#142
USACMASDiver - 7/21/2014 5:44 PM
By the way, I once taught and certified a man who as a boy had legally drown. He was about 12 at the time that he decided to just "jump in" off the reef. Someone saw him floating out there, got the medics out there, and they some how brought him back to life. 30 years later, finding that he was an islander surrounded by water, and living with other men who were either fishermen, divers, or speared fish to eat, he was in a constant state of "freak-outer-y." Suppose a tsunami, suppose a flood, suppose a bit wave!!! And the list went on. Well, at about 40, he walked into my shop and explained. This was all in Japanese by the way. I took all the fish out of one of my aquariums, cleaned it up and used that as a "face pool." With feet on terra firma, we got to where we could put "our" face in the aquarium with a regulator in "our" mouth while breathing. That didn’t just happen all at once by the way. We practiced even just putting our face in the water and pulling it right back out. Also, today, that chap is a very successful diving instructor hundreds of dives under his belt. Just take your pace. Analyze what freaks you out and why, and take that fear apart piece by piece, address each piece with a method, practice each piece, and then one by one, work on them. Soon, you can put those pieces back together, and do them all at once. All this will make you a much, much better diver, and if you keep going, a truly hot Dive Master. You will have an ability to sense when people are at their stress limit that another Dive Master might not even notice. You are the man, man, you are are it.

Oh, sure, there are probably a lot of Instructors out there who would say, "Don’t teach a person like that." The difference, they are in a hurry, I was not. So, if you have total water-freakout-ability thing, get an aquarium, put it in the