{"id":6613,"date":"2020-04-17T13:31:59","date_gmt":"2020-04-17T17:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6613"},"modified":"2020-04-22T13:18:15","modified_gmt":"2020-04-22T17:18:15","slug":"how-i-healed-the-phobia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6613","title":{"rendered":"How I Healed the Phobia"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are the last two paragraphs of my blog post from 2011 about the airplane phobia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Looking back at it, I can see better how it became so horrendous.\u00a0 Hypersensitivity to sound is a symptom of PTSD, but I still had no idea that I had been traumatized.\u00a0 One thing about an obnoxious and very loud sound, you can\u2019t look away as you can from an ugly sight.\u00a0 Your only recourse is to go far enough away.\u00a0 Finding it impossible to live in your own house, in your own town, is depressing in itself.\u00a0 I felt hopeless and helpless. The planes were triggering flashbacks to a helpless, terrified infant.<\/p>\n

“Healing from the phobia happened literally overnight.\u00a0 I had started taking Imipramine (Anti-depressant medication) in February and after a few months was beginning to feel\u00a0 better.\u00a0 I had started therapy with Dr. Cynthia Rankin in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.\u00a0 She was a specialist in mood disorders.\u00a0 I had been seeing her for several months.\u00a0 It was May and the planes were starting up.\u00a0 On Friday I had a session with Dr. Rankin.\u00a0 I asked her if it was OK to \u201cwhite-knuckle it\u201d through the noise.\u00a0 She said \u201cOf course.\u201d\u00a0 Then she said she had observed a pattern in my behavior.\u00a0 I would start a project that had several steps.\u00a0 I would do the first two steps just fine, but if I ran into trouble on the third I would conclude that I \u201ccouldn\u2019t do it.\u201d I would fail to see that I had already managed to do part of it successfully, in fact I would even define those first steps as failures.\u00a0 This was enormously interesting to me.\u00a0 I knew something about training dogs and that the principles worked for human beings also.\u00a0 I figured I could retrain myself about the planes.\u00a0 I would write down each one survived with white knuckles as a success, and see how many I could survive before I had to leave the house.\u00a0 Saturday was rainy, and I went to the first level Reiki training.\u00a0 I had the oddest feeling afterward that my immune system had \u201cswitched on.\u201d I could almost feel a protective field around me.\u00a0 Sunday was sunny and I sat down with paper and pen, waiting for the planes to start.\u00a0 Each time one went over I would say \u201cthat\u2019s one survived\u201d and make a little airplane symbol on the page.\u00a0 By the end of the day, I had survived 13 planes, and I knew the phobia was over.\u00a0 Dr. Rankin had given me my power back for which I am eternally grateful.\u00a0 I still hated the sound, but I no longer freaked out, and gradually the sound began to fade into the background.\u00a0 Every now and then I notice a plane towing a glider and think \u201cGod! I suffered from that for 13 years, and now I don\u2019t even notice them.\u201d<\/p>\n

More recently, in 2018, I realized that the process Dr. Rankin had identified was actually rooted in something my father said<\/a> to me. \u00a0“If you didn’t know how to do it, why did you even try?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These are the last two paragraphs of my blog post from 2011 about the airplane phobia: “Looking back at it, I can see better how it became so horrendous.\u00a0 Hypersensitivity to sound is a symptom of PTSD, but I still … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression","category-healing","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}