Fear of Flying - My Latest Client 

I posted on Facebook that I would be seeing a client with a phobia for the first time this week, a woman with a fear of flying. To the best of my knowledge I've never had a client with fear of flying that hasn't successfully flown afterwards ( I told that to my most recent phobia client, who had been wrestled off airplanes in the past, and he sent me a lovely text pic from his plane window, of the wing and engine [not the one above!] saying 'Poolside in Spain, I wasn't the first!' ), and so I was very confident I could help.

It transpired, in the Initial Consultation, that my client did not have any flights booked, and had no plans until next year, and this presented a problem. The typical phobia cure I use in situations such as 'simple' fear of flying is called the Rewind and Reframe, which aims to disrupt the old fear response, and then place something pleasant and distracting in it's place.

Nothing in the brain is permanent, and the objective of this process is to move the client on quickly to a situation in which they can comfortably be exposed to whatever it was they feared, and cope , and it is this coping, this real life experience that really cements the new ideas, or two real life experiences in the case of flying, because most people come back!

This may be my living, but I can't do it unless I do it properly and get the results that allow me to live with myself, so I explained this to my client, and accepted that although she was 'fired up' and ready to deal with her phobia, there was a real risk of failure if there was a long delay between the treatment and the prospective flight, and that her fear of flying may re-establish itself.

I hope that when she does book a flight next year, she remembers that I treated her honestly and comes back to 'get on with it'.

Alan Wick - Solution Focused Hypnotherapist
22nd August 2018