Fear of Flying
And if after what you have seen and read on this site you still have a fear of flying. that niggling feeling telling you its just not natural. Read on this may help if not then rest in the fact that your 29 times more likely to die in your car than a plane. Apparently!!!!!!!!!
The Facts . . .and the Problems | Flying is generally considered to be one of the safest forms of public transportation currently available in the United kingdom . Statistics compiled by the Department of Transport have led to the conclusion that airline travel is 29 times safer than driving a car. The problem with the above statistics is that they do not stop people from being afraid of flying. Statistics do not help because the fear of flying actually has little to do with risk as such. If the fear of flying were actually caused by the potential for an accident, then everyone who fears to fly would be even more afraid—29 times more afraid, to be statistically exact—to drive or ride in an automobile. But that is clearly not the case. Anyone who flies—even someone not afraid of flying—understands that there is always some chance of an accident, just as with any life activity. Relatively few accidents happen in aviation because pilots are specifically trained to stay calm and to think clearly in an emergency—and they are trained to handle just about every emergency imaginable. But, without their own specialized training, many passengers sit in the cabin worrying about the dangers of flight. Despite the safety statistics, they become disabled by fear and experience the psychological symptoms that make flying a misery. |
Vulnerability | If you carefully read the information on this webpage, you will learn that, although the fear of flying isn’t really about the risks inherent in aviation, it is based in the uncomfortable awareness that life is fragile and vulnerable, and that none of us—much like the passenges on many of the flights on this site.—has any real control over it, whether in the air or on the ground. Because we were not designed to fly like birds, whenever we get into a “flying machine” we have to confront our deepest fears of human vulnerability. It’s not so much that flying is “unnatural,” but that in finding ourselves way up in the sky, sealed in a machine, we can hear our deepest whisperings of vulnerability more clearly than anywhere else. Still, even though none of us is ever “in control” of anything, we can learn to be psychologically in command of our thoughts and feelings—and trust in something greater than ourselves—more than we think. We can learn to not be overwhelmed by fear itself. Continue reading, therefore, to experience your own “specialized training” in flying without anxiety. |
Components | Technically, the fear of flying is a Specific Phobia, one of several kinds of Anxiety Disorders. As an anxiety, the “fear” of flying is more concerned with what might happen than with what actually is happening.
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Symptoms | No one can be in control of his or her future, and so anyone who worries unnecessarily about the future will cause physical and emotional reactions just as if something dangerous really were happening. Generally, people who experience a fear of flying report two basic kinds of symptoms.
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Medical Issues |
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Trapped ? | Clearly, the fear of flying can be associated with many different symptoms. You might even experience some of these symptoms in situations other than flying and not be nearly as incapacitated as when you are flying in an airplane. In fact, this is the key to the whole problem. In other situations, you have much more freedom to change things. If it’s stuffy in a car, you can open a window. You can talk to the driver. You might be the driver. Even riding in a bus or train is usually less troubling than flying. The reality is that flying can feel like being trapped—trapped in the airplane until it lands. And so it might be said that your symptoms are your “out-of-control” reactions to feeling trapped and out of control. |
Freedom | A person who has overcome the fear of flying still knows that anything could go wrong with the flight—just as someone driving a car surely knows that an accident could happen at any time. What this person has overcome, therefore, is the escalating spiral of ever-worsening symptoms triggered by one or more of the anxiety-provoking components of airplane flight |
Cognitive Coping Strategies | Research that has examined the cognitive coping strategies used by persons who are afraid to fly tells us that, in general, four specific coping strategies seem to be most associated with flight anxiety:[4]
This means that if you are afraid to fly, you are likely to spend a lot of time being preoccupied with worries about flying before the flight even happens, and you can get caught up in dwelling on all the physical and psychological symptoms you’re feeling once the flight begins. Plus, you will likely blame yourself for your failures and weaknesses, you will be telling yourself that you are helpless to do anything about those weaknesses, and you will be thinking of all the bad things that could happen. Here, then, is some advice about how to change these anxiety-provoking ways of thinking. Rumination—expand your awareness beyond the unpleasant situation:
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Children And Fear Of Flying | Sometimes children develop a fear of flying. But unless the fear can be traced directly to a trauma or accident, before seeking treatment specific to the child, it would be advisable to think of the child as just one part of a larger family system. So consider whether the child’s anxiety relates in some way to family conflicts. For example, children who have to fly from one divorced parent to another for visitation can develop anxiety about flying which relates primarily to feelings of helplessness and abandonment. In other words, the fear is not about flying so much as about what flying signifies: the despair of being shuttled from one parent to another like a sack of potatoes. A child’s fears can also be an unconscious expression of a parent’s anxieties. It’s odd, but sometimes a child’s symptoms reflect things the parents are struggling with but are trying to keep hidden. So always consider what the child’s symptoms mean psychologically within the greater family context. The child’s fear of flying may not be about flying at all. |
Other Issues To Consider | When someone flies across the country, it’s not usually for the benign reason the chicken crossed the street: to get to the other side. Human travel usually involves desires and expectations. And often those desires and expectations involve unpleasant emotions such as hurt, anger, and uncertainty about fulfilling obligations. Now, because flying does have some risk to it, those unpleasant emotions can get psychologically transferred to the process of flying. That is, rather than acknowledge our “dangerous” emotions, we focus on something else that seems dangerous: flying itself. So, as strange as it might sound, even an adult’s fear of flying may have nothing to do with flying per se. Consider the following case vignette.
Any—or all—of these possibilities could be an explanation of the fear of flying symptoms. And none of them has anything to do with flying itself.
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Treatment | Considering all that has been said on this page, treatment for the fear of flying can take several forms.
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