EgyptAir: Now What?

When a terrible event like the EgyptAir crash takes place, our emotional response can make it difficult—even temporarily impossible—to maintain balanced thinking.

Imagining what it was like for people on the EgyptAir plane triggers stress hormones, which make that imagination seem real. Typically, we produce the most awful imaginary experience we can. Then, we regard what we imagined as legitimate by thinking “It really did happen.” No. It didn't. Though the plane crashed, we do not know the experience of any person on board.

To make things worse, we make the tragedy about ourselves. How would we feel on that plane? More stress hormones are released. When the ability to distinguish imagination from reality completely collapses, we are swept away by imagination and experience the awful event as though it had happened to us.

Let's take a break:

• We were not on the EgyptAir flight. We need to separate ourselves from it.

Let’s get back to reality:

• Including terrorism, we are as safe on a coast-to-coast flight, or on a trans-oceanic flight, as we are driving three miles to the supermarket. There’s no reason to give up going to the supermarket. We need bread, veggies and milk. There’s no reason to give up flying. We need to have a life.

For additional reading, go to https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/conquer-fear-flying/201512/fear-can-make-you-believe-the-worst-will-happen-how

Techniques that keep thinking balanced, and self-generated distress controlled, are detailed in SOAR: The Breakthrough Treatment for Fear of Flying.

Though the cause will not be determined soon, we can still gain some degree of closure. The cause is either terrorism or technical.

1. If terrorism, it is something we are already dealing with, and will be dealing with for some time to come.
2. If technical, a fix will be quickly developed. Since an A320 takes off somewhere in the world every few seconds, and only rarely does one crash, whatever technical problem might have caused the crash is rare to take into consideration when you make a flight decision.

Whether terrorism or technical, this crash should not be a factor when you consider taking a flight.