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You were in a car accident. Someone handed you a referral, maybe a prescription, and sent you back out into the parking lot — and now you're trying to figure out the rest on your own.
Beyond the Crash is the show that covers everything they didn't tell you.
Every episode, licensed massage therapist and MVA recovery specialist Tabitha MacDonald breaks down one piece of the puzzle — in plain language, no medical degree required. Your body. Your brain. The emotional stuff nobody warned you about. And the practical stuff too — insurance, PIP benefits, attorneys, documentation, and all the fine print that somehow becomes your full-time job while you're just trying to feel like yourself again.
Tabitha has spent over a decade helping car accident survivors recover when the standard playbook ran out of pages. She's been on both sides of this — as a clinician and as a patient. She knows what it feels like to not be believed. To be told you're fine when you're not. To have no idea what your rights are or what's actually happening inside your own body.
This show exists because nobody gave her a roadmap. And you deserve one.
Beyond the Crash — body, brain, feelings, and the fine print.
Imagine this. You come to, and you hear crying from the back seat. All you can see is smoke and this big giant bag in front of your face compressing you like a weight on your body. You don't even know if you can move, but somehow you do. And you don't know what happened.
Speaker 1:You don't know where you are. You don't know if you're safe. You don't know if your child is safe because all you can hear is this high pitched tone, this ringing and crying. But it sounds distant. And you don't know how far it is or where you are.
Speaker 1:And it's confusing. But you do know that you are the one who needs to get both of you out of this. Something primal takes over. If you or someone you love has ever been in an automobile accident, you are in the right place. My name is Tabitha McDonald.
Speaker 1:I am a licensed massage therapist. I specialize in motor vehicle accident recovery, and I've been doing this work for over twelve years. I am also a car accident survivor. I had my five year old son in the back seat when it happened. So I'm not just someone who treats this, I'm someone who has lived it.
Speaker 1:And this podcast, Beyond the Crash, exists because I kept meeting people who were trying to recover without all the information they needed. People who were in pain and didn't know why. People whose doctors cleared them and they still felt terrible, but they believed what everyone told them, which is they should just be better. People who were doing everything right and still felt like they were failing. I built this to close that gap.
Speaker 1:You or someone you care about was in a car accident, and now you're dealing with your body, your brain, your feelings, and approximately 10,000 insurance forms. I'm Tabitha McDonald, licensed massage therapist, coach, and your guide through all of it. This is Beyond the Crash. Let's get into it. Okay, let's talk about who I made this for because it's a bigger group of people than you might think.
Speaker 1:Obviously, if you were in a car accident, this is for you. Doesn't matter if it happened last week or three years ago or twenty five years ago. Doesn't matter if your car was totaled or barely scratched. It doesn't matter if you went to the ER or drove yourself home because you felt fine. Side note: If you felt fine right after the accident, that is completely normal and also not the whole story.
Speaker 1:We are going to talk a lot about that because that's the mistake that I made. But not one as devastating as you think it is. But here's who else I made this for: the spouse who is watching their partner flinch every time they see brake lights, the parent of the teenager who hasn't been the same since the accident on the way home from school, The partner who is trying to understand why the person they love is exhausted all of the time, irritable, having trouble remembering things and keeps saying I'm fine While clearly not being fine. The employers, the coworkers, anyone who is in relationship with someone who has experienced an automobile crash. This is for you.
Speaker 1:Because this process of healing takes a community. The families going through this, they're in it too. They just don't always have a name for what they're experiencing. And I made this for the practitioners. The alternative health practitioners, the physical therapists, the chiropractors, the acupuncturists, the counselors who are working with MVA clients and all want a deeper picture of what their patients are actually navigating.
Speaker 1:And for all of you body workers, massage therapists, and healers out there who find themselves working with this very vulnerable population. Because an automobile accident doesn't just injure a body, it disrupts a life. And the ripple goes further than most people talk about. That's what we're here to discuss. I want to tell you my story.
