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     The material in this section was presented at the Anxiety Disorders Association of America meeting in Atlanta, Georgia (March, 2001).  You are welcome to receive a free copy of this manuscript by sending an email request to cmfzne@fearofflyingdoctor.com or calling, toll free, (888) 847-3351 and leaving your name and address.

     The Emotional Problems of the Fearful Flyer represents a careful clinical study of the varieties of emotional responses that fearful flyers have to airplanes and to airplane travel. Subjective interpretations of airplanes and the manner in which they fly reflect the personalities of the perceivers. When perceptual reactions to the airplane and the flight environment are stimuli for anxiety reactions, a deeper study of the perceiver will yield the source of the subjective reaction to the airplane. It is the source of these subjective reactions that represent the emotional problems of the fearful flyer.

     When I began working with fearful flyers, it was in a one-to-one, psychotherapeutic context. Our conversations ranged from personal historical material to material more clearly focused upon airplanes, travel and the environment of flight. By the time I began working with individuals in a group context in 1988 I had constructed a list of situations from the self reports of the fearful flyers with whom I had worked individually. Early work on personality dynamics relative to the fear of flying focused more upon historic material that seemed related to the fear of flying. For instance, reports of past traumatic loss or child abuse or personal injury accidents bore a direct relationship to the fear of flying, or rather to the fear of trauma that flying would potentially bring.

     Of course, as I continued to talk with my fearful flyers, the list of relevant past events continued to grow. What also continued to grow was my awareness that the fear of crashing was only one among many negative emotional states that, while induced by the act of flying, were rooted in background characterological and developmental dynamics of the personality of the fearful flyer. The discovery of the correct background factors were often quite as mysterious to myself as they were to my patients. Perhaps the most spoken statement was, "If I could just figure out what about me is afraid to fly, I think I could solve this problem." The statement implied a search for a singular characteristic or past event that "caused" the fear. The fact was, it was the rare or infrequent case that produced a linear relationship between the fear of flying and some past event. Even in cases where there was a linear relationship between past and present, continued analysis revealed multiple and circuitous threads in the personality structures that forced the conclusion of multiple background factors and multiple causation to the negative emotional states that form the "fear of flying".

     For instance, a flight-crew member with whom I worked, experienced an outbreak of a fear of flying shortly after a rollover automobile accident involving herself and her infant son. This flight crew member had been flying for more than 15 years and had logged more than 12,000 hours of flying. Physical injury in this accident was minimal, and the individual was back to flying after one month. The fear began to incubate over a period of more than three months after the accident, in spite of attempts at remedial cognitive-behavioral therapy. Referral tome for treatment was made at that point.

     During the course of our work, two insights proved particularly useful to Ms. L. First was the fact that Ms. L. was "self made". Being from a poor family, Ms. L. paid for her own college education, separated herself from the chaos in her family of origin, married a stable and loving man and had just delivered her second, healthy child. Combined family incomes allowed her and her family comfort, security, and community respect. As we discussed the contrast in her life between past and present, Ms. L. related the massive amount of drive and determination it had taken to change the course of her life. It was not until we added the utter uselessness of her drive and determination in the prevention of an accident that we had a useable insight into the continued incubation of her anxiety. You see, her original drive and determination was an outgrowth of the sense of helplessness Ms. L. often felt during adolescent bouts with depression over the plight of her family. After her accident, and in the face of the feelings of helplessness which revisited her, her drive and determination was no longer a psychic antidote.     The insight into this process helped her disassociate the anxiety from the image of the airplane and made her freer to develop new methods for coping with the sensations of flight.

     A second insight provided further relief and opened the door to new learning a little wider. Ms. L’s father had been addicted to alcohol for some time during her adolescence. The addiction was so severe that it destroyed nearly all of the daughter/father trust sought by any young person. This fact proved to be a factor in a second source of tension during flight, that was a very hypercritical attitude toward new, and especially young new captains. It was not until discussion of the relationship with her father that Ms. L. was able to identify this attitude as coming from a general distrust of authority. Ms. L. struggled with separating the image of father from other authorities not only in relation to her captains, but also in her relationship to me, especially when in an airplane together. Overcoming this transference helped provide major anxiety relief. It is safe at this point to draw two tentative conclusions about the emotional problems of the fearful flyer. First, emotional problems are determinants in the manner in which the aviation environment is perceived and secondly, emotional problems help determine the resistances in the fearful flyer to overcoming the fear. The corollary to both of the above conclusions is that awareness or insight into the role of these background factors helps the fearful flyer in his or her attempts to master flight anxiety. Let’s look now at the bulk of the emotional problems which I have identified as factors in the fear of flying over the last 19 years.  We will begin with "separation anxiety".