Fear of flying

One of the most rewarding treatments that I carry out for people is for a fear of flying. A lovely lady who came to me some years ago had not flown for many years due to her last flight ending in an emergency landing. The resulting panic and chaos in which she remembered people screaming around her was embedded in her memory, and - although it had happened many years ago - still seemed like yesterday and was preventing her and her husband from enjoying their retirement to the full.

This is not surprising as recent research reveals that a traumatic accident which may have happened decades ago is often remembered as if it were a recent event, as well as those involved seeing other similar events in a more heightened and emotionally charged way.

A group of Canadians had been flying from Toronto to Lisbon on August 24th 2001 when their plane suddenly lost power because of a fuel leak. They plunged down towards the sea at 2,000 ft per minute but the pilot managed to land the plane safely at a small military base in the Azores. One of the passengers, a psychologist, decided to use the group's shared trauma for a the basis of an experiment into the effects of extreme distress on the brain. Almost a decade later the same passengers were put under an MRI scanner and shown coverage of their disaster as well as footage of 9/11 which, coincidentally, happened weeks later. It was found that the people who had experienced the incident had a much stronger emotional response to the trauma, as opposed to subjects who had not experienced such an event. They also 'remember the event as though it happened yesterday, when in fact it happened almost a decade ago.'

Hypnotherapy and NLP can rapidly and effectively break up the memory of this type of trauma, and I am consistently amazed (I've always been a bit of sceptic) by how well the treatment works, often in just a couple of sessions. To enable people to see all sorts of different wonderful places, people and cultures is such a privilege for me.

By the way, the husband of the lady who came to see me wishes she had never come for treatment. It's costing them a fortune ....

Wendy x