Phobia

HP Lovecraft wavered between seeing human existence as being totally meaningless, lost in the vastness of the cosmos (see also Douglas Adams and The Total Perspective Vortex, in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy as a portrayal of the same thing ) and ego building certainty from the historical stance. In other words his racism as seen in his support of The Color Line, by William Benjamin Smith and identification with his ancestral family home, Providence, Rhode Island must be weighed against his scientific realism on the futility of human life, when measured against the vastness of space and the immensity of time.

This personal and racial identity crisis shows in his work and perhaps his life (both his parents ended up in an insane asylum and he suffered night terrors. This condition is where the dreamer has nightmares that they carry over to waking, screaming in terror, sitting bolt upright in bed and not responding to the real world when mobile in this state but running around in fear).

H P Lovecraft’s main protagonist in several stories, wander vast alien landscapes or discovers alternative realities, co-existing within our own as in Dagon or At The Mountains Of Madness. If his heroes don’t lose their lives they may lose their minds, becoming crushed wrecks , whose world view is shattered by their discoveries. Only the modern horror / science fiction films of directors like Ridley Scott, have managed to capture these strange vistas of alien worlds, full of hostile life forms and the changeling angle of people not being what they seem / were (Kafka’s Metamorphosis also comes to mind in this context ). An example of Lovecraft’s attempt at this, includes The Rats In The Walls, where the hero sinks deeper and deeper into recidivism, the further he explores the secrets in his ancestral home ( the psychoanalytic movement would explore this area of the unconscious through the works of Freud and Jung, in dreamwork and relaxed recall on a couch). In The Shadow Over Innsmouth the hero discovers that he is tainted with the very genetic make-up he feared in the locals (Ridley Scott’s Prometheus harks back to this).

Lovecraft’s horror of coloured people and his fear of having ‘tainted blood,‘ has been disclosed as a possible reality in a scientific study which showed that people can indeed appear white but have genetic characteristics, revealing African ancestry. In psychological terms his reaction could be categorised as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), behind which lies the phobia of being contaminated by external forces, most notably germs but also other poisonous materials. In the film Coming To America, Eddie Murphy donned make-up that turned him from a coloured man into a caucasian. Imagine how Lovecraft or other racists would react to this trick being played on them and how it would shatter their certainty of superiority?

This whole question of identity (who are we really?) was also covered by Edgar Allan Poe in the story William Wilson and in the Roger Moore film, The Man Who Haunted Himself. Even Peter Sellers portrayal of Dr Strangelove , disclosed a man at war with himself. These two sides of reality or primitive versus civilised (past versus present) was explored by Robert Louis Stephenson in his book and various film versions . In the film by Amicus, From Beyond The Grave, David Warner faced this mirror image self or alter ego and in the end was replaced by it: two way mirrors can hide an unseen, unconscious predatory self which makes the conscious self, paranoid prey or victim of this unknown being.

Returning to Lovecraft, the 1993 film The Necronomicon, based on three of his stories, had a segment called Whispers, where one of the characters explained very eloquently to the female lead that once her human consciousness was replaced by one of the creatures she faced, she would see them in a whole new light and her old self likewise. Poe himself carried this theme forward in Ligeia, where the main protagonist’s second wife dies, coming back to life but with the personality of his first wife, reborn.

Even in our own lives is to be seen this dual nature of reality; the child, a clean slate out to fill the emptiness of experience, its primitive mind yearns for and at the other end of life, the wrecked body and mind of the worn out explorer (the shuffling zombie): the child comes from this state of nothingness and the old return there. Ouroborus or the mythical snake eating its own tail, reflects the future feeding off the past. In between lies lies normal life or continuation of existence. This conveyor belt of growth, leads us into the world with wonder and out of it, in the horror of knowing it is all going to end and not necessarily pleasantly. Horror is this dissolution of the body (the destruction of form) or the loss of our faculties.

Awareness is that blank slate, which records everything as it goes along (the camera, the observer, the learner, the child). It is the mindless dreamer, swimming in a sea of new experiences as opposed to the old person, drowning in a plethora of memories – a mobile library of saved information from the past, slowly rotting back into the dust it came from. Here we see in Lovecraft and others of that ilk, a fear of sleep as being that little death that takes us away, however temporarily, from the certainty of the created world around them and into the palette, where creativity can make hell in all its fear (the symbolism of dreams as envisioned by the psychoanalysis movement).

