ARE YOU READY FOR YOUR HOLIDAY FLYING?

If not sure, call me at 877 332-7359 between 10 AM and 7 PM Eastern
time. If outside the toll free coverage, use 203 258-4803.

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NO WAITING AT ALL

As SOON as you place your order, you can start watching video on
the DVDs you purchase (we of course do send you the actual DVDs)
on your computer via the internet.

If unsure what to order, go to

http://www.fearofflying.com/store.shtml

or call and we can talk it over. Use the number above.

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TO INDIA FOR A WEDDING

- - - With Photos - - -

When I got an email from India two weeks ago from the writer of this
email I asked if he would write up something for the newsletter about
his trip. He did, and also provided photos.

Dear Tom,
 
I just wanted to thank you again for your help in making my dream trip
to London and India come true. I thought I was a real complex case
because I thought that I could not isolate and identify exactly what my
fear of flying has been. I thought about takeoff, landing, turbulence,
and terrorism, and really felt I was not fearful of any of these things.
It seems that my fear and anxiety kicks in when nothing too dramatic
seems to be happening during cruise. As you know from our phone
conversation, I had a lot of anxiety prior to the flight thinking about
the physical sensations of being in a pressurize tube, 1 mile high,
cruising at 500 MPH.   
 
You helped with my anxiety over my thoughts about how unnatural
flying seems to be to humans. You acknowledged that flying was
unnatural but also linked this notion to a part of my personal history
(which I shared with you). You made me realize that child adoption
is unnatural when considering how natural child birth and biological
parenting are. The equation Flying = Child Adoption really gave me
an inspirational boost. Because while flying is unnatural to humans,
so can be considered child adoption. The fact is that both flying and
child adoption have enabled me to experience the most joy in life.  
 
To make a truthful and long story short, I took a half of pill of anxiety
medication for each flight (4 flights total for a round trip of 36 hours
flying time). The medication worked and even made me feel abso-
lutely okay and anxiety free during the flights.  This has been my first
exposure to this type of medication and I will continue as a student
of SOAR to some day be able to sooth myself during flight without
medication.   
 
I have gained from the SOAR course an intellectual understanding
of how flying works, the reality of how safe flying is (especially when
compared to driving in India !!!), and techniques of managing flight
anxiety. Bottom line is that I have had the experience of a lifetime,
adventuring over 1000 kilometers by rail and car throughout India,
attending a Hindu wedding and visiting all the places that I have
always dreamed about.
 
With your help I have overcome a mountain of fear to make my
dream vacation come true. If it adds value to demonstrate to your
readers how much this personal victory has been and how grand
the prize was, your readers can see a photo journal of my dream
vacation with my wife and daughter at:

http://www.pbase.com/northernsnow/fabulous_india

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REGARD

One of the ways we human beings place value has to do with how
much attention is paid. In show business, an actor or entertainer who
captures the attention of a larger audience is more valuable than one
who has a small following.

Consider the French word meaning to see: regardez.

It - in English - means to look at. But notice how, in English we say
we hold someone in high regard. This clearly indicates a strong
connection between being looked at and ones value.

I had a dream a few nights ago that someone I was attached to turned
her attention to some other man. The feeling was so distressing that I
woke up, shocked at the impact. And since then, I've understood
Freud's famous - among therapists at least - statement about loss, in
the shadow of the object falls on the self. When there is a loss in which
the object (psychological shorthand for a person one is attached, or
otherwise related, to) no longer is alive, it is different than when the
object simply turns away from you toward someone else. This causes
such distress that it is the fundamental event shaping human psychol-
ogy, the Oedipal Conflict, in which the parent of the opposite sex turns
away from the young child toward his/her mate, or some other person,
or activity. This loss of the object - as belonging just to ones self - casts
a shadow on what? The self the object turns away from.

If an actor or entertainer loses his/her audience, it is not just a question
of less income; it diminishes the actor or entertainer. Value is bestowed
by the attention of others.

When we were small, what gained us attention, and what lost us atten-
tion? First, did you get attention by simply being yourself? If you did, you
are most fortunate, for that is not what happens for many of us. Instead,
we painfully discover we must give up some - possibly all - of our initial
characteristics, qualities, and behaviors and adopt some other charac-
teristics, qualities and behaviors to gain attention.

Anxiety, in my view, is a problem when feelings are not "user friendly".
When we as young children cried, unless we were pretending, certainly
feelings were involved. And when crying was discouraged - rather than
soothed - we were given the message that the feelings we were exper-
ience (as well as the behavior) were to gotten rid of.

It is not such a great loss to change behavior, but it is a loss to change
feelings, because our own sense of self is so tied to feelings. But that
tie, for many of us, is something that we are told must be broken; we
are led to understand that the way we feel is wrong, and thus, we are
wrong.

If an infant's caretaker becomes agitated or even panicked when the
infant becomes upset, it gives the communication to the infant that
what the infant is experience is threatening, dangerous, and places
the infant at risk of being punished, threatened, or withdrawn from.

What we are now discovering in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is the
importance of something being called "mentalization". Within out own
experience, it is where mentalization is NOT taking place that trouble
arises. Research in England has shown that inmates in prison have
little or no ability to mentalize, that is, to observe and think about their
own internal psychological processes.

They were, it is believed, trained by brutal early experience, not to
feel. Through blocking of feeling, all internal psychological process
were blocked. Thus the person, instead of thinking through potential
behavior, simply did what they did, and got into trouble with the law.

