What is it with people and being scared of spiders? I know if i see one i almost pass out, i go cold and my body keeps trying to run away…but i don’t know why, I mean i hate them with a passion, but I can’t explain why, and I dont hate other insect type things. I’m English if that makes a difference 
So why don’t I like them? and how can i overcome my fear without touching one?
any help is appreciated
thanks in advance
ICP9991.
For some unknown reason I think we grow up with the fear of spiders. I mean we see how people react to them growing up and copy it. If a child was raised with an adult telling him/her how beautiful and nice spiders were they would not react this way…
Ummmm, that doesn’t answer why people are scared of spiders actually!!
Well I am terrified of needles, and I mean I get sick seeing one… and I can’t explain why either…
I’ve heard the theory that as spiders and snakes are often poisionous, we’ve adapted over many generations to fear them.
Think about it. If you have two cavemen, one who treats snakes with the same reptillian respect that they give to most other small, crawly things, and one who inexplicably has a phobia for long, slithery things with no legs, that first caveman has a higher probablilty of being bitten by a poisonous snake and dying. Over many thousands of years you begin to see more snake-haters than snake-lovers.
Why are many of us afraid of heights? Well the acrophillic proto-hominids probably climbed a lot, fell a lot, and removed themselves from our gene pool.
Don’t have any answers for you, but I am adding my voice to the “how can I get over this in a way that doesn’t involve touching them” choir.
This town I live in is like a bad horror movie. Lots of them and they grow big. I find it humiliating to check my room for spiders before I go to bed each night.
Like everyone else, who isn’t a therapist in psychology I have not way of telling you how to get over this. And many therapists don’t either.
Spiders in general, I think, are poisonous to some extent. They also tend to be secretive and I think most of us have an aversion to “creepie crawlies.”
On the good side, however, I know of no diseases that are carried by spiders, like malaria in mosquitos, sleeping sickness in tsetse flies and so on. Furthermore, spiders prey on the insects that do carry diseases.
In our house we leave spiders alone as long as they leave us alone and we have never had need of an exterminator. It is sort of interesting to watch the cycle of, for example, silverfish. They start to build up and then we start to see a build up of spiders, particularly harvestmen (commonly called daddy longlegs) a really scary arachnid to those with arachnophobia. And then the silverfish disappear followed by the harvestmen. And in a few months the cycle repeats.
As with all creatures, you have to have some knowledge and wariness. We have black widows here, and they have a painful and sometimes dangerous sting. So, at night when they are out, don’t go out in the yard around wood piles and other good hiding places and stick you hand into that area without checking first with a light of some kind. If you leave a pair of shoes or a garment outside for day or two you don’t put it on without checking. However, here again, black widows don’t leap out at you because you are not exactly their natural prey. But if you come in contact with one for some period of time she will doubtless sting.
Fear of spiders is learned, not instinctive. You’re afraid of spiders because someone you knew growing up was afraid of them, and you saw how they reacted. This is the same reason that people are afraid of almost anything. Why are spiders so commonly feared? I dunno. Does there need to be a particular reason?
The only treatment method I know of is gradual, controlled exposure to what you fear, in this case, spiders.
Do you know someone who has a pet tarantula? You could have them bring it over. Start off by having it in a see-through container, where it can’t escape, and just watch it move, eat, and do its spiderly thing. Do this for, say, 15 minutes, for a week, or however long it takes you to become comfortable with the spider being there, in its cage. Next, have the handler take the spider out and handle it in the same room as you, but from a distance. After you get used to that, you can have the spider brought closer.
With each progressive step, the spider will be brought closer to you, and each time, you don’t progress further until you’re totally comfortable with the spider at that level of closeness. You don’t ever need to actually touch the critter. The point of the exercise, though, is to get to the point where seeing a spider doesn’t evoke the reaction it does now.
If that’s not possible… I dunno, maybe a book on spiders, with pictures, would do? You could have someone who doesn’t share your phobia pick a picture (one not too scary) and have it open in, say, your garage. Someplace you’ll see it, but not constantly. After a week, or however long it takes you to get used to it, you could place the book in a different room, in an area you spend more time in. I’m not sure this’ll be as effective as dealing with a real, live spider, but if you don’t have access to one, it’s the best you can do.
Chronos, in Australia we are TAUGHT not to touch spiders because they are inevitably poisonous. In fact, the only spiders I can think of that I saw regularly as a child which AREN’T poisonous are huntsman spiders, but they just freak everyone out because they are big and hairy. And they tend to hide in letterboxes and other places where you tend to stick your hand without looking.
Here in Japan, most spiders (and in fact, most creepy-crawlies in general) aren’t poisonous so people just tend to ignore them. That’s why when redback spiders were found in Osaka a few years ago there was such a hullaballoo.
Learning about their way of life can help, watch the Discovery channel!!!
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
Other than that, AudreyK has some great advice.
Chronos, I agree with you 100%. Fear of spiders is a learned behavior.
My wife maