Overcoming Your Fear Of Flying – The Captain Can Help

Learning to fly helps a person understand how flying works. But knowing how flying works is only half the battle. It isn’t enough to stop fear of flying. Why? Because when you fly your own plane, you are in control. On an airliner, you are not.

We human beings are born with HALF of the emotion regulation system in place (the half that revs us up) and HALF of the system does not exist whatsoever (the half that calms us down). The brain system that will provide the ability to calm ones own self begins to develop at around eight months.

Until that time ALL calming the young child gets is from others, and often that calming is not adequate and the young child experiences terror and this terror is, amazingly, recorded in the brain forever.

Then, around ten months, the part of the brain that has the POTENTIAL to become able to calm us starts to be available. At that point, the young child can, if conditions are good, begin to memorize what caregivers do to provide calming. And here is where the problem becomes critical: the only way a human learns to effectively self-calm is be memorizing the steps received from someone who is very, very good at providing calming.

Obviously, caregivers – regardless of how much they care – vary in their ability to tune in the the child and assure the child in a way that works. As a result, on a scale of zero to ten, a few of us get a “ten” level of ability to calm ourselves, and most of us get far less. People who get a “one” or a “two” are the people who become addicts. Those of us in the middle have enough ability to calm ourselves that we can develop strategies to make up for what we were not given during those early formative months.

The strategies typically involve (when dealing with uncertainty)

Control
Escape

Control: if we control a situation, we often believe (whether really true or not) that we can make sure everything works out OK, such as when driving a car. Though it is not nearly as safe as flying, we FEEL safer because our hands are on the wheel.

Escape: this means not only a way out if things don’t go well, but a way to maintain a certain distance, either physically or psychologically.

On the ground, we do OK. But when we get aboard a plane, we have no control and no escape. Frankly, all this does is put up back to the level of ability to regulate emotions we were originally given. But that ability originally given simply leaves us exposed to the terror of anything we can imagine.

Having dedicated twenty-eight years to the development of advanced help for fear of flying, both as an airline captain and a licensed therapist, I’ve found the solution is to keep distress from starting.

Protection to combat distress must be established prior to flight. Protection must operate so quickly that distress is stopped before it becomes conscious. In other words, for protection to work, it must operate automatically and unconsciously.

Information on how fear of flying can be combated effectively is available in the free library at http://www.fearofflying.com/wordpress/

Posted by Jenny @ 9:13 am