incriminating circumstances can be overwhelming. The situation is most troublesome for young drivers who are first time offenders. They experience a paradox of emotions because there is so much to lose. They crave for a support system, as they do not know how to deal with a criminal allegation. Some offenders make the mistake of misbehaving with the police officers, which further worsens the conditions. It is natural for a person to go through a range of emotional phases while dealing with a DUI charge:
Shock and Denial
Being pulled over by the traffic police is typically an unpleasant surprise. On the top of that, getting handcuffed by a stern officer and being dragged to the police station is nothing less than horrifying. The proceedings seem like a nightmare and you hope to wake up any second. You tell yourself that you did not do anything wrong and want to run free, but find yourself restrained. You are not ready to take responsibility of your actions and face the consequences. You believe that denial will enable you to get past this.
Fear and Fury
Anger gets the best of you when the police treats you like a criminal and disrupts your plans. You clearly never intended to land in jail, thereby you curse your luck. You may yell or hit something in the heat of your desperation and frustration. At the same time, you are also frightened of what is yet to come. You are scared of having to spend the night in jail and no one coming to your rescue. If a family member sees you like this, how will you explain?
Remorse and Embarrassment
When you realize that you were wrong and cannot undo what has happened, the guilt begins to set in. You regret every action that led you to that moment. You wish you never had a drink or got behind the wheel, but it’s too late. You wonder what your family and peers will have to say once they find out about your criminal offense. You dread the fact that your mug shot shall become public and everyone you know will see it. You cannot stop thinking about the implications of a criminal record on your job or education.
Despair and Anxiety
When everything is out in the open and you are left helpless, despair takes over. You are sad that you let others down and risked your own future. You become a patient of depression after receiving rejection from the society and losing several privileges you had earlier. You want to go back in time, but things will never be the same. You pledge to never drink or drive again because you cannot bear reliving the recent events.
Accepting Reality
Time heals wounds, thus you gradually become calm and complacent. You are adhered to the altered lifestyle, so it doesn’t bother you anymore. As you make peace with reality, everything starts shifting back to normal. You can never forget the incident, but you learn to live with it.
Moving On
You start putting your life back together and strive to make things right. You try to invoke optimism and step forward. You hope to earn back the trust of people who matter the most, and not repeat your mistakes.
Author Bio
John Adams writes about physiological traumas and personal healing. He encourages readers to fight their fears and overcome the obstacles holding them back. He believes that any person can improve the quality of his or her life by incorporating positivity in every thought and action. He loves to share his insight on life experiences, and contributes on various online platform in the same niche.
Psychological Impact of a DUI Charge
A DUI charge can lead to dire legal consequences, but that is not the only concern at the time of arrest. The DUI testing, police questions, license confiscation, and the overall incriminating circumstances can be overwhelming. The situation is most troublesome for young drivers who are first time offenders. They experience a paradox of emotions because there is so much to lose. They crave for a support system, as they do not know how to deal with a criminal allegation. Some offenders make the mistake of misbehaving with the police officers, which further worsens the conditions. It is natural for a person to go through a range of emotional phases while dealing with a DUI charge:
Shock and Denial
Being pulled over by the traffic police is typically an unpleasant surprise. On the top of that, getting handcuffed by a stern officer and being dragged to the police station is nothing less than horrifying. The proceedings seem like a nightmare and you hope to wake up any second. You tell yourself that you did not do anything wrong and want to run free, but find yourself restrained. You are not ready to take responsibility of your actions and face the consequences. You believe that denial will enable you to get past this.
Fear and Fury
Anger gets the best of you when the police treats you like a criminal and disrupts your plans. You clearly never intended to land in jail, thereby you curse your luck. You may yell or hit something in the heat of your desperation and frustration. At the same time, you are also frightened of what is yet to come. You are scared of having to spend the night in jail and no one coming to your rescue. If a family member sees you like this, how will you explain?