Those who saw Lovecraft only from the point of view, of schlock horror missed the dreamscapes and alternative realities, featured in his other stories. Freud would have understood the nightmare terror and Jung the archetypal figures, haunting those vast, alien landscapes. Lovecraft feared dissolution of the self (existential angst), not physical death so much as loss of identity. His horror at the idea of a sophisticated self being replaced by a more primitive version is not totally racial but one whose faculties have been lost through old age.

The past is the only thing we can be certain of as recorded time, whether individual memory or written archives by society. In memory is to be found a sense of identity (belonging) but the change that movement brings, erodes that certainty, however slowly and replaces it with a quicksand of sensory doubt. It is what leads to sleep deprivation, where fear of loss takes over from wakeful certainty. Ironically this cannot be avoided as hallucinations drags us screaming and shouting back into the world of dreams and visions (fluid reality), where nothing is what it seems – hence perhaps Lovecraft’s night terrors and powerful imagination.

All I wanted was to go south and visit relatives but no, fate was against me. It started with our old dog having a stroke, so that I had to postpone my trip to the following week (these things happen). So the following week came and while I was waiting for my bus connection to Glasgow and the coach to London as the first part of my journey, a man sidled up to me and started chatting. He related how his girlfriend had dumped him, he was suicidal, he had just come out of hospital after an asthma attack, he had been warned by the police not try to visit his girlfriend again or he would be arrested (he was twice because he didn’t obey their injunction and a third time, when he went to the village she lived in, to collect his belongings from a friend, who shopped him to the police apparently).

His tale of woes continued. He had tried to kill himself before (the rope marks on his neck proved it) and he had been beaten up so badly once that he now had a steel plate in his skull and had had facial reconstruction and it showed. Needless to say, I missed my bus, caught a later bus which arrived ten minutes too late, spent an hour and a half waiting for a midnight coach, hoping to get on, only to find it was fully booked but at least I got the last bus back to where I lived. After all this I didn’t know whether to phone the Samaritans (I was raging) or join them because of this natural talent that obviously drew waifs and strays to me (not the only time this kind of thing has happened to me). Anyway the coach company haven’t given me a refund, so that is £60 down the drain and I am thinking of changing my name by deed poll to Lemony Snicket because of this series of unfortunate events.

One last thing. I have now developed a phobia about going downtown, especially catching buses from the bus station. Can you blame me and are you surprised the coach company didn’t believe me or my cousin, when I told her why the trip was off? Even I don’t believe me, so why should anybody else and I was there?

By the way did I mention the fiasco over the senior travel card? I booked it online, only I didn't. It said the payment had gone through but after five days the card hadn't arrived so I phoned them. Technical fault led to my payment being rejected. Having only a few days before my selected date of travel, I had to rush into Glasgow and buy it direct. All that followed was just melted icing on the cake as this was the start of everything going wrong (the dog being ill followed this, leading to the first postponement).

If you are afraid of flying, then you likely have experienced the all-consuming anticipatory anxiety that can arise anytime you're approaching a flight. Or, you may avoid traveling altogether because the fear of sitting trapped in a plane for hours is so overwhelming. While some people's worry focuses on the idea of the ultimate catastrophe, many people who fear flying actually can be even more paralyzed by the idea of the fear itself.

There are a number of reasons that people come to me to help them overcome their fear of flying. One of these reasons is that I approach flying anxiety in a different way than other therapists do, and differently than the numerous videos or other gimmicks advertised online (which are mostly not produced by mental health professionals). If you have tried some of these approaches, you'll find that many don't work well for this complicated phobia. A large number of people tend to come to me after trying those other options, at a point when they feel almost hopeless.

It's worth noting that many of the gimmicks you'll see advertised tend to be a one-size-fits-all, where it is implied that everyone's fear of flying is the same, and just needs the same one approach to conquer it. They may have a video to watch, or exercises to learn, or otherwise. If you come across courses and videos sold by pilots online -- and there are quite a few of these out there -- remember that pilots are very knowledgeable and skilled at flying planes and knowing aviation, which is their specialty. However, they aren't experts in deep emotional processes or what is really driving someone's flying anxiety. While courses or videos that explain flying can be mildly helpful for some people on a rational level, rational-based approaches are generally not greatly helpful for flying phobia, because fear of flying is embedded in deeper emotional processes.

