I am greatly concerned about the idea of working with a phobic diver on anything other than a 1:1 basis.
I've had two students in the past who I would have referred to such a course if it had been available.
The first one was a diver, a person with 250 dives and a DM rating, who had experienced a fatal accident and had stopped diving for a period of time. When she decided to get back in to diving she came to the shop where I was working and they asked me to "handle" her. They often ask me to handle "unusual" cases and there is nothing special about me that makes me qualified for this.
The other one was a diver who every other instructor working at the shop had already given up on. The diver was a friend of one of the DM's and she was absolutely determined to get certified but she had (it turned out after the fact) a rather peculiar way of learning things that didn't fit in the way most of our instructors were teaching and she was *very* nervous underwater. Once again I was asked to handle it because it was an unusual case and not because I have any special skills.
In the first case, the DM, she was completely sorted under water and I could add nothing in terms of her diving. The problem was that everything about diving brought back memories of the accident and even the smell of the diving gear was enough to make her start crying to begin with. What she needed was a trauma counselor, and she was, in fact, seeing one, but it wasn't over. She was determined to take up diving again but needed someone to talk to. What I ended up doing with her is asking her to tag along with scuba reviews that I did on a regular basis and then after everyone went home we stayed for a while longer at the shop and just talked. Actually, she talked. All I did was shut up and listen, and it did seem to help her. After a while she thanked me and went back to diving with her friends like she did before. I would have loved to have been able to refer her to a course like this with a specialist. In this case a 1:1 ratio would not be necessary.
In the case of the nervous OW student with the odd way of learning the approach was very different. To start with our first "lesson" didn't even involve doing any skills. I thought since she's so wound up about being rejected by the other instructors that I would go do something fun with her so we went to the pool and just threw an under water frisbee around for while and then went to a cafe across the street and just had a coffee and talked. What I wanted out of that, of course, was to dig into her head. In this case, I said to her pretty much literally, that instead of telling her what she had to do for me (or the course) that I wanted her to tell me what I could do for her. This lead to me understanding her peculiar learning method and over the course of the next 2 lessons we tried to apply it and refined it somewhat so that I was teaching her how she wanted to learn it. That didn't solve her fears though (it did help) and for that I just took a lot of time.... and I mean a LOT of time. I did 20 pool dives with her and another 20 in open water, all 1:1, before the fears had abated to the point where she was diving normally, enjoying it, and able to handle surprises (to a degree). I did, actually, discuss with her on more than one occasion if diving was "worth it" for her but she was completely determined to learn it and wrestled her way through a lot of anxiety to get to the point where she relaxed and could dive normally. We also spent a LOT of time discussing "comfort zone" and how to respond if she got outside her comfort zone. This student could have really benefited from working with someone like the OP instead of me, because while I'm a good instructor, I'm no counselor. In the end I was very proud of her and her accomplishment but I was happy when she got to the point where I could certify her because she was starting to do things like bake me muffins and it was making my wife nervous
Something worthy of noting is that the student I just described was "anxious" but not phobic in the classic sense of the word. I think if her fears had been any worse that there is no way I could have taught her how to dive.
I *did* have someone for an intro dive who was phobic once. Thankfully she told me about it and told me that she wanted to learn how to dive in order to get over her fear of water
I took her to the pool, again 1:1 and we went to a shallow part that was only 90cm deep. After 1 hour of work I had her to the point that she was able to put the regulator in her mouth and lay on the surface with the BCD fully inflated and breathe. At the end of the session I deflated her BCD and she sank to the bottom in this 90cm of water and didn't fly into a blind panic. To the contrary, she came out of the water so energized that she was almost literally bouncing and wanted to sign up right then and there for an OW course. I told her, as politely as I could, that I didn't think it was a good idea but that if she went to swimming lessons and came back with a swimming diploma that I would try to train her. She agreed and left (I thought) determined to sign up for swimming lessons the next day. I never did see her again so I don't know if she did it or not. I'm guessing she didn't.
The point is, having had that experience, the diver with "angst" problems was trainable but the truly phobic one had no chance at all of learning how to dive.
And that's where I have to scratch my head about this "specialty". Because specialties are intended for divers who are already certified and while I could easily see it being applicable to the DM in the first story, or even the diver in the 2nd story as an intermediate step before taking AOW, the truly phobic diver simply would never be certified. It's literally impossible to certify someone who is phobic because if you follow standards they can never "master" a skill (the definition of mastery is "
comfortable", "fluid" and "repeatable"). As long as they are actively phobic they can never be comfortable. At least that's my take based on the one example I have to draw upon.
R..