Remorse and Embarrassment
When you realize that you were wrong and cannot undo what has happened, the guilt begins to set in. You regret every action that led you to that moment. You wish you never had a drink or got behind the wheel, but it’s too late. You wonder what your family and peers will have to say once they find out about your criminal offense. You dread the fact that your mug shot shall become public and everyone you know will see it. You cannot stop thinking about the implications of a criminal record on your job or education.
Despair and Anxiety
When everything is out in the open and you are left helpless, despair takes over. You are sad that you let others down and risked your own future. You become a patient of depression after receiving rejection from the society and losing several privileges you had earlier. You want to go back in time, but things will never be the same. You pledge to never drink or drive again because you cannot bear reliving the recent events.
Accepting Reality
Time heals wounds, thus you gradually become calm and complacent. You are adhered to the altered lifestyle, so it doesn’t bother you anymore. As you make peace with reality, everything starts shifting back to normal. You can never forget the incident, but you learn to live with it.
Moving On
You start putting your life back together and strive to make things right. You try to invoke optimism and step forward. You hope to earn back the trust of people who matter the most, and not repeat your mistakes.
Author Bio
John Adams writes about physiological traumas and personal healing. He encourages readers to fight their fears and overcome the obstacles holding them back. He believes that any person can improve the quality of his or her life by incorporating positivity in every thought and action. He loves to share his insight on life experiences, and contributes on various online platform in the same niche.
Let's Keep in Touch - The Survive A DUI Newsletter
Tom here… Just wanted to drop a quick note - I'm starting a newsletter to help people keep updated with the site, new posts, and new DUI laws as they happen. Free to subscribe, unsubscribe anytime, and I'll have the "community" features enabled so you can talk with other people and help commiserate and share experiences (there's already a discussion thread for you to post in).
No pressure to sign up, I just wanted to offer another resource for all of us to get through this together.
-Tom.
No pressure to sign up, I just wanted to offer another resource for all of us to get through this together.
-Tom.
The Next Few Days
The first few days after a DUI arrest are the worst part of the whole experience.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
If you’re like me, if you’re like most people, you’re going to absolutely beat yourself up. You’ll feel the pain of knowing what you did, the fear of all the possible things that could happen to you. You’ll feel anxiety, nervousness, guilt, self-hatred and loathing. It’s an incredible mix of conflicting yet all-negative emotions swirling around in the pit of your stomach, your heart, and your head all at once.
It’s an incredibly difficult, depressing time.
Your conscience is going to tell you the 50 ways you made mistakes that night, tell you about all the other times you did and got away with it, tell you how you could’ve killed yourself or, even worse, somebody else, maybe even a kid, or a family.
What are your friends going to think? Will they ever talk to you again? Are you going to walk into a place and watch as everybody becomes quiet and starts pointing fingers, “Look, there’s the guy who drove drunk!”.
In my experience, you will beat yourself up worse than anybody else. You expect other people to yell at you, and revile you, and say awful things… truth be told… it doesn’t really happen. You’ll be told that you should have known better and that you fucked up, but, everyone knows that it’s wrong to do, and they most likely have done it themselves. So they’re not that hard on you. Not as hard as you would expect. The other DUI offenders I’ve spoken to have generally reflected this sentiment as well. Driving drunk is something that everybody knows is wrong and nearly everybody does. It’s bad, it’s stupid, it’s wrong, but it’s just how it is.
The churning stomach doesn’t start. I don’t think I ate the day afterwards until late and I really had to. You wake up and it’s the first thing you think about, at night it’s the last thing you think about - usually making you stay awake for an hour, maybe two, maybe more, in bed turning worst case scenarios over and over again in your head. At work it’s always in the back of your head, biting at you, making you wonder if everybody knows somehow.
Again, I’m sorry that you’re going through this. I felt completely worthless as a human being, and it took some time to get over these feelings. The remorse I felt was more than I could ever express in any way, and I’m sure yours is too. The thought of feeing those feelings again is more of a deterrent for me than anything else.
I cried, I prayed for forgiveness, I was depressed, I felt completely horrible.
