I’m still not sure what set me off, but it was sometime in my mid-20’s that I started down the slippery slope into a true phobia of flying. A friend at the time described waiting in line to board a plane that blew up right in front of him on the tarmac. (I now believe this was one of his many grandiose, made-up tales, but at the time I swallowed the story with shock and awe.) I had a couple of “bad experiences,” including one flight that inexplicably (I thought) took a sudden drop of about 1,000 feet in midflight. People screamed and a few held hands across the aisle. The pilot’s terse command, “Flight attendants, take your seats!” and the announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated until we know what this turbulence is about,” did nothing to comfort us. Eventually the flight attendants all got up again and started maneuvering their carts in the aisles, but we were never told what happened. It was only years later that my pilot husband explained the phenomenon of “clear air turbulence,” and the likelihood that we were never in any danger, except maybe someone bumping their head on an overhead bin.
I began to do all the things phobics do to try to control the situation that causes their fear. I prayed. I tried to meditate (no good – every bump shook me out of any possible alpha state). I recited a mantra given me by a Jesuit friend: “Love supports the universe and love supports this plane.” In my 30’s and 40’s I asked my spouse Michael to visualize a pink blanket around my plane, and gave him precise takeoff and landing information so he would be sure to do it on time. I tried drinking wine (no good – I was still terrified, and fuzzy-brained on top of it). Just once I tried a Xanax. Not bad during the flight – but the adrenaline that had been pumping during the flight stopped flowing, and the drug really kicked in just in time for me to almost fall on my face as soon as I walked off the plane!
I eventually came to identify deeper roots to my fear. I made a connection to the sudden death of my grandfather when I was seven. He had gone on a trip to Denver for an American Legion Convention and never came back. He died of a heart attack while boarding his plane home. I came to believe, deep down, that travel was dangerous.
Realizing this, however, didn’t stop the phobia. With apologies to Freud, insight was not followed by cure! Anxiety had by now carved a pathway in my brain. Every time I boarded a flight, I felt absolutely certain that I was walking the gangplank to my death. Every subsequent scary experience (which could be as simple as a funny vibration or an unfamiliar whine of an engine) reinforced the sense of danger. Turbulence taught me the literal meaning of one’s knees knocking in fear. Benign experiences did not serve to reassure – in my twisted logic, a good flight simply meant that I had been miraculously spared, but a grisly and terrifying death still awaited me next time I took to the air. When I would land safely and begin to gather my belongings I would almost experience a kind of shock – I lived! Now I would have to go ahead and do the thing I was there to do, and for which I had skeptically planned (in the improbable situation in which I would survive the flight!) The relief I felt the moment the plane’s wheels hit the runway was like a stay of execution. I could hardly believe my luck had held one more time.
The anxiety in-flight quickly spilled over into anxiety about the anxiety. I so feared flying that I could hardly sleep the night before a scheduled flight. I would take care to leave my will out on my desk before leaving the house. I would clean everything, so my survivors would not see any disarray or dirt upon entering the house after notification of my demise. I would call a loved one or two while waiting to board the plane – just to say “I love you” one last time.
Weather became a preoccupation. I would scan the Weather Channel for all national storms and wind conditions the night before a flight. I breathed easier if the skies looked clear, but dreaded flying through rain and snow. My phobic mind filtered all of what I had learned from my pilot husband, disregarding the reassuring facts like redundant systems and FAA safety rules, while obsessing over everything that could go wrong (and I knew way too much about wind shears, icing, flaps, retractable gear, and hydraulic systems!) A basically stoic person, I usually braved conditions I considered bad if not fatal, but on one or two rare occasions I did refuse to board a flight (both during blizzards), and I toughed out the massive inconvenience of finding an alternative route home. On more than one occasion, I would call my long-suffering spouse, and he would “talk me down” from running tearfully for the nearest car rental booth to embark on a 2-3 day drive in bad weather.
In the last few years of the phobia, I began to say no to things I wanted to do, chances to travel for fun, and opportunities to give lectures and workshops in my profession. I narrowed my flying to the minimum (which still, given my far-flung family and conference-oriented academic life meant getting on a plan at least monthly). It was dawning on me that this was not a good way to live. Rather than cure my phobia—what phobia? Why would any sane person think it makes sense to hurtle through the sky at 35,000 feet in a heavy metal tube!? In fact, how could such a thing really be possible? I imagined a day when the laws of nature would suddenly catch up with the fact that all these tons of steel were up in the air where they did not belong, and gravity would suddenly yank them all out of the sky. I felt certain I would be on a plane precisely when that happened. I began to fantasize about a simpler life, lived in one place. I began to romanticize life in a medieval village, or a yurt.
I continued to make do, to fly less, but still fly when necessary. I white knuckled it across the country for work and family trips, and looked forward to the day when I would be able to live life entirely on the ground again. Then 9-11 happened.
It wasn’t the fear of hijackers that grounded me that fall of 2001. But living through the grief and horror of 9-11 in the Northeast had already raised everyone’s baseline anxiety. And then an airplane crashed in Queens, New York—a crash that was exactly my own very specific fear scenario. Catastrophic engine failure. A plane flying along just like normal, and then, with no warning, falling out of the sky like a rock. That did it. I was grounded.
I’d been scheduled to present a paper in Denver at a November conference I very much looked forward to attending. But as the date approached, I found myself completely unable to imagine getting on that plane, or any plane. I went to my Dean and President, and said “If I don’t go present this paper, would you be OK with that?” They were already aware of my fear of flying—although I had never refused to go anywhere before. And to their everlasting credit, they said “These are times of great anxiety, and we understand. We want you happy and healthy. You don’t have to go, and we will pay for the unused ticket.” It was an astonishing act of kindness, a moment of real grace I will never forget.
I knew I had to do something about this. I could not stay grounded forever and live my life. But what? I thought I had already tried everything, to no avail. Then Michael came home from flying his Cessna one weekend waving a piece of paper. A fellow pilot at his small airport had posted a flyer: “Support Group: Overcome Your Fear of Flying.” It turned out this avid small plane pilot, Penny Levin, was also a cognitive-behavioral therapist, and she had conducted several such groups with great success. After a brief conversation with her, she determined that individual counseling would work better, and also be cheaper for me, since much of the group covered basics of aviation I already knew (but hadn’t helped my phobia one whit.) I scheduled my first session.
I have to admit, I had my doubts. For one thing, as a psychoanalytic therapist, I had been trained to be skeptical about cognitive-behavioral therapy as a “bandaid approach.” And having already made my psychological breakthrough about my fear of flying—to no effect—I wondered what more this therapist could do. Nevertheless, I was drawn to her expertise as a pilot, and I liked her straightforward manner.
I was cured with two sessions – and a 3-legged flight from hell! TO BE CONTINUED…
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