“Becoming the Sky: A Therapist’s Journey with a Passenger in Fear”

“Becoming the Sky: A Therapist’s Journey with a Passenger in Fear”

By The Flying Psychotherapist

Before I was ever a therapist, I lived in the sky.

For over two decades, I wore a flight attendant uniform and moved through time zones, tarmacs, and terminals with practiced grace. I knew how to anticipate turbulence—not just the kind that rattled trays, but the kind that crept quietly into people’s eyes: fear.

I saw it often—the silent panic, the white knuckles gripping the armrest, the shortness of breath that had nothing to do with altitude. And back then, I met that fear with warmth, reassurance, and calm. Now, years later, as The Flying Psychotherapist, I meet it with something even deeper: healing.

Maya came to me not with a fear of flying, but with a fear of what flying meant: surrendering control. Trusting the unknown. Sitting still with her own vulnerability at 30,000 feet.

“I don’t understand it,” she said once. “Nothing bad ever happened. I just… feel unsafe.”

That’s how fear often starts. It doesn’t always come from a trauma. Sometimes, it arrives as a whisper—then grows loud in the silence of a sealed cabin, in the moment just before takeoff when everything feels like it’s lifting too fast.

But here’s what I know: the fear isn’t about the aircraft. It’s about uncertainty. About trusting something—or someone—else to carry you safely to where you need to go. It’s about learning how to rise, even with the weight of fear in your chest.

So we worked slowly, deliberately. We didn’t rush to “fix” the fear. We befriended it.

Using CBT, I helped Maya unpack her anxious thoughts:

• “What if I panic and can’t get off the plane?”

• “What if something goes wrong and I’m trapped?”

• “What if I lose control?”

And gently, we challenged each one.

What’s the likelihood?

What’s the evidence?

What’s another, more balanced thought?

Through DBT, we practiced check the facts, radical acceptance, and paced breathing. I taught her how to self-soothe—not to escape the fear, but to stay with it and move through it.

And then I shared something I hadn’t shared in a long time: my own experience in the jumpseat. The moments where I held someone’s hand during turbulence. The red-eye flights where the whole cabin seemed to hold its breath. The quiet power of staying calm—not because I wasn’t afraid, but because I knew how to fly anyway.

One day, I showed Maya a photograph I took—a butterfly made of clouds hovering high in the sky.

She stared at it for a long time.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It doesn’t even look real.”

“Neither does change,” I replied, “until it is.”

I told her the story of how caterpillars don’t become butterflies overnight. There’s a phase of complete breakdown, a moment in the cocoon where everything dissolves before becoming something new. Transformation, I reminded her, often happens in the dark—before the wings ever unfold.

“You don’t need to be fearless to fly,” I said. “You just need to bring your fear along and teach it how to ride quietly while you rise.”

Maya did fly again.

Not because the fear vanished—but because she stopped giving it the controls. Because she learned that she was the sky, too. That the same stillness she saw above the clouds could live inside her. That growth didn’t mean never being afraid—it meant doing it anyway, one breath at a time.

As a therapist, my job isn’t to erase fear. It’s to walk with it. To help others hold it, name it, and soften its grip. To be the cocoon when someone is unraveling, and the wind beneath them when they’re ready to rise.

Because every passenger has a story. Every cloud holds a mirror. And every person who fears flying carries something much deeper than altitude.

So if you’re reading this and you’re afraid—of planes, of change, of becoming—know this:

You are not alone.

You are not broken.

You are becoming.

And when the day comes that you lift off, wings spread wide, fear in tow, you’ll understand what Maya learned:

The sky was never the limit.

It was always the invitation.