Speaker 1:Because I think it matters for you to understand where I'm coming from and why this work is so deeply personal to me. Before I was a massage therapist, I worked as an office manager and legal assistant for a personal injury litigation firm in California. I handled car accident cases from the inside. I saw the medical records. I understood how documentation worked.
Speaker 1:I watched how cases unfolded. Then I moved into auto insurance, starting in personal auto and moving into commercial, helping people understand their policies and navigate claims. So when I say understand this world from multiple angles, I mean that literally. I've been on the legal side, the insurance side, the clinical side, and the patient side. In 2013, I opened Soma Massage in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
Speaker 1:I specialized in MVA recovery from the very beginning, not because I planned to, but because of what happened in 2012. It was June 2012. I was driving with my five year old son in the back seat. It was just two weeks after his fifth birthday. I was two weeks into massage school.
Speaker 1:You know that feeling when you've just made a big life change and everything feels a little fragile and a little electric at the same time? That was me. Here's a detail that still gets me. The week before the accident, I had been pulled over by a police officer. He told me my son was in the wrong car seat.
Speaker 1:I had just moved him to a booster because he had just turned five and he was so excited to get to sit in a big boy seat like his sister. But the officer explained, it's not age that determines the car seat. It's weight. My son wasn't heavy enough for a booster with no five point harness. He needed to go back into a five point harness seat.
Speaker 1:I was very embarrassed, and I fixed it immediately. One week later, that traffic stop probably saved my son's life. I'm gonna tell you right now how grateful I am for the Sherwood Police Department because everyone makes fun of them for being so diligent and very, very, like, we always joke and say, you don't go five minutes or five miles over the speed limit in Sherwood, Oregon because they'll pull you over. Thank God they did. So it was an ordinary Tuesday, rush hour.
Speaker 1:I was driving a Honda Civic on a country road to pick up my daughter. And if you've never driven a small car on an Oregon country road at rush hour surrounded by SUVs, it is genuinely hard to see over them. Oregon has a lot of SUVs because of our weather and because of the lifestyle here. I thought I saw an opportunity to turn, hit the gas, and I can only describe it as if someone else's foot pushed mine down. Like, my body made a decision before my brain caught up.
Speaker 1:Then bam. Smoke. So much smoke. A huge white airbag airbag thrust into my chest and ringing. Ringing loud ringing in my ears.
Speaker 1:And beyond the ringing, crying, not mine. Something more precious than my tears. Distant crying from the back seat. It was my son. Oh, no.
Speaker 1:Like, what just happened? There is a strength that people write about in articles, the kind that shows up in impossible moments. I wanna tell you it is very real. Because somehow, I got out of that car and got to my son. I don't have any recollection of how I managed to do that.
Speaker 1:I just remember grabbing him and putting him in my arms and collapsing on the side of the road. There was people. There were sirens. There was noise, but all I could hear was the ringing and the crying. And I couldn't even focus enough to see who was around me or what they were asking me.
Speaker 1:Shock is a funny thing. A firefighter came over, this calm, steady presence of a man in the in the middle of complete chaos. And he knelt down next to me and he said something I've never forgotten. He had this little tiny stuffed purple giraffe in his hand. And he handed it to my son.
Speaker 1:And then he looked at me and he said, in a couple of days, the reality of what just happened is going to hit you. This intersection should have been fixed a long time ago. They call them accidents for a reason. Please do not feel bad about this. Do not let it get into your head.
Speaker 1:That man's words changed my entire experience of what came next. He gave me permission, before the shock had even worn off, to not blame myself, to take accountability but not blame. And I have thought about that moment so many times over the years. How different healing is when someone shows up at exactly the right moment and says, This wasn't all your fault. And what's about to happen is normal.
Speaker 1:My husband arrived shortly after, and he gave me a look. We weren't in a great place at the time. And he didn't need to say a word because I already felt like a complete failure. I don't know if you've ever had an experience where you put your own child's life at risk. It just hits different.
Speaker 1:It hits really different. And if you happen to have a spouse who's not supportive or who likes to blame you for everything that's ever gone wrong, man, it the shame is something I don't even know that I know how to explain to another human being because I knew it was my fault. I took full responsibility for having made a very big mistake. But not feeling supported on the journey. We'll talk about that later.
