If you haven’t already read about the therapy-based approach I developed to help people overcome flying anxiety and fear of flying, check out the the other articles on my blog.
One of the four main components of this approach explores the underlying causes that are likely to be contributing to your experience of anxiety and fear of flying. The underlying causes vary from one person to the next, as these generally are rooted in experiences you’ve been through in your life that causes the flying environment to feel like a threatening space. In general, the mind and body have a way of carrying the emotional weight of past events, and certain environments can be quite triggering, especially one similar to the flying environment, which is such a unique place to be for most people.
Some people experience anxiety with flying starting early in life (which in these cases can often be linked to either exposure from a parent who was afraid to fly, or from images of disaster in TV and movies as a child). However, many others actually can first experience fear of flying later on, sometime even after adolescence, and into their 20s and 30s. In these cases, it’s very often either one incident, or a collection of life experiences over time that makes the vulnerability of sitting in a plane almost intolerable.
Carried emotions can set the stage for fear of flying
The environment a person grows up in can commonly set the stage for fear of flying. This is even true for people who are comfortable flying for years before something triggers the fear, often out of nowhere. For many people, these events can recall times life where there was little emotional control or trust, or when vulnerability came with negative consequences, such as embarrassment, hurt, or otherwise.
For people who had abusive parents, substance abusing parents, or particularly inattentive or emotionally neglectful parents, this environment can be especially difficult. The chaos of the home environment, or never quite knowing when the shoe would drop and things would turn, or how bad they would turn, can become significant triggers in the flying environment. As long as everything is smooth, it may be okay. But the moment the unpredictability of turbulence starts, the next question for many is how bad it’s going to get. It feels like the start of everything catastrophically falling apart rather than just bumps in the road.
As for people with inattentive or emotionally neglectful parents growing up, the flying environment can be another difficult place to sit when it feels like they’re going to have to sit alone with incredibly overwhelming feelings, or when it feels like they’re going to need care; or, at least someone to know if something is wrong, but feeling like they’re going to have to deal with it on their own. This can often show up in a flight as feeling scared that something will go wrong and there’s going to be no one to turn to who can make them feel better, or relieve their anxiety (whether it’s because it doesn’t feel like anyone around can, or because it may be too vulnerable or shameful to share what you’re going through). Instead, they are just left to stew in it, which can feel emotionally consuming..
Feeling out of control
For people who are good at being in control in their daily lives — whether at work, or home, or in any other way — being in an airplane tends to be one of the very few places they are forced to stay with the experience of being out of control of their environment in a way they can’t escape. You’re essentially made to sit in the plane until the flight is over, no matter how badly you want to get off the plane, which leads to a sense of being trapped. They can’t stop the flight (or the turbulence), and they can’t simply walk off of the plane either. So, people who tend to be very in control in daily life can actually feel the most out of control and fearful when flying.
The emotion from these types of experiences tends to sit in the background as long as the person can construct their environment to be in control of their life and their emotions, or as long as they know they can escape any environment. But put someone in an environment where they can’t emotionally feel like they are in control of their life, and suddenly all of those old emotions can come rushing out from behind that wall. This often tends to happen when there are things going on in one’s life that are increasing vulnerability and lack of control that may be already stirring some of the older, deeper, repressed emotions. It’s as if the emotional door is opening and then getting on the plane just opens the door the rest of the way for all of those terrifying feelings.
Losses
People who have experienced early (or later) losses that haven’t been grieved also can struggle with flying anxiety. This also includes people who have experienced significant illness of someone close, or infidelity, parental divorce, or their own divorce or significant breakup, as well as other significant life changes and challenges where the emotions have never been sorted through and grieved. In each of these scenarios, there’s often been a component of waiting for the worst to happen, or feeling in some ways like the worst has happened. It validates the sense of catastrophe and doom. When the worst has happened, or you’re always about to experience the worst, it can reset your internal meter for what’s reasonable to happen in a certain environment, especially when feeling out of control, like in an airplane. The fear of flying mechanism is very commonly set off by deeply stored events such as these that people don’t often realize until later.
Anticipation of events
I’ve often also seen people who struggle deeply with fear of flying and flying anxiety when they are anticipating a major life change. This can often be something such as getting married, having children (or planning to try soon), making a major career move, graduating college or graduate school, etc. Anticipatory anxiety can be incredibly challenging for those with flying anxiety; and it isn’t only upcoming life changes that can cause anticipatory anxiety. Just because you may struggle with anticipatory anxiety doesn’t necessarily mean you have a big change coming up. But upcoming life changes can triggering a lot of fear of the unknown and vulnerability, which is significant in the flying environment.
Difficulty with trust and vulnerability
Another significant factor for fear of flying are those who have difficulty trusting, and difficulty with vulnerability in general. People in this group often tend to keep emotions close to the vest, and may not let others in due to their lack of trust. This becomes especially magnified if the inability to trust extends to one’s own parents. If your parents were unreliable emotionally, or in terms of providing a safe environment growing up, this commonly exacerbates a fear of flying and flying anxiety. The less trust there is of the one’s world growing up, the harder it can become to surrender control to the people flying the plane without feeling a sense of fear, or worry that things will end up going wrong.
Moving forward
There are many other underlying contributors that I’m not acknowledging here. But this should give a sense that fear of flying is quite complicated. You may not experience everything above, and you may in fact experience none of the above. Either way, it’s important with help to get to know, and to work through what it is that feeds your fear of flying. The more that the underlying emotional experiences are able to be worked through and healed (in combination with the other components of the approach), the more comfortable people become with being able to sit in the airplane environment without overwhelming anxiety.
On a regular basis, I’ve seen people become able to fly who started out with a crippling flying phobia and with such an overwhelming fear of flying that they couldn’t board a plane. In fact, some people are able to completely flip the script in our work and even become excited to fly after many years of being tortured by flying anxiety (the line between fear and excitement is quite thin). It is possible to overcome fear of flying. You just need the right kind of help for your own fear.
Reach out if you’d like to discuss your situation and to see how I can help you overcome your fear of flying.
