How YOU can overcome your phobias by breathing out of one nostril and journaling, according to top trauma expert… So can he rid our fear-stricken science writer NIKKI MAIN of her irrational phobia?

By Nikki Main

I’ve always been afraid of skiing, since before I set my eyes on a slope.

I was afraid of falling off the edge, being hit by a fellow skier, and crashing to death, but it wasn’t difficult for me to identify where my fear began.

My mom was like most moms: she pitied me when I was sad or stressed and encouraged me when I participated in the school play, something she pushed me to do because I wanted to be like her.

But when I met with Jones to talk about my fear of skiing, we realized that’s where it all started: I wanted to be like my mother.

He has been afraid of skiing for the past 30 years, ever since he nearly died when another skier passed him while flying downhill and crashed, breaking his jaw and falling into a day-long coma.

It’s a story I’ve heard many times and it left me petrified of skiing, but as I got older I decided it was time to take the leap and strap on a pair of skis, but I couldn’t have been more scared.

I told Jones that I hyperventilated as I took the lift to the top of the slope and cried when I saw how steep the mountain was, but I kept trying until I finally called it quits and decided skiing wasn’t for me.

Jones said some people experience anticipatory anxiety, or fear of fear, and construct worst-case scenarios before facing it.

You may have a voice inside your head telling you that you are afraid, that you are going to cry, or that you think, “Everyone is going to laugh at me,” if you are afraid of speaking in public; But if you flip the script to imagine that voice as that of the most boring person you’ve ever heard, it will completely change the meaning you give it, he told me.

This is called reworking: when you locate the root cause of the fear and change it to make it fun or to change the way you see it.

Jones told me to rate my fear on a scale of one to 10 (I rated it as a nine) and to visualize the first time I went up the mountain on that ski lift and tell him what I remember thinking at that moment.

I told him I kept thinking ‘Oh my God, what if I fall?’

He made me imagine that voice in my favorite animated character, but when I couldn’t think of any, he suggested Goofy.

I felt silly when I heard Goofy’s voice in my head saying, ‘Oh my God,’ over and over, and when Jones asked me to rate my fear, I said it was still high: a seven.

He tried several other tactics, including thinking about my happiest memory and relating it to that moment of skiing, giving me a hug, and massaging my temples, cheeks, and arms, but in the end, that rating had only dropped to a five.

We repeatedly tried the methods and before long I started to feel better skiing. I wanted to jump onto an incline right then and there and see if I could do it. I was miraculously cured.

But when I sat back down at my desk an hour later, I wasn’t so sure.

Those feelings were back, the fear was back, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop the anxiety from resurfacing every time I thought about booking a ski trip or sitting on that lift.

I finally realized that I hadn’t been cured at all, it almost felt like I had been brainwashed into believing I had overcome my fear.

Jones said that most of his patients overcome their fears by the end of a 90-minute session, but I remain unconvinced.