Speaker 1:Because I don't think I'm alone in that experience. And it's a kind of silent pain that drives drives a stake in your heart that you don't even know is there. When the paramedics asked if I wanted medical care, I immediately said no. My husband was giving me the look. Like, how the hell are we supposed to afford any of this?
Speaker 1:And I just said, no. I'm fine. I'm fine. I just need to go home. And I need to get my daughter.
Speaker 1:And luckily, we had cell phones by then, so we called the lady who had my daughter, and she had no problem keeping her for dinner. Now I want to go back for a second because I didn't ask for medical care because I wasn't hurt. It was because my brain was already calculating the bill. I was thinking about the ambulance bill, the ER visit, what that meant for a family that was already stretched too thin. My husband was self employed.
Speaker 1:I had just left my corporate job to go back to school. We had lost our insurance in the gap. I didn't know about personal injury protection at the time. The coverage that pays for your treatment after an accident, regardless of faults, nobody told me about it on the side of the road. So what they're thinking about is, are you okay?
Speaker 1:How can I help you live? They're not thinking about insurance. It's not their job. So I said no to the ambulance and tried to convince myself and everyone else that I was just fine. I was not fine.
Speaker 1:And here is how I know. Because I want you to understand the level of denial that is possible in the human mind and body when it is in survival mode. We went on a camping trip that weekend. I didn't want to let the kids down. We had been planning it for a long time and they were all excited.
Speaker 1:I was in so much pain I could barely function. But I put on a smile and I moved through it. Because I was born in the seventies and we were taught to tough things out. Buckle up buttercup, right? Don't let anyone know you're weak.
Speaker 1:And we just get on with it. The following week, my daughter, being the enthusiastic seven year old that she was, ran across my bed and also across my gut. I folded forward to protect my already aching abdomen and my entire back seized. And I screamed a sound I don't think anyone in my family had ever heard before. All I saw on her face was this look of terror.
Speaker 1:Like, what did I just do to my mom? And somehow I had to say, not your fault, honey, while also gritting my teeth and being absolutely terrified of this experience that I had never had before in my body. Except the day she was born. But that's a whole another story for a whole another podcast. Now context.
Speaker 1:One time my dog yanked my finger out of socket, like dangling, literally dangling, had run off with it and a leash chasing another dog. I put it back in myself and drove to the ER. I am not someone with a low tolerance for pain. When I screamed, I knew we were past the point of toughing it out. I went to the ER and it was over a week post accident.
Speaker 1:And the doctor brought in the entire student team because they almost never see post accident contusions that far out. Most people come in, you know, pretty soon after the accident. The bruising I had was apparently a teaching moment. So glad that I could be of help. You're welcome.
Speaker 1:It was a friend actually, a fellow, colleague of mine at the massage school named Brandon. He found me in class one night and said, you know, your PIP covers your injuries and your visits, right? No, I did not know that. Nobody had mentioned that to me. I could barely focus on filing a claim, let alone figuring out what any of the coverages meant.
Speaker 1:And that was the turning point. I booked an appointment with Brandon and his chiropractor, and I started getting treatment. I started getting the support I desperately needed from the beginning. Although I don't think my body could have handled the treatments in the beginning. And then as if the universe had known I was going to have an accident.
Speaker 1:I had just won an acupuncture appointment with Aram Levendosky, owner of AOM Health, from a YMCA raffle a couple of weeks before. I don't think he knew at the time when he gave me that free acupuncture treatment that he was about to become a very prominent figure in my life. But maybe that's just fate working its hand in your life in ways that you don't really know it's working. So I called Aram as well, and he was right down the street from my house and he became a very important part of my treatment team. And honestly, one of the reasons I went on to open Soma Massage just a year later.
