Fear of Flying

Is fear of flying limiting your life, or does the thought of being in an airplane cause overwhelming anxiety?

Do you experience fear or anxiety about flying in the days, weeks, or months leading up to a trip? Or, do you fully avoid traveling?

Maybe you feel dread when the door closes after boarding an airplane, or when about to take off.

Or, perhaps you experience constant fear during a flight, feeling trapped, anticipating turbulence, or simply waiting for something to go wrong.

Fear of flying (or flying anxiety) can be debilitating and keep you from visiting family, friends, or from meaningful life events. It can even get in the way of career opportunities or general travel. When flying phobia is in control, the world can feel very small.

The Components of Overcoming Your Fear of Flying

In addition to my various areas of mental health specialty as a therapist, I created an internationally acclaimed approach to helping people overcome fear of flying and flying phobia. This therapy and coaching-based approach has you and your situation in mind, whether you are fully unable to fly or board an airplane at all; or, if flying is still something you’re able to do, but still with significant anxiety and dread.

This approach is based on four main components (not in any particular order, as each is important): Normalization, underlying causes, emotional regulation, and passenger flying education. Each component addresses a different pathway to what fuels flying anxiety for people. While the approach has some more structured and concrete elements to it, fear of flying varies in experience and underlying foundation for everyone. Therefore, how you and I will work together within the approach is always based on your personal situation and where you are emotionally.

The Line Between Fear and Excitement Is Thin

I have worked with people all across the world who contacted me feeling paralyzed and limited by the significant anxiety and panic that flying has caused for them. Perhaps, this is similar to the way you may feel now. I know it may be hard to imagine flying comfortably based on how you have felt up until now. However, it actually is possible to overcome this debilitating anxiety. While the starting goal is to help you feel indifferent and unbothered by flying, a number of people have actually become excited by flying through our work, even when they were previously terrified by it. The line between fear and excitement can be quite thin.

When you are able to internalize the normalcy of flying and start to embrace the newfound openness of your world, it allows you the freedom to do all of the things you’ve been delaying while fear has been in control. Our work is to help you travel with a sense of empowerment, confidence, and calmness.

What does our work look like?

If you’ve been in therapy or counseling before, whether for fear of flying or anything else, then our process will feel familiar. It’s more similar to therapy than it is a class, as we need to learn about your own history and emotional patterns that are underlying the fear and anxiety. We will talk about you and your life as a whole, including of course (but not limited to) flying. The space here is for you, and, therefore, we still talk about you and what you’d like to bring in each time we meet. I find that fear of flying is quite interconnected on an emotional level — so even when we’re not specifically talking about flying on any given day, there are still often connections that relate to fear of flying present in our conversations.

Through this process, we’re able to start understanding you emotionally and working through together what is underlying and causing your fear of flying, or driving anxiety as a whole for you. There may also be some occasional light homework involved, but this depends on where you are and what is needed. In short, all you need to do is come in curious about yourself and the process opens organically from there.

How improving fear of flying can improve other areas of life, too

As we come to understand and help you through the elements that cause flying to be riddled with anxiety, the ripple effect of these improvements actually tends to help other areas of your life, as well. People have seen improvements in areas such as general anxiety and panic, depression, stress management, improving confidence, and even how relationships are approached and handled, in addition to releasing carried traumas. Fear of flying is a very “back of the brain” experience, which is why logic and statistics doesn’t work to resolve this fear. So working on this issue from an emotionally-based approach generally tends to help emotions become more balanced as a whole.

Outside of fear of flying, I have specialties in various other areas as a therapist. Therefore, when other struggles come up that could use our attention, there is always room for these conversations to become integrated into our work here alongside the goal of overcoming fear of flying (and other struggles often can be interconnected with the flying issue, as well).

It is okay, and actually quite common, for people to contact me to work on flying anxiety while also addressing other things going on in life simultaneously. Whether you’re looking to overcome your fear of flying on its own, or more, you’re welcome to reach out and we can discuss your situation.

Contact me for help with your fear of flying »