After tragedies, how can an anxious flyer find the courage to set foot on a plane?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/28/how-to-combat-fear-flying-after-plane-crashes

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The dull roar of the airplane was rapidly becoming the only noise I could hear as we bumped up and down and rocked side to side, 32,000 feet in the air above the Caribbean Sea. I could feel tears in my eyes, but I was concerned that if I took my lorazepam then – my first time ever using the anti-anxiety medication – I would have an allergic reaction and nowhere to go because I was hurtling at 550mph in a metal death trap.

Virginia, the stranger next to me, had taken a similar pill before takeoff. So had her two sisters, whom she was vacationing with. She encouraged me to take mine. The flight attendant happened to be at my side with our white wines.

“Is this normal turbulence?” I asked, putting all of my courage into the positive response that had to be coming. “No, I think we’re flying over some unusually severe weather.” Eyes wide, I looked at Virginia and took the pill.

There are people who don’t particularly like flying, and there are people who start feeling like the room is closing in on them as soon as they book plane tickets online. Their anxiety levels also skyrocket when there are reports of a catastrophe like the Germanwings flight that crashed into the French Alps this week.

Flying is the safest form of transportation, but that doesn’t matter when you are convinced that the small bag of salted peanuts you just ate is your last meal.

“The phones have not stopped ringing,” said captain Tom Bunn, a trained pilot and licensed therapist who estimates that he has worked with “tens of thousands” of people to overcome their fear of flying since starting his popular Soar course in the 1980s.

Plane crashes can lead to a spike in this phobia-fighting business, but sometimes they drive people away from the industry altogether. Bunn said that nobody called him after September 11, because people did not want to get over their fear of flying. A similar thing happened after MH370 went missing in March 2014. “People were saying things like ‘I’m never going to get on an airplane again if they don’t find that plane’,” he explained.

Bunn said it is individuals who need to be in control and probably have trust issues who tend to be afraid to fly. “They are people whose anxieties push them towards control and escape,” he said. And the problem is, he notes, that you cannot escape from a plane. After he said this, my heart rate increased and my lungs felt like they were constricting.

Bunn’s strategy for overcoming this feeling relies on the theory that the positivity-inducing hormone oxytocin can be applied to flights. Mothers might remember that feeling from nursing a child, other people when they have had good sex. Researchers are optimistic about oxytocin’s potential to have an anti-anxiety effect.

“If you can remember a moment when there was good sexual chemistry between you and another person and you could feel your defences melting, that’s oxytocin doing that,” Bunn counselled me. “Just pretend that your lover has a picture by their face of a plane door closing in, then you switch to a picture of a plane taxiing out and then a picture of the plane taking off.”

Fear-of-flying expert Dr Martin Seif adds that avoidance helps quell anxiety in the short-term, but it reinforces anxiety in the long-term. “You have got to get on the dance floor and make mistakes, and then learn from the mistakes,” he said.

He’s right. Less than 10 years ago, I would not have been on any plane. That’s why, at 18, I would seclude myself in the quietest room in our house and listen to an exuberant British man instruct me to imagine my ancestor’s experiences to account for the source of my fear. This required relying heavily on memories that I don’t actually have and almost certainly did not happen.

The program also used positive emotions in a similar way to Bunn’s Soar course, which manifested for this program as me lying in that room and imagining the people I love the most as I pinched the fleshy area between the thumb and forefinger, to be pinched again during takeoff or turbulence – a sort of Pavlovian response.

It was weird and scientifically dubious, but it worked. Sometimes I even enjoyed turbulence on flights. But these personal victories took a sharp turn sometime in the past three years, and I now once again rely on the medically discouraged combination of lorazepam and whiskey.

Bunn says such backtracks are unusual, but he is confident it can be fixed. He had one final reassuring thing to add: “There are going to be procedures put in place immediately after this crash that’s going to keep this from happening again,” Bunn said. “At least people aren’t going to have to get on an airplane worried about the same thing happening.”

For now, I’m sticking to the miniature bottles of whiskey.