Speaker 1:The universe has interesting timing sometimes, don't you think? But here's what I didn't understand for years. I was struggling in a massage school in school in ways I couldn't explain. Foggy, losing words mid sentence, exhausted in a way that didn't seem to get fixed by sleep, trouble concentrating on things I knew I was capable of learning. I genuinely thought maybe I just wasn't smart enough.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'd made a mistake going back to school. You know, normal fears of returning to school as an adult. I'd already gone to massage school in England. I had put this off for seven years because I was worried about the kinesiology portion of the exams in The States. I wasn't sure I was capable.
Speaker 1:Now I had two kids in a car accident and I'm thinking I'm definitely not capable. I knew I shouldn't have done this. I did this thing that's ruining my family's life because I was being selfish and going for my dreams and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes. All of this was happening at the same time.
Speaker 1:I started to genuinely doubt myself. I was impatient with my kids. My marriage was deteriorating. And that part was true. That wasn't the head injury in ways that went beyond the accident.
Speaker 1:Right? So he was already struggling with alcoholism long before I stopped, working, went back to massage school. It was part of the reason I was going back there, but that's a whole another story on a whole another podcast. And I did not have the emotional capacity to make sense of any of it. I started gaining weight rapidly and blamed stress.
Speaker 1:I was making impulsive decisions that didn't feel like me. I had always been grounded and thoughtful and suddenly I wasn't. And I never put it together that it had anything to do with this accident. I thought life was just unraveling. What I didn't know was that all of it had a name.
Speaker 1:And no, it's not a midlife crisis. I had a mild traumatic brain injury. Not the kind that shows up on a scan. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies. The invisible kind.
Speaker 1:The kind where your brain moves inside your skull on impact. And when it does, it creates a cascade of effects in cognitive function, emotional regulation impulse control, sensory processing. The whole system gets disrupted. Quietly, invisibly. And nobody puts it in your chart because nobody thought to look.
Speaker 1:Nobody named it for me. Nobody treated it. Nobody connected the dots. Not because they weren't adequate, but because it was too fragmented and there wasn't things in place at the time to look at all of the weird things happening in my life and saying, Oh, there's a pattern. And it has a name.
Speaker 1:Years after the accident, I was driving home from a day on Mt. Hood with my family. Late Sunday, icy roads, heavy traffic, dark. Get home, I needed to make a left hand turn onto a busy road. Obviously, I turned right instead.
Speaker 1:Told the kids I needed to find a restroom. Drove 20 miles up an icy mountain road in the dark, found a rest stop, and added a full hour to our drive home to avoid that turn. My kids called me out immediately, because they had been watching me do this for years. Twenty minutes out of the way, sometimes an hour, to avoid a left hand turn on a country road without a traffic light. They had a name for it before I did.
Speaker 1:I thought I wasn't afraid of driving. I was just very, very good at avoiding anything that resembled the original event. That is what unaddressed driving fear looks like. It doesn't always announce itself as fear. Sometimes it just looks like creative routing.
Speaker 1:I became obsessive about understanding MBA injuries. The average massage therapist is required to complete six continuing education hours per year. I was averaging 100. I trained in neuromuscular therapy, structural integration, post concussive syndrome, rehabilitation. I dug into pain, neuroscience, polyvagal theory, and trauma informed care because my own accident had shown me that everything gets hit.
Speaker 1:The body, the brain, the nervous system, the emotions, the relationships, all of it. And over twelve plus years of working with hundreds of accident survivors, I have seen the same patterns repeat. The same inevitable, invisible injuries going unaddressed. The same people being told they're fine when they're not. The same families who don't understand why their person has changed.
Speaker 1:That's what this podcast is built to address. So here's what I want to build with you over the coming weeks and months, however long we're going to spend together. This podcast is your education hub. Your place to finally understand what actually happened to your body, your brain, and your nervous system in that accident. And what becomes possible when you have the right information and the right support.
Speaker 1:We are going to talk about the physical stuff whiplash, soft tissue injuries, the ways an accident affects your spine and connective tissue and your brain and the nervous system in ways that don't always show up immediately and why that is completely normal and not a sign that you are making it up. The neurological side: mild traumatic brain injury what it is, how it actually works, what the symptoms look like, and why it's so frequently missed. If you've been told everything looks normal on your scan, you still don't feel like yourself, I want to talk to you. The emotional and the psychological stuff, the heart stuff, the anxiety that shows up on the road, the hypervigilance, the way your nervous system recalibrates after trauma and what that means for your daily life. The grief that nobody warns you about.
