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Monthly Archives: September 2016

SUV
Feel Safe In Your Car?
A new report by Insurance Institute for Highway Safety lists the number of yearly deaths per million vehicles registered. They break it down by models. [...]
Scared woman
Why Die All Tensed Up?
A reader emailed the following question. ‘I want to know why, though. Why do we fear something, but think that by fearing it, we can keep it from [...]
The Grand Canyon
Some Thoughts About Fear of Heights
Truman ‘Slim’ Cummings who started the first fear of flying course at Pan Am told me the following. He said almost all airline pilots have fear [...]
Motorcyclist
Control Means Having a Way Out
When you drive your car, if someone comes at you, you know you will hit the brakes or turn the wheel. You have a plan that you hope works; actually you [...]
Light bulb heads connected by wire
Where Do Anxiety and Panic Come From?
The autonomic nervous system that regulates emotions has two parts: one is totally mature at birth, and the other part only starts to physically develop at [...]
Worried looking man
Flying Can Become a Problem When a Loved One Dies
Nature wired us up to be calmed by being nurtured by another person. But we are supposed to learn to be calmed – not only by that person’s [...]
Tape measure showin one inch
Jets Move Up and Down Less Than An Inch During Turbulence. Why?
In a jet, you are going about about 800 feet per second. From goal line to goal line, a football field is one-hundred yards, or three-hundred feet. So [...]
Mother & Child
Development And Emotional Regulation
For some time, psychiatry has known that the pre-frontal cortex plays vital role in the regulation of emotional states. That is not new information. But [...]
Fire Alarm
Connecting Dots That Shouldn’t Be Connected
An Email: I’m at a hotel, and this morning they evacuated the building! It was about 8:00 a.m., and I was bumbling around getting ready for work, and [...]
Woman holding clapper board
Hollywood Of The Mind
A fearful flier once told me she didn’t want to worry unintelligently, and thus wanted to know when – during flight – was the best time [...]
Venice
Keeping “What If” Thoughts Separate
Years ago, I went to Venice with a friend. You may have seen St. Marks Square in movies It is a huge square with outdoor cafes, a tower, and – at one [...]
Sailing Boat
Child Development And Regulating Feelings
Though fear of flying can be triggered by a bad flight, other passengers on the same flight do not develop fear of flying. Whether one develops fear of [...]
Low cost airlines
Working For A Low Cost Airline
Posted on the SOAR Message Board I am a FO with USA 3000 airlines. October will be my 2yr anniversary Let me shed a little light on this operation. 99% of [...]
Idea head
Inside Reality Versus Outside Reality
The Following Was Posted On The Message Board . . . I’ve known I’ll be flying . . . for . . . months. I have been getting a lot of great info [...]
Airplane landing
Origins Of Flight Anxiety
Anxiety – flight or otherwise – is about our psychological makeup. Initially, we see things in terms of good and bad, because that is the way [...]
Air crew
Some Great Tips
A SOAR participant sent this hoping it would help. 1. The lights don’t dim by magic or mechanical failure, the crew does it! 2. There aren’t [...]
Therapy sessions. Male therapist with female client
Psychopaths
When I was studying psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Masterson Institute, Dr. Masterson directly supervised one of my cases. When in such training, [...]
Woman standing on space rocket
Learning To Deal With Reasonable Risk
Others who work with flight anxiety base their work on telling people how safe it is. Then, when there are accidents, the clients are set back, maybe [...]
Driving in bad weather
Driving Versus Flying
It has been raining a lot here in Connecticut. Tonight driving home in the rain, I was being quite careful. I started thinking about driving versus flying [...]
Baby playing with mother
Emotional Regulation: Allan Schore
In a workshop with neuroscientist Alan Schore, we were shown a sequence of photos in which an infant and its mother were playing gleefully together. One of [...]
Man holding glass of beer
Knowledge, Control, and Comfort
Knowing how flying works helps. It helps by limiting what you worry about to thing that actually can happen. Before learning how flying works, it is easy [...]
Ice Cream
Mirror Neurons: We Can Feel What Another Feels
The autonomic nervous system has two parts: one that revs us up when facing an emergency – or imagining an emergency – and one that is supposed [...]
Chocolate brownies
Twin Fears
Years ago, we realized there are twin fears that can stop a person from getting help with flying: one fear is that the help won’t work and that will [...]
Passenger on runway
Feeling Alone When Flying
Someone emailed saying they were doing great and the only better thing would be if I were flying with them. What the person didn’t understand is [...]
Pencil eraser
Erasing A Memory
The movie ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ is about the idea that when a love affair breaks up, instead of feeling pain, you just go to [...]
Astronaut
Anxiety And Logic
Anxiety, if it were based on pure logic, would recognize that – in spite of all the risk factors you cite – when compared with either driving [...]
Man reading newspaper
USA TODAY Article on Flight Anxiety by Gary Stoller
Gary Stoller, who writes on aviation for USA Today, interviewed SOAR grads Angel Miller, Tracy Leskey, and Marci Smith for this article.The article leads [...]
Plane overhead lighting
The APU
When the plane is parked at the gate, it is using power either from a thing we call the APU (Aux Power Unit) on-board the plane, or the plane is plugged [...]
car repair car battery
A Good Article On Airline Maintenance From ABC News
Planes are not maintained like our cars. We wait for things to break on our cars, but with airplanes, we fix things before they break. And in the rare [...]
DNA
The 5-HTT Gene
Anxiety develops because of a limited ability to regulate emotions within. If the way we are wired up inside makes us sensitive to what is going on around [...]
Child in car seat
Putting Your Child On A Plane Can Cause Anxiety But . . .
Though you FEEL safe when you put your child in a car, you are actually safer when you put your child on a plane. Feelings and reality are often not in [...]
Dominos
Psychoanalysis Is Great But It Doesn’t Change Flight Anxiety
Psychoanalysis – which I’ve been trained in – is great for developing insight. It increases what we are now are calling [...]
Mother with baby
Illusion Of Safety Though Illusion Of Control
It comes down to this. When we are born, HALF of the emotional control system in the brain is mature and works fine; the other half doesn’t exist at [...]