When we, as infants and young children, were taught not to feel, or
that our feelings were a problem, we simply shut off that area of mental
activity as much as possible. Much of our mental life went underground.

As a result, we know feelings like we know volcanos; little, except when
there is an eruption (high anxiety, panic, rage, extreme fear) because to
know and observe and think about feelings was taboo. It may not have
been our parents' intention to make feelings taboo, but if parents are
not "user friendly" with feelings, that is what we learn, and we have,
as a result, little ability to deal with feelings, be informed by feelings,
modulate feelings, balance feeling with intellect, etc.

Marsha Linehan, who developed DBT, the therapy which is used to
treat people who are suicidal and use other self-destructive behaviors,
has said that "mindfulness" is key. She finds people engage in highly
problematic behaviors because the mental domain that should be
processing feelings is closed.

We, as children, learn to close off certain domains of thinking, feeling,
and being in order to gain being seen by the people we are attached
to. And when we do that to gain attention, we can lose ourselves in the
bargain.


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AIR MARSHALS

No doubt you all know about the shooting in Miami. An air marshall
shot and killed a man who appears to have had a panic attack and
bolted from a plane.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but somehow I got the idea air marshals were
supposed to keep someone from hijacking an airplane. Why someone
needs to be shot LEAVING the plane is not as obvious to me as it was,
apparently, to the air marshal.

9/11 was not the start of the air marshal program. We had them first
years ago, back in the 1970s, and I do not know any airline pilots who
was happy to have them on board; we felt the risk of a hijacking was
small in compared to the threat posed by a trigger-happy air marshal.
As we pilots back then say it, an air marshal is a nobody with no mean-
ing in his life unless he stops a terrorists or hijacker. So there is a
personal NEED for there to be a problem; otherwise, the air marshal's
life has little meaning. And, if the air marshal does not act to stop a
terrorist or hijacker, he is a total loser. Thus, the air marshall is "spring-
loaded" to see an act of terror where you or I would see a panic attack.

Wouldn't we expect that the air marshal program would educate air
marshals about such things? The reason I would not expect so is,
when I have treated policemen for fear of flying, I've found that the
reason they have a fear of flying problem is that their awareness of
their own emotional processes is pretty near zero. The domain of
emotional process appears to be located somewhere outside the
domain of law enforcement. Primitive simplistic categories of think-
ing are standard equipment.

Police deal with life and death issues. How can we expect a police-
man or policewoman to deal with the anxiety? By belief of being in
control. I once treated a New York City undercover cop after he retired.
He told me he had no fear of the mob. He had no fear of an "punk".
He had no fear of anyone with a gun. He had no fear of anyone with
a knife. Gunfights didn't bother him at all, because he knew HE WAS
IN CONTROL.

But put him on an airplane, and he became an emotional basket case.
It is obvious to you and me that no one in a gun battle is in control. This
policeman control his anxiety by maintaining a MYTH that he was in
control. On the airplane, he could not maintain that myth.

I believe many people with difficulty flying have a basic problem with
anxiety, and do not suffer from it on the ground because on the ground
they are able to maintain the myth of control.

But in the plane, the myth comes unglued, and the anxiety that was
really there in the background all the time comes out on the plane.

It may appear that one just has an anxiety problem on the plane. The
truth is, there is an anxiety problem 24/7. It just gets uncorked on the
plane.

At the time I treated this undercover cop, I had not developed the
Strengthening Exercise, and attempted to get results via Cognitive
Behavior Therapy and a few other things, including taking a flight
with him (something we no longer need to do because the psycho-
logical changes we now can provide make it completely unnecessary
to fly with clients.)

During the flight he couldn't sit down. He spent the flight in the galley
talking with the flight attendants and trying to get them to let him help.

Granted, my experience treating policemen is limited to treating phobic
ones. But based on the little experience I've had with pilots and air
marshals, I would much rather have pilots armed in the cockpit than
have air marshals armed in the cabin.

All the information released by the government so far is that the air
marshals did exactly what they were supposed to do.

US air marshal spokesman Dave Adams said the two air marshals
followed "textbook training" when they shot Alpizar after he ran off the
airplane and ignored demands to stop and put down his bag.

What else but such claims could be expected? I, for one, am not
buying it. Nor am I buying such inane claims in the press as "it shows
that our government has made significant improvements in airline
safety."

What the press has said since this tragedy demonstrates once again
that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels seems to have been
right when he claimed he could make people will believe anything if
they can first be made afraid that they are under attack from some
outside enemy. And further, that protection from the enemy requires
unity behind those in power.

Anyone who has had a panic attack can understand being overcome
by the feeling that one must get out of a plane. To be shot for having
a panic attack by an air marshal - and to have it justified - is absurd.

If I had not been flying with that New York City undercover cop, he
- too - would have bolted.

But while on the subject, you may need me to remind you that we do
have a way to train your thought processes so that panic does not
happen. If this tragedy makes it seem even more important that you
not fly - because you might panic and be confronted by an air
marshal - that is not necessary. We can give you the tools to control
high anxiety and panic when flying.

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PATRICK'S EXCELLENT BLOG ON THE MIAMI SHOOTING

Patrick's blog is the best thing I've read about it.

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2005/12/09/askthepilot165/

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IS FLYING SAFE?

PHYSICALLY?

EMOTIONALLY?

It is physically safer than your usual daily routine. Emotionally safe?
That's another thing.

We can help you be thoroughly sure that it is OK for you to fly
EMOTIONALLY and PHYSICALLY.

To get started, please just go to:

http://www.fearofflying.com/store.shtml