Speaker 1:Because yes, there is grief in this the version of your life you had before. I was just telling this to a client the other day, said, your new normal. And he looked at me like, I'm so tired of people saying that to me. And I said, no, no, no. What I mean is your new normal right now.
Speaker 1:Not permanently, but just getting used to your new normal right now. Your new normal is going to change, and you'll probably feel better than ever. We just have to talk about your new normal in the moment. Trust me, that changes daily. The relational side: How accidents affect families, what partners and parents and children and colleagues experience while their loved one recovers, how to communicate across that gap when you're both exhausted and neither of you has a roadmap for what's happening.
Speaker 1:And the practical stuff documentation, insurance, PIP, legal considerations the things that matter enormously and that people so often don't understand until it's too late. And we're going to do all of it in plain language, no jargon, Nothing that requires a medical degree to follow, because I believe that understanding your own body is a form of healing. And when you know why something is happening, it stops being terrifying and starts being navigable. I'm also going to tell you things that your doctor may not have had time to tell you. Not because they don't care, most of them genuinely do.
Speaker 1:But the healthcare system gives them about seven minutes per visit and recovery from a car accident is a long, complicated, deeply individual journey that does not fit neatly into seven minutes. So I am filling in the gaps. That is my job here. Mind you, I am not a medical doctor. So never assume I know more than them.
Speaker 1:I'm just giving you the information from a different perspective and hopefully give you some better questions to ask when you go talk to your providers. They're always the ones who are going to be your like, you know, who you're going to get the best information from. But I mean, none of this is here to replace medical advice is what I'm trying to say. And I hope that you understand that and that you use your own due diligence and common sense when making decisions for yourself. Before we close out this first episode, I want to give you something practical.
Speaker 1:Something you can use right now tonight. One of the things I've learned over years of working with accident survivors is that the nervous system is doing tremendous work in the background of recovery that most people cannot see. Your body is in a state of heightened alert. It experienced something that felt genuinely life threatening and it is doing its job to protect you. That's not a malfunction, that's biology.
Speaker 1:But one of the most powerful things you can do during recovery at any stage is give your nervous system regular moments of genuine safety. Not distraction, not pushing through, actual deliberate physiological rest. That is what the meditation I'm sharing with you does. It's called the Healing Glade. It's a guided audio experience using the Soma Rewire system, which I'll get into in a whole another episode.
Speaker 1:But it's specifically designed to work with your nervous system that's been through trauma. It uses imagery, breath, and gentle language to invite your body into a state of safety and repair. I used to be one of those people who thought people who listened to meditations were simply taking a nap until I needed them. I have created a library of Soma Rewire sessions that literally help you heal on the go because my opinion is, who's got time to lay around meditate and talk about trauma for all of the days to come? I got a life to live.
Speaker 1:And so I started creating these amazing, sessions, healing sessions for my own recovery from my brain injury. Cause let me tell you, it happened again in 2024. Whole another story. Not a car accident, just a slip and fall. A couple of them.
Speaker 1:Same results, though. So a lot of the change processes that I've created were based off of my training in NLP, hypnosis, things that I learned about using the unconscious mind to restructure it and put it in alignment with living a pain free life and health and vitality, things that you have to focus on when you're getting your system to jumpstart and move into a new direction. I'll talk all about the background on that stuff. I don't want to overwhelm you right now. What I'm going to invite you to do is listen to the Healing Glade at night.
Speaker 1:I'm also going to go ahead and post the sleeping one, as well as a separate episode. And that we all just have them in this meditation library. And you don't have to sit around and meditate for hours. This stuff works while you're sleeping. So you could listen to it literally while you're falling asleep.
Speaker 1:It works with your unconscious mind. And I'll explain the science behind it in another episode. I'm not going to bog you down with it in this one. I'm just saying it works. You can do it or not do it, but it works.
