I once worked with a fellow who initially he told me he was afraid of flying, but it turned out that he had a variety of scenarios in his mind, all of which were about dying. I asked him one of the questions I always ask people. "How do you know it's a phobia?" In other words, what has to happen in order for the phobia to occur? He said that with his flying, a plane takes off climbing steep and then all of a sudden it levels off. You get that little feeling in the pit of your stomach when it levels off. When he was a little boy, a very nice neighbor came over to play. He picked him up, tossed him in the air, and caught him like men often do with little kids. It's a fun little game; however he didn't know what the neighbor was doing. He'd never been thrown into the air before, so it freaked him out. His fear of the plane leveling off stemmed from that feeling when he was 3 years old and tossed up in the air by his neighbor. He thought the neighbor would drop him. Interestingly enough, people are afraid of different things with a fear of flying. A lot of times the fear of flying is actually claustrophobia or a fear of closed spaces. Some people are literally not afraid until the plane lands and they are on the tarmac. Everyone stands up in the aisles in front of them, and then they realize they can't get out. This man was afraid of a plane crash. He had an image in his mind of the plane diving into the ground at 600 miles per hours and bursting into a ball of flames. I usually don't do this, but I asked him at that point, "then what?" because I knew he was very religious. He realized that his belief in going to heaven was a wonderful feeling, so he said he wouldn't have that fear anymore. His strong religious belief helped him through that particular phobia, because we were able to find the root cause of it.
