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On many occasions, I have felt anxious or frightened and I've decided that I won't let fear stop me from showing up and doing what I need to do. Flying is a good example.
Like many women, I became terrified to fly, or more accurately, terrified to crash, after having children. Waves of anxiety would wash over me at night as I pictured my little boys' faces and then imagined my plane, engulfed in flames, plummeting to the ground, leaving them grieving and motherless. These fearful imaginings began days before every departure.
People often calm down by going for the facts. My friend, Miriam, for example, feared that her plane would be struck by lightning until I gave her an article on this very subject. It said that the last confirmed commercial plane crash in the U.S. directly attributable to lightning occurred in 1967. The article also stated that even if a bolt of lightning happened to strike a plane, "nothing should happen because of the careful protection engineered into the aircraft."
Back in my own fear-of-flying days, this article would not have encouraged me. "Nothing should happen," I would have said to my husband, Steve, and anyone else who would listen. "What the hell does it mean that ‘nothing should happen' if lightning hits the plane? Why didn't this expert say, ‘Nothing will happen?'" I would have been inconsolable.
Even after I felt comfortable flying alone or as a family, I insisted that Steve and I protect our boys from orphan status by flying separately for about 20 more years. This terribly inconvenient practice made no logical sense.
I would insist on separate planes for Steve and me, then drive with him from the airport to our hotel in a cab with broken seatbelts and a thick sheet of glass separating us from the driver that would have inflicted a major head injury in the event of even a minor accident. Some of the cab drivers appeared to be on drugs and/or to harbor homicidal tendencies. Had I been even a teensy bit rational, I would have flown with Steve and insisted that we take separate ground transportation.
Back then, cheerful reminders that air travel is the safest way to go did not at all reassure me. No amount of statistical evidence could compete with the terrifying scenarios I concocted in my head. Nor was it my spiritual belief that if my plane went down, it was part of some divine plan. Neither science nor faith put me at ease.
I was cured because I kept buying airline tickets-in short, I kept showing up. I haven't always been as spunky in other situations that scare me, but my work demanded a fair amount of travel and the consequences of not flying would have been intolerable for me, both personally and professionally. Things become less terrifying the more we face them, and each time I got off a plane intact, I felt a little more capable of managing my fear. I flew so much that my fear eventually melted away. Experience gave me comfort where reasoning had failed.
If my fear had reached phobic proportions, I would have availed myself of the best treatment program and medication I could find. A genuine phobiacomes complete with a racing heart, breathing difficulties, sweating, an overwhelming need to flee the situation, and sometimes an imminent fear of death. It causes enormous suffering.
A phobic individual is gripped by paralyzing neurochemical storms that render advice like "feel the fear and do it anyway" totally irrelevant. Nor does it help to tell a phobic person to take a Valium and wash it down with several in-flight cocktails while repeating to herself that air travel is safer than driving.
The good news is that phobias can be treated and overcome. Treatment is important because avoidance won't work-in fact, it makes things considerably worse. Research demonstrates that the harder phobics work to avoid the things they fear, the more their brains grow convinced that the threat is real.
This is true for all of us. If you're not phobic but merely terrified or just plain nervous, avoidance also makes the problem worse. You need some experience with the very activity you dread, be it dating, driving, or raising your hand in a meeting.
But only you can judge what you're ready to take on. If you jump right in, you may learn that the fearful imaginings cooked up by your overactive brain never come to pass. Then again, they might.
I refuse to reassure people that the universe really is a safe place and that you should always trust it. If you push past your fears, bad things may happen. It's just quite unlikely that bad things will happen at the airport or on a plane.
Therapist David Reynolds says: "When people tell you they don't fly because they're afraid of flying, you need not believe them. They don't fly because they don't buy airline tickets."
So true.