Ironically, the pain of my DUI lead me to drink more than ever. At home, of course. Hair of the dog? Maybe. I was certainly bitten. Sign of a reliance on alcohol? Perhaps. It only now really hits me how funny it is that we celebrate both the successes and victories in life by drinking, and use it to morn our losses and express our condolences.
I drank, and I drank a lot. Beer, vodka, whatever. I drank in a dark room feeling sorry for myself. I hated myself for what had happened. Was it the best way to get the feelings out? Maybe, probably not.
But it worked.
After two or three days of wallowing in self-pity, I came out of my complete depression, and put it together - alright, we messed up, let’s do what we can to make things the best they can be, fix the things we can, make amends, and get it to where we can move on.
Do I recommend heavy drinking afterwards? No, of course not. But I recommend getting your grief out, in whatever manner is appropriate for you.
Be sad, get the emotions out, then prepare to move on.
This is a temporary thing, it won’t change too much of your life.
You can get through this and on with your life.
I promise.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
If you’re like me, if you’re like most people, you’re going to absolutely beat yourself up. You’ll feel the pain of knowing what you did, the fear of all the possible things that could happen to you. You’ll feel anxiety, nervousness, guilt, self-hatred and loathing. It’s an incredible mix of conflicting yet all-negative emotions swirling around in the pit of your stomach, your heart, and your head all at once.
It’s an incredibly difficult, depressing time.
Your conscience is going to tell you the 50 ways you made mistakes that night, tell you about all the other times you did and got away with it, tell you how you could’ve killed yourself or, even worse, somebody else, maybe even a kid, or a family.
What are your friends going to think? Will they ever talk to you again? Are you going to walk into a place and watch as everybody becomes quiet and starts pointing fingers, “Look, there’s the guy who drove drunk!”.
In my experience, you will beat yourself up worse than anybody else. You expect other people to yell at you, and revile you, and say awful things… truth be told… it doesn’t really happen. You’ll be told that you should have known better and that you fucked up, but, everyone knows that it’s wrong to do, and they most likely have done it themselves. So they’re not that hard on you. Not as hard as you would expect. The other DUI offenders I’ve spoken to have generally reflected this sentiment as well. Driving drunk is something that everybody knows is wrong and nearly everybody does. It’s bad, it’s stupid, it’s wrong, but it’s just how it is.
The churning stomach doesn’t start. I don’t think I ate the day afterwards until late and I really had to. You wake up and it’s the first thing you think about, at night it’s the last thing you think about - usually making you stay awake for an hour, maybe two, maybe more, in bed turning worst case scenarios over and over again in your head. At work it’s always in the back of your head, biting at you, making you wonder if everybody knows somehow.
Again, I’m sorry that you’re going through this. I felt completely worthless as a human being, and it took some time to get over these feelings. The remorse I felt was more than I could ever express in any way, and I’m sure yours is too. The thought of feeing those feelings again is more of a deterrent for me than anything else.
I cried, I prayed for forgiveness, I was depressed, I felt completely horrible.
Ironically, the pain of my DUI lead me to drink more than ever. At home, of course. Hair of the dog? Maybe. I was certainly bitten. Sign of a reliance on alcohol? Perhaps. It only now really hits me how funny it is that we celebrate both the successes and victories in life by drinking, and use it to morn our losses and express our condolences.
I drank, and I drank a lot. Beer, vodka, whatever. I drank in a dark room feeling sorry for myself. I hated myself for what had happened. Was it the best way to get the feelings out? Maybe, probably not.
But it worked.
After two or three days of wallowing in self-pity, I came out of my complete depression, and put it together - alright, we messed up, let’s do what we can to make things the best they can be, fix the things we can, make amends, and get it to where we can move on.
Do I recommend heavy drinking afterwards? No, of course not. But I recommend getting your grief out, in whatever manner is appropriate for you.
Be sad, get the emotions out, then prepare to move on.
This is a temporary thing, it won’t change too much of your life.
You can get through this and on with your life.
I promise.