This is me with Jimmy. Jimmy’s one of my oldest mates. We have known each other since we were 2 years of age, but we were both in our early 30s when this photo was taken.
We are in a pub in Dublin. It’s Jimmy’s stag do, and two weeks after this photo was taken, he got married in a beautiful ceremony to his now-wife Lucy.
It’s a great photo, and Jimmy’s on his stag do, so he should be happy. But I’m happy for a slightly different reason, because getting to the point where I could join him in a pub in the Irish capital wasn’t straightforward.
Earlier that day, I had sat on a flight from Birmingham to Dublin. I looked out the window, and saw a trawler ship way down below on the Irish Sea. I remember thinking ‘that looks a long way down’. But that was it. I didn’t freak out. I didn’t hyperventilate. I saw it, and then my thoughts moved onto something else.
That flight was my first in 13 years. So you might think this is going to be a fear of flying story, and think that I’ve already given away the ending. But it’s a little different. It’s a story that ends with a pint of Guinness in the Auld Dubliner in Temple Bar, but it starts with something I couldn’t quite explain when I was a teenager.
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This something was anxiety. But back in the mid-2000s when I was 16, anxiety wasn’t a word I knew. I thought I was ill. I used to wear sea bands all the time, because I thought it was a kind of sickness. To be fair, I did feel nauseous practically all of the time. Whenever I went to a party or an event, my stomach would do somersaults. I would have this dry cough that I didn’t usually have. At that stage, I was forcing myself through things, hoping that whatever it was would one day just stop.
Me at a wedding aged 18. Note the sea bands.
But that’s not how these things tend to go. As I reached the end of my Sixth Form days, it got worse and worse. And then it reached its peak on a holiday with my friends in Greece in the summer before we all went off to university.
I had felt it crawling all over me all week in Greece. I was not eating right. I was not able to relax my body. After seven days of trying to pretend I was having fun, we were getting ready to go home. I first felt it really building on the bus to the airport. Then when we got to the departure lounge and were told there was a 3-hour delay with our flight, I broke.
I had a panic attack – at least that’s what I know it was now. When it was happening, I didn’t know what was going on. I hid in the toilets. I thought I was going to vomit – something I had had an acute phobia of ever since I was young. I tried to pace around the duty-free shops to distract myself. I couldn’t seem to shake this dreadful feeling in my stomach. It only eased slightly when we got on the plane (after what turned out to be a 4 hour delay, an extra hour for luck I guess), and we flew back to the UK.
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Now people have had panic attacks and been able to go back to normal life pretty quickly. People have had panic attacks at airports. People have had panic attacks on planes. I wasn’t alone in that experience in the grand scheme of things, though I felt like I was at the time. But back then, anxiety and panic attacks were not spoken about openly. They were not things I knew people really suffered with, or lived with, or were even able to have good, productive lives in spite of.
This meant I didn’t have any sense of context around what had happened. So I didn’t do any research, or speak to the right people. I just felt that I could never, ever put myself in a position where something like that could happen again.
This was one of the biggest mistakes I made, but I know now that it wasn’t my fault. It was my rational brain trying to defend me from a perceived threat. And it was a lack of an alternative narrative. I didn’t know what had happened. And because people didn’t talk about these things openly back then, I didn’t know I was suffering with anxiety and panic. I wish people had talked more.
So for the next ten years, I did everything I could to not experience the same things I experienced in Greece. I was absolutely terrified of having a panic attack again, to the extent that it sadly shaped my entire existence. This included being away from places I deemed ‘safe’, because in that departure lounge, I associated my location with what was happening. That meant flying, foreign holidays, even travelling in the UK became extremely difficult, because only a specific number of places were ‘safe’.
What’s more, as this problem became more and more entrenched, my personality and habits changed to reflect it. I suddenly found myself analysing certain activities I once didn’t think twice about for threat. From a panic attack in a Greek airport, I had spiralled into an isolated world of neuroses.
