The jump – Photo by Adam Clarke

by Lynn Cain

The first AAC(UK) courses on Overcoming a Fear of Heights took place in the Peak District this August. They were delivered by Will4Adventure which has been helping people overcome acrophobia (fear of heights) since 2006. The courses lasted two days and had three phases: a morning with Brian, a therapist specialising in treating phobias; an afternoon outdoors with Will to consolidate our morning session; and a day on the hillside to reinforce our progress and confidence. This was my first AAC(UK) event and I’d only just recovered from Covid which wasn’t ideal. Nor were the temperatures exceeding 30°C. “How do you feel?” asked Brian when I arrived. “Terrified” I replied.

We had been given homework to do beforehand. This included reading Will’s article explaining how the brain responds to external stimuli to create automatic responses to certain situations. Fear plays a role in this as retreating from danger helps keep us alive, but repeatedly yielding to fear reinforces it so it can spoil our enjoyment of life. The course, we were promised, would provide techniques and experiences to help us to control our fear of heights. We had also been asked to recall an episode of acrophobia and our first task that morning was to revisit that event and grade it 0-10 with 10 indicating that the emory affected us deeply. Most graded it 3 or 4, one person 7, and me 8. This, I realised, was going to be tough.

Brian’s session focussed on Neuro-Linguistic Processing techniques to help us to dissociate from our acrophobic memory and when we repeated the exercise several hours later some regraded it 0 and most 1 or 2. I was still top (or bottom) with 3 but that was a massive improvement. Then it was out into the hills.

I had somehow failed to read the detailed course programme, so I was shocked to discover we were going to be abseiling, something I’d never done. Surprisingly I wasn’t frightened. Will’s system of graduated challenges repeated until, in his words, we got bored and wanted to do something else, took us from a gentle slope to a quarry face by day’s end. And during this process my fear had magically translated into excitement.

Day two was very hot indeed and we had no shade as we developed our movement skills on boulders at Stanage Apparent North. These included walking down a steep incline, first with the security of a rope, then without. I’d recently broken a wrist on a descent and expected to be nervous, but I managed it comfortably. During the afternoon we progressed steadily through graduated scrambling to the course’s culmination - a Moderate 10m climb up Martello Cracks. Sadly, I didn’t manage it. Heat and post-Covid fatigue had finally caught up with me. But the rest of the group did, and I shared their euphoria. In fact, I didn’t feel too bad about it. I had come to tackle my fear of heights, not learn to climb. That was for the future, which now seemed a lot closer.

Tackling slopes – Photo by Angie Lander

The final challenge and Topping out – Photos by Poppy Holden

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