Fear of Flying
A business man makes regular trans-Atlantic flights to America as part of his itinerary, sustaining important links with clients. This is something he does without giving a second thought to the flying itself. When he boards the plane the only thing that bothers him is whether or not he will be able to avoid boredom on such a long flight. He does a bit more preparation for the upcoming meetings, he reads a little, he chats to the person next to him. Intermittently he drifts into a sort of deep reverie which seems to be generated by the incredible vista of cloudscapes suspended in an endless blue that the plane effortlessly glides through. His thoughts drift into pleasurable memories. He begins to follow a line of speculation about a work problem in which his ideas become very clear and lucid and the problem begins to settle into a comfortably manageable pattern in his mind. The hostess passing up the aisle sees a face, eyes closed with a half smile. She doesn't need to ask if everything is alright, the face is so relaxed.
This was generally the pattern for our traveller until a combination of stressful circumstances led to him experiencing a drop in his spirits and resilience. This coincided with one of his trans-Atlantic flights. The plane encountered some pockets of disturbance over the Atlantic. Nothing severe, but he suddenly found himself on one of those lines of speculation, about what would happen if it was severe, if something went seriously wrong. He began to allow himself to think about the plane going out of control. In a very short time his attention was completely magnetized by this idea, his muscle tone changed, adrenaline started to flood into his system he spent the last leg of his journey manufacturing a very stressful experience for himself, and was impressed by just how hair raising the trip had been. The low spirits and rather awkward and unsatisfactory business meetings which followed in the U.S, meant that on his return journey he was again in a rather negative frame of mind. A detailed report of an air-crash in Malaysia had been on the news the previous night and he found himself resurrecting bits of it at breakfast.On the plane he started the journey feeling quite unsettled. Even the take off which he usually found quite stimulating, seemed rather too stimulating.
Half a dozen trips later he had fully installed a new program for his transatlantic flights. This program was called Fear of Flying. Eventually this program began to become an enormous barrier to him.
In hypnotherapy we gently begin to restore the original program.
We do this by primarily exploring the nature of a person's fear. If you think about it in a certain way, the proposition of hurtling through the sky at over 20,000 feet in a metal box seems preposterous and it seems preposterous to expect it to stay up there and arrive and land safely at its destination. The odds on a catastrophe taking place however, are actually much greater if you were to make an ordinary everyday automobile journey. The dangers of doing a simple thing, at ground level, like crossing a road, involve a huge potential for personal injury. Why single out a plane journey ? The fear only becomes logical if you also begin to program yourself to be afraid of many of the things that you do every day including walking out of your front door.
What exactly is your fear of flying if you were to allow it to manifest vividly in your conscious mind? We might create a detailed narrative to bring it more out into the open and aereate it rather than allow it to remain slightly out of consciousness where it can have all the more powerful a disturbing effect on your nervous system.
The fear of the flight begins well before take off. There is a rehearsal period where you begin to build up the level of sensitisation by contemplating how scared you're going to be when it actually arrives. You begin to load up the physical details of boarding the plane with a sense of dread, creating powerful cues to trigger you into fearful and anxious states at that time. Hypnotherapy allows you to intervene in this negative spiral. You make an immediate radical adjustment by connecting the flying experience itself and your anticipation of it, with the physical, mental and emotional state that you go into in the hypnotic trance i.e. deep relaxation. At the very first sign of being magnetized into those feelings of being totally powerless and trapped, you are triggered into releasing feelings of deep, pleasurable relaxation. You begin to allow yourself to drift into that reverie state formerly enjoyed by our traveller above. This is actually the natural state of pleasant dissociation appropriate to this unique way of travelling. Direct suggestions rehearse you into a mindset where every element of the flight, even the rattling sound of that trolley being wheeled down the aisle by a rather harrassed looking hostess, is cueing you very strongly to simply relax and drift, or become wonderfully immersed in that book you are reading, or settle into a very clear arranging of your thoughts around some work or relationship matter, or simply enjoy the strangely calming effect of that blue sky and magnificent clouds bathed in sunlight. Also- the prospect of this is what automatically comes into your mind in the days or weeks prior to the flight, when you begin to anticipate it.Up there, above it all.