Understand Aviophobia
The first thing to understand is that
fear is a natural and normal human 'negative' emotion.
The purpose of negative emotions is to tell us that something
isn't quite right; an indication that we need to take
some kind of action.
In the case of fear, the message is 'danger'.
While we are born with fear of loud noises and fear of
heights 'pre-wired' in our nervous systems, and all other
fears are learned from 'experience'.
The catch is, our mind is so powerful,
that the 'experience' doesn't have to have been real,
it could just have been vividly imagined. (That's why
you can get feelings about flying just by thinking; you
don't have to actually be there).
Learned fear is an important survival
mechanism, but just occasionally the wires get crossed
and we learn a fear response for something where it doesn't
belong – where there isn't a significant danger
– and Aviophobia can develop.
The Root Cause
The root cause of Aviophobia varies from
individual to individual, and whilst no two individuals
are the same, most fall into one or more of the following
categories:
A Single
Traumatic Incident:
A highly stressful or frightening real
event at which, instantaneously Aviophobia is created.
Similar to, say, a child being bitten by a dog and developing
an immediate phobia, a single traumatic incident is
a one-time experience at which there is such extreme
fear - even if only for a moment - that the nervous
system 'learns' to associate fear to help the individual
avoid such situations in futre.
The initial fear, by the way, may be
nothing to do with flying. We often hear from clients
that the problem started at a time when they were under
extreme stress for something completely unrelated, but
the mind somehow associated the negative feelings to
flying anyway.
An Associated
Traumatic Experience:
This is where the individual does not
directly experience the fear, but 'associates' to someone
who does, either in a real situation, or, more rarely,
when watching someone in a movie - or even a dream -
experience a traumatic event.
A Slow
Build:
A slow build occurs when a mild case
of Aviophobia escalates over time to become a severe
one. What is happening here is that the individual is
'accumulating' fearful associations to flying, so that
the evidence used by the mind and nervous system is
becoming increasingly irrefutable that fear is the appropirate
emotion. That means that anxiety isso it is created
automatically in anticipation each time... creating
a self-fullfilling prophesy.