Speaker 1:I have been giving this stuff to my clients over the past few years and people are shocked. They say, well, that's really weird because I had a horrific fear of driving. And all of a sudden, all I can hear is your voice in my head telling me it's going to be a beautiful day. And suddenly I don't feel like I'm about to panic every time I drive over a bridge. What did you put in that meditation?
Speaker 1:Cause that's not normal meditation. I'm like, I know it's here to like reset the way that your brain is perceiving your reality back to a place where you feel safe in the world and on the road. I've got you! I've been through it. I know what I needed back then and I've created it now.
Speaker 1:Now that I have the skills and the training and the things, the tools. So I'm going to start including some of those things here so that you can just try them out for free and see if they work for you. The thing I'm going to ask is that you go into it with an open mind. I used to be very closed minded when it came to these things. I always believed hypnosis and bodywork belonged in the same sessions.
Speaker 1:I knew that from the gate, from when I opened the clinic. I didn't know how I was going to be pulling them together. And that is the work that I've been doing over the last five years, which if you want my full story, I have another podcast entirely dedicated to my journey of mind body healing. But this one I want to keep specific to motor vehicle accident recoveries. I can put a link down below to some of those episodes that you might find interesting.
Speaker 1:But these processes, I'm going to put them specifically in this podcast, will help you reduce the amount of physical pain you're experiencing by helping your brain make sense of it. Because the alarm systems are up right now. If you were just in an accident or if you've been in pain for a long time and it's been over three months, there's a whole another type of pain called neuroplastic pain, which creates a whole another podcast. We'll talk about that later. But the healing blade is a process that I've been using just to help reduce some of the pain and make more sense of it in your brain.
Speaker 1:So that's my welcome gift to you. And also my, healing meditation that you can listen to while you sleep. These are all great. My best advice, and I'm going to just say this before moving on, I really want you to not make any major life decisions if you were just in an accident. I've had people come in and they're, like, wanting to blow up their lives.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, does your boss suddenly look like Cruella DeVille and, you know, your mother-in-law look like the Little Mermaid, what is her name? Ursula. Yeah. Let's just hold off before we finally let our voice free, until we know we're not going to say anything that we regret. We know our impulse control and emotions are in our own authority and that we're reacting from a place that feels good to our future self as well.
Speaker 1:You know, try to avoid big financial decisions, big life changes, and just give yourself a moment for your brain to rest and heal before you start making a lot of big changes in your life. I promise you there's a lot of reasons for this. You're going need stability moving forward. Coming up on future episodes, I'm going to be pulling in content from work I've done over the years, teachings, deep dive conversations, bringing in expert lawyers and insurance agents, therapists, acupuncturists, people I've actually worked with in the industry who I trust and I value their opinion and their advice so that you have this one stop shop for accident care and recovery from a cohesive team. Because what I see a lot on the internet is there's like lawyers doing education over here, or there's, maybe some insurance over here or a doctor over there, but very rarely do I see things in easy to understand language.
Speaker 1:Now here's the thing, if you've just been in an accident and someone's talking in language over your head, you're probably just smiling and nodding, not wanting to tell them you don't understand what they're talking about because you don't want to sound stupid. Especially if you're someone who has, you know, is highly educated and is used to sounding smart. This might be a real challenge for you. And I just want you to know that's normal. I've done it a lot where I just kind of smiled and nodded and then I didn't realize later I didn't actually process anything they were saying because of the brain injuries.
Speaker 1:And, I had to really go back and go, Oh my gosh, how many things did you just agree to that you didn't actually understand because you were kind of afraid to admit that, that you didn't understand what they were talking about. Cause maybe a year ago you would have. So I kind of went on a little bit of a ramble right then, but I just want you to know that that's, that's something I just want you to watch out for. So my goal is to always put things in the simplest terms possible. And it's not because I'm uneducated or I don't have the big words and all of the other things in my background.
