Obsessive fears can sometimes develop out of nowhere, but often there is some actual trigger that starts to terrify the OCD mind and set it on a continuous roller-coaster of ritualistic thoughts and behaviors. For me, a trip to Aspen, Colo., with my dad and my brother set into motion an intense fear of flying that still brings back anxiety-inducing memories.
After an amazing vacation of skiing on a “guys” trip, it was time to get on a plane to fly out of a small airport tucked away in the Rocky Mountains. I had always enjoyed the feeling of taking off and landing when I was a child. I was smiling and laughing on the way to the airport and feeling good about the great terrain that I just skied and the beautiful Aspen mountains.
The plane was unusual as the wings looked like they were connected to the top of the plane as opposed to the sides of the plane. I remember the pilot telling us that it might get a little bumpy flying over the Rockies, and I thought, “Cool! This is going to be an exciting flight.”
As the plane was reaching its cruising altitude, all of a sudden it felt like the plane started getting knocked around like a ping-pong ball. Then the plane starting dropping and bouncing, and it was as though there was no end to how far the plane could drop. The seatbelt sign came on, and the stewardesses ran to their seats. The pilot was silent, and I kept hoping he would say something to calm my fears. When I hear the pilot I always feel better for some reason.
Then the pilot said it could get more bumpy. I remember thinking, “How could this get any bumpier without crashing?” The plane literally felt like it was free-falling and hitting the tops of the Rocky Mountains. An overwhelming anxiety came over me and I was convinced that we were goners. I had never felt that kind of loss of control before, and it just got worse.
People started to yell and I heard some crying from behind me. My dad was a few rows in front of me, and my brother and his friend were sitting next to me. The plane kept dropping like a roller-coaster, only this wasn’t a roller-coaster and we weren’t on tracks. We were 30,000 feet in the air over the Rockies. I started to get dizzy, and my adrenaline was pumping.
All of a sudden with another huge drop and a boom, I yelled as loud as I could, “We are all gonna die!” My fear overwhelmed me and it was just my instinct to yell. My dad turned around and actually looked scared, and I have never seen him appear scared before. Suddenly we dropped lower, and then slowly a calm came over the plane.
I looked over at my brother and he appeared to be laughing at me as he saw his little brother in a state of panic. My big brother wasn’t trying to exacerbate my anxiety, but I think in his own way he didn’t know how to respond during this moment in time when we were all stuck in a tube in the sky. For him, possibly his defense mechanism was laughter in the face of an uncomfortable and physically frightening experience. I was “white knuckling” it still as I was convinced we were in for more horror, but it stopped and suddenly I was breathing again and feeling a slight sense of relief.
Ten minutes later we were on the ground and we were still alive. I never quite got over that flight, and it took a lot of therapy to work through my fears of flying.
With OCD or no OCD, the fear of flying is extremely common, but with OCD the fears seem to come long before the flight. For me, the obsessing started several months before a flight from that point on in my life. Obsessing led to numerous overt and mental rituals that took hours on end before I could let go and move on with each task. As I engaged in these rituals I noticed they would take longer and longer to complete, to the point of both physical and mental exhaustion. Knowing beforehand that I had to do these rituals led to a lot of avoidance of getting up in the morning and trying to start the day.
The idea of one ritual after the next meant that I dreaded starting them in the first place, so I often felt trapped into doing nothing at all but feeling the anxiety of being stuck in limbo before taking that first step forward everyday. My OCD had been gripping me tighter every day, but I had no insight or knowledge of what I was facing. I only knew that I needed to think a certain way and do these bizarre repeated actions to move forward, and I was running with my OCD.
It took years to realize that a brain disorder had taken the joy out of my life and replaced it with constant uncertainty and uneasiness that felt like a record with a deep scratch in it. There was a skipping record in my mind that I never knew could be smoothed out with cognitive behavioral therapy, and in particular exposure and ritual prevention, and it would be years before I found that there was help out there.
— Jonathan Lukas MFT is a psychotherapist specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy. He is in private practice and runs The OCD Treatment Center of Santa Barbara, working with adolescents and adults with anxiety disorders. Click here for more information or call 805.453.2347.