The Childhood Connection
It is now fashionable to say that all our problems come from childhood. In a previous post, I wrote about my attitude to this statement at the initial stage of practice.
I believed that there was no point in looking for childhood trauma to eliminate aerophobia, you just need to change your behavior and thinking HERE and NOW.
Has my opinion changed today, after 15 years of practice? Yes.
The Airplane as a Trigger
Today it is obvious to me (and my colleagues) that the plane is not the core of the problem. It is just a kind of trigger.
Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) lives by its own rules. Its main task is to preserve our lives. If something unusual happens to us, the ANS does not know whether this unusual event is dangerous or not dangerous.
Fragmentary Memory
Traumatic events are stored in a special part of our memory - fragmentary memory. It is so called because events are not stored in it entirely, but in the form of fragments - "shards".
This is also done with care for us - after all, difficult events become psychological trauma if at the time of their occurrence we did not have sufficient resources to "digest" them. And then the psyche splits them into fragments that are preserved forever.
Why Childhood Trauma Dominates
By the way, this explains why most psycho trauma are childhood ones, because a child, as a rule, does not have the resources to cope with difficult events on their own.
The difficulty of such fragmentation is that we are not fully aware of the events that caused the injuries, which is why we usually hear from patients "I didn't have any trauma."
How Flight Activates Old Wounds
However, when we find ourselves on an airplane, the nervous system recognizes the usual flight FEELINGS of instability, unpredictability, helplessness, inability to escape (and many others) as similar to the sensations that we had at the time of psychological trauma.
In an effort to protect us from repetition of trauma, the psyche turns on the protective mechanism of fear. But we treat it as an EXTERNAL threat - and our thinking brain begins to look for an "explanation" for fear in the external environment.
And, alas, it finds it. Competent therapy solves this problem.