Speaker 1:It's because I need you to understand it. And I don't know about you, but I don't like having people talk over my head when I can barely concentrate and my head's pounding. So that's going to be my goal, is to keep things as simple as possible so that you can process it in a very easy way. And not because I don't think you're smart enough or that any of us aren't smart enough. It's just that your brain needs a little bit of a break right now.
Speaker 1:I'm certainly not going to be the one to put it in frustration and shutdown mode. Some episodes will just be me teaching. Some will be drawn, from my existing library on pain science, mind body recovery, and the healing process. And some may I'm going to bring in, like I said before, other voices, practitioners in my world who are doing extraordinary work with accident survivors. We are going to go deep on the mind body approach to pain, because the research is clear, it is profound, and it is still not talked about enough in mainstream conversations around car accident recovery.
Speaker 1:Subscribe wherever you are listening so you don't miss new episodes. And if you know someone who just went through an accident could use this, share it with them. That is the best thing you can do for this show and for the people in your life who need it. I want to close this first episode the same way I begin every session with a new client. By saying, I got you.
Speaker 1:I see you. I know this is hard. I know there are days when the progress feels invisible and the world feels like it's crumbling and this whole thing feels bigger than you could manage. I know that feeling. What you are experiencing is very, very real.
Speaker 1:You are not making it up. Your body is not broken. It is responding to something that actually happened to it. And that response makes complete sense. And it makes no sense at all at the same time.
Speaker 1:Recovery is not a straight line. It's not a timeline. It doesn't follow a schedule and it doesn't care about your to do list. It does not care about baseball practice and ballet lessons and all of the other things that are on your plate. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I wish it did. But it doesn't. Healing is very possible. I have been a witness to it happen hundreds of times. And I'm here to walk it with you.
Speaker 1:Years after my accident, I drove past that same intersection. And there it was, the exact same scene. A small gray Honda Civic, an SUV, same time of day. History really does repeat itself sometimes. Not long after that, I drove past that intersection again and saw them finally installing a stoplight at that corner.
Speaker 1:It took a couple of crashes, but the change came. I think about the people who went through what I went through, who maybe didn't know about their PIP, who said no to the ambulance because of the bill, who spent years rerouting around left hand turns without knowing why. I got better because I eventually asked the right questions, dropped the shame of being at fault, and let myself use the support that was available to me. That support exists for you too. That is what this podcast is here to help you find.
Speaker 1:I am Tabitha McDonald, this is Beyond the Crash, and I'll see you next time. Wrecked is not the same as broken. That's a wrap on today's episode of Beyond the Crash. If something landed for you today, please share it. Send it to someone you know who's in the middle of this because I promise they need it, and they may not know where to find resources.
Speaker 1:Everything we talked about today is in the show notes. Resources, links, and whatever I promised I'd put in there and actually remembered to do. If you wanna go deeper, download a free trial of the Somaflow app, full of meditations and healing processes designed to help you recover faster. I call it healing on the go, because let's be honest, who has time to sit and meditate for hours? It's hard enough remembering to text people back when your brain feels like it's scrambled, let alone carve out extra time for self care.
Speaker 1:The Soma Flow app is packed with tools for the hardest parts of your healing journey, including a powerful Soma rewire session to help you overcome your fear of driving so that you can feel safe on the road again. Find your free trial link in the show notes. And if you want a comprehensive care team in your corner, come see us at Soma Massage. Our therapists are highly skilled and trained well beyond your average massage. We work at the intersection of evidence based treatment and intuitive care, science and art together for a truly holistic approach to your recovery.
Speaker 1:If you're carrying fear or stress patterns that just won't budge, the kind that live in your body, not just your head, I'd love to invite you to book a personal Soma Rewire session with me in person here in Lake Oswego or virtually from wherever you are. We go straight to the root of what your nervous system is holding and we clear it. One session can shift things that months of regular treatment haven't touched. The booking link is in the show notes. If this show has helped you, please leave a review.
Speaker 1:It genuinely makes a difference, and, honestly, it's a really lovely thing to do for someone who recorded this between clients. I'm Tabitha McDonald. Take care of yourself out there. Wrecked is not the same as broken. I'll see you next time.