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So how did I end up drinking a pint in the Auld Dubliner? Well, it starts with another type of pint – a dodgy pint of milk in the office fridge. I smelt it and it smelt off to me, so I left it. A colleague saw me and asked why I’d done that, and I gave him an answer that was true – something to the effect of ‘I’m always wary of dodgy food and drinks because I’ve got a really bad fear of vomiting’. That was accurate then, but it was also because I was worried that vomiting would bring about a state of panic I couldn’t handle. When I was in that Greek airport, I didn’t want to be there, so I panicked, which upset my stomach so I was worried I was going to vomit, so I panicked more, which made my stomach feel worse, which blew things out of the water.
My colleague told me he had a friend with a similar condition, and that they had received some help for it and had made improvements pretty quickly.
That passing comment was an eye-opener for me. As silly as it sounds, I had never thought about getting help for a phobia before. I just thought it was a life sentence.
But that evening I put a name to it – Emetophobia – and I bought a workbook that helped support people in their Emetophobia recovery. I worked my way through this workbook and suddenly I started to recognise things in myself – an external locus of control, negative self-talk, catastrophising. The book gave me ways to look to address this, and while it’s hard to change such an embedded mental trend, I did make progress. The acute anxiety and panic I would feel when outside of my comfort zone suddenly had another narrative to contend with.
The work I put in here reaped benefits, and I took steps in the right direction, towards getting my life back. Soon I was putting things I had learnt to good effect across other aspects of my day-to-day. I got a new job. I started socialising more. I started travelling a little more in the UK. Essentially, I started pushing my boundaries further and further. In time, my life became more tolerable, more life-like. But in truth, I didn’t feel comfortable enough to even think about going abroad yet. I still avoided this topic with others and in my own mind.
Then I decided to change things. I had got the bit between my teeth in other aspects of my life and had made positive steps – so why not this too?
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The first step I took was to book some sessions with a private therapist. While money is an obvious factor here, I am of the opinion that if you make progress that can genuinely change your life for the better, then you can’t put a cost on that. While I acknowledge it’s not easy for everybody to do, I made a personal decision to invest in my recovery. These sessions helped me digest and reflect on some of the things that had happened, and find ways to move forwards.
Next, I booked a visit to an airport. This was part of a service called ‘Fly and Be Calm’ run by East Midlands Airport. Myself and a few other attendees were guided around the airport and given various pieces of information about what to expect when passing through an airport. This was a great way to refamiliarise myself with the airport scenario, while also creating a new narrative for my body and mind when it came to airports.
I then booked some sessions with an EMDR specialist. I had read about EMDR and its relation to trauma in Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score. The EMDR sessions helped me digest and reinterpret what had happened in Greece. I started to see the situation more rationally and took myself out of the mindset I had been in when it had been happening. EMDR is a peculiar thing, but I attest to the positive effects it can have around trauma.
‘Flying’ during the Virtual Aerospace session.
Fourth and finally, I booked a session with a company called Virtual Aerospace. These guys run sessions in a passenger plane simulator, and I travelled to Northamptonshire to essentially ‘fly’ a plane for myself, with an experienced pilot beside me. He talked me through all the processes and procedures of the plane, and explained how safe and secure even the most standard of aeroplanes are. By this time, I had mentally committed to making Jimmy’s stag do my first ‘actual’ flight, so we simulated a journey from Birmingham to Dublin. This was excellent as it helped me get a feel for how take off would be, and the length of time a flight between these two places would take (48 minutes!).
Thanks to the steps I had taken, as the stag do approached I had gone from being somebody who couldn’t even contemplate going into an airport to being confident I would be able to successfully fly again. Sure, in the days building up to the flight I was nervous. But I never swayed from my belief that I would get on the plane, take off, and let what happened happen. I had lost the need to control everything, and avoid how I felt. And that was when I knew recovery was near.
The first plane I got on to in 13 years. Next stop, Dublin!
Then the big day came. I caught the train to Birmingham Airport, made my way through security and sat in the departure lounge. I let the anticipation build until it was time to board. I sat down in my seat, put some music on and felt the plane taxi to the runway. Then I listened to the noise of the engines for take off, and before I knew it, I was looking out the windows at the clouds and the sky and the sun.
When I touched down in Dublin, the sense of accomplishment and relief was beyond anything I can describe. And to be honest, I think I deserved that pint at the Auld Dubliner, all things considered.
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