Fear of Flying is Emotional

Fear of flying has varying underlying causes for it, and the actual experiences of the anxiety and fear tend to manifest or present differently from one person to the next. Therefore, a flexible approach and the ability to understand you and your experience on a deeper level is necessary in order to help you overcome it. One major difference between how I approach this issue and how it seems most others approach, is that I enter this fear through the emotional process. When people try to do a one-size-fits-all, or teach you a class, they're coming at it from the front of the brain, so to speak -- the more consciously rational process, which is only available to a person when they are emotionally grounded.

However, when not emotionally grounded, or heavily emotionally activated (in anxiety, panic, or similar), the rational may as well not exist. The deeper emotional processes in the back of the brain are what have developed, sustained, and strengthened your fear of flying. This is the space where it lives, and what takes over when the fears show up. These deeper emotional processes from person to person are entirely unique, based on their own lives, histories, experiences, emotional patterns, etc.

People often want fear of flying to be simple. They wish for someone to give them a couple of tips or techniques and hope that somehow they'll suddenly be flying comfortably. However, finding comfort in an environment that calls for people to have to patiently sit in some of their deepest vulnerabilities and fears is much more complicated than this.

Anticipatory Anxiety and Fear of the Fear

Many people who fear flying struggle deeply with anticipatory anxiety -- the intense dread and anxiety that can show up in the days, weeks, or months leading up to a flight. When it comes to anticipatory anxiety, for some this can be the one of the most uncomfortable places to sit. The fear of the flight and the unknown of how it will go or, more so, how they will actually feel during it. For some, the fear of how terrifying and all-consuming the emotional discomfort will be is what they actually fear the most. The worry that they won't be able to calm themselves (and no one will be able to calm them), and feel like they are losing control, and even worse, that they have no choice but to just sit with it for hours until the plane lands.

In these moments, knowledge and the rational tends to slip away. The front of the brain loses its ability to have control and the back of the brain takes over almost completely. It can be such a powerful takeover that even learned exercises can be forgotten or impossible to access in the moment. This surge in anxiety can be so uncomfortable, and feel so terrifying that, often, this can become the anticipated fear. The fear of having to experience this out-of-control discomfort and fear at all. Even if someone knows in their mind that the flight itself will be okay, when the body can't hear or access this, then it feels on every level like they won't be okay.

What does this mean?

Overall, flying anxiety is an emotional process. It needs to be treated by getting to understand you and your process personally, and knowing how to respond in needed ways to this. Purchasing a pre-recorded, blanket-approach video or program doesn't do this. It doesn't get to know your process, or help you in a way you are needing. Flying anxiety runs deep, and people are often surprised to find that depth of the fear isn't always as much about flying itself than they realize at first (which is part of the reason that the over-focus on how flying works doesn't tend to work so well, even if it can create a temporary sense of control).

While there is more to the complexity of the process than can be articulated in one article, it is important to know that you can overcome fear of flying. Whether you've had it as long as you can remember, or if it's a recent development, there is hope. It just has to be the right approach that is attuned to you and what you need.

#fearofflying #fearoffear #MentalHealth #PanicAttacks #Anxiety #flyinganxiety #Anticipatoryanxiety

My path to self-discovery was slow and hampered by denial and doubts, fueled by internalized phobia. Yet I feel more positive about myself when I accept who I am inside.

I feel incredibly guilty. I planned to visit my bestie of 35 years in Connecticut this week to see him and his new house. We haven't seen each other in almost 3 years. The day came and I talked myself out of getting on the plane. This fear happens sometimes but lately it's all the time. Not sure how this phobia links to my depression, but the real issue is I lied to my friend because I just didn't want to explain my mental paralysis, especially when it sounds so irrational. I've flown all over the world. This was a short 2 hour flight. But I couldn't do it. Now I have a week at home to lie around and hate myself for it. My suitcase still sits at the front door. I'm riddled with shame.
Thanks for allowing me to be 100% honest. Sometimes even the ones closest to me forget I have these unpredictable internal meltdowns because I'm always putting on my best life-loving positive performance, to the degree that some people actually deny I have depression (like I'm wrong about myself).