Summer has finally arrived, and many of us are looking forward to sunshiny days at the beach, hiking in the mountains, or sightseeing in a foreign country. For some of us, however, a looming summer vacation is not a happy prospect. It means an airplane flight, and these people inwardly quake at the very thought of getting on an airplane. They may fear losing control and panicking during the flight, or suffocating, or dying when the plane unexpectedly takes a nose dive.
A fear of one specific place or thing such as heights, spiders, or plane flights, is called a phobia, a word that comes from the Greek word phobos, or fear. A phobia arises when a person has a bad experience involving the feared thing or place. With the fear of flying, perhaps the person was on an airplane flight where there was an equipment failure and the plane had to turn back. This scared all the passengers. Perhaps the person lost a loved one in an airplane accident.
Or perhaps they were on a plane when another passenger had a heart attack. This one scary experience becomes generalized in their mind and feelings, with the result that for them any plane trip is associated with fear.
Most clients come back after a single session and tell me that they feel more in control of their fear. One young client, a seventeen-year-old boy named Mitchell, came up with his own unique variation on the strategy. He did the fifteen minute exercise while he was mountain biking. When he reached the summit of a hill, he set his cell phone timer and brought on his worst fears for fifteen minutes. At the next session two weeks later, Mitchell told me that now he could control his fear by using the power of his own mind. That is exactly the point of the exercise. The mind conjures up the fear and then stops the fear.
For me, as a therapist, summer brings clients who want help overcoming their fear of flying. Of all the strategies in my therapy toolbox, I have found one particular strategy most helpful to combat the fear of flying. This strategy is paradoxical, because I prescribe to the client the very symptom for which she is seeking help. I ask the client to devote fifteen minutes a day to conquering her fear. She has to be alone, in a comfortable place such as her bedroom. She then sets her cell phone or other timer for fifteen minutes. Then she conjures up the most fearful airplane journey she can imagine and starts having the worst fears possible. After fifteen minutes, she can stop having the fear and go about her usual activities.
Like other paradoxical strategies of prescribing the symptom, prescribing fear to combat fear is a powerful intervention
Mary Avis had been a white-knuckle flyer for years. But on one fateful flight from Virginia to Boston several years ago, her fear finally took complete control. Although the weather was clear and the flight was smooth, Avis panicked.
"I was sure that if I stood up, the floor would collapse and I'd fall through," says Avis, now 61, who spent the entire flight motionless and petrified.
When the plane landed in Philadelphia to refuel, Avis fled. "My husband was annoyed, to put it mildly," she says.
"Instead of an hour flight home, we took a 14-hour train ride." She could not fly again for five years.
Fear of flying may seem irrational, but it is no joke.
It can restrict your life and hobble your career, says Al Forgione, PhD, a Boston psychologist who treats the condition. It's common, too -- a 2006 survey by Gallup and USA Today found that more than one in four people are somewhat afraid, and one in 10 considers him or herself very afraid of taking to the skies.
Despite the term, fear of flying isn't just a fear of being in the air.
Some people are claustrophobic or afraid of being far from home. Forgione says the most common fear is not crashing, but becoming hysterical and humiliating yourself in flight. And "the underlying fear in all of these anxieties is loss of control," he says. To create the illusion of control, some people believe that their actions -- listening for odd noises, noting the slightest dip, or even staying motionless in their seats -- could actually save the plane.
While you can't control the flight, you can control your own emotional reaction. Many people start with therapy.
Forgione runs classes for people who are afraid to fly. Students learn breathing exercises to calm them during tense situations. They visit the terminal and watch planes take off and land. For graduation, the class takes a short roundtrip flight.
Other therapists use virtual reality to help people feel more at ease with flying.
Wearing a special helmet embedded with monitors and speakers, they experience a computer simulation of the airport, the cabin, and the flight without leaving the safety of their therapist's office.
Forgione adds that medicine can be a helpful tool. Small doses of a mild sedative may allow people who would otherwise be too afraid to get on a plane.
As for Avis, she finally decided to take Forgione's class. While she says the class was hard work -- "learning to relax isn't easy," she notes -- it paid off. "I felt victorious when I took that graduation flight," she says.
Now Avis says she's so relaxed on flights that she dozes off, something unimaginable before.
"These days, the only thing that really bothers me about flying," she says, "is being woken up by a chatty pilot yakking about the weather."
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