Niki’s Health Triangle Magazine Articles

Fly with the Eagles or scratch with the Chickens?

 Fly With the Eagles or Scratch With the Chickens?

There are many websites listing the top 10 fears that people suffer from, all seemingly taking a different view.  Mostly they agree on snakes, spiders and heights.  Here in the UK, we do not often see snakes, and spiders can mostly be avoided. Heights, too, can usually be managed, although this fear can limit our choices of places to visit.

Fear of flying, also called ‘aviophobia’, can always be found somewhere in the top 10, and since many of us are busy planning holidays which quite possibly include  two flights, those who have this fear probably already have sweaty palms and pounding heart at the very thought.  There are alternative means of travel, but if you want to leave this island, they will result in additional travelling time – not ideal if you are limited to just one or two weeks.

When someone contacts me to ask for help, they nearly always say ‘I know exactly when it first started’ and tell me about a particularly difficult flight they once had.  The reality is that, with all fears, the fear of flying is only a symptom of an earlier fear, almost certainly stored in the subconscious mind sometime before the age or 5 or 6.  In order to permanently remove the flying fear, the underlying fear first needs to be identified and neutralised.

In therapeutic terms, it goes like this: Something happens when you are, let’s say, 3 that frightens you (not necessarily something that would seem significant to you as the adult, but it felt big to the Little You back then).  The subconscious mind stores this event with the accompanying fear - permanently.  This is called the ISE or Initial Sensitising Event.  Over the years, other ‘frightening’ events occur, and these too are stored by the subconscious.  We call these the SSEs, or Subsequent Sensitising Events.  At some point in your life, you will probably go on to have a ‘scary’ flight, and this event, together with the fear that you experienced at the time, is added to the Fear Folder in the subconscious mind, and in some (but not all cases) becomes the SPE or Symptom Producing Event, resulting in fear of flying. 

There can be many variations on this, including the possibility of travelling with an adult when you were young; for example your mother, and witnessing her being terrified when flying, even though she did her best to hide her fear.  As we learn by copying our caregivers, this can have a profound effect at a later date.

In Peter Pan, J M Barrie writes “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”  I would say that when you remove the doubt, you can fly with the eagles.

Hypnotherapy can safely help you to overcome your fear of flying  - or any other unresolved fear.  Start the process of being free to fly as soon as possible, and in that way, there is no time pressure on either you or the hypnotherapist!

Tweet

---

Comments

No comments to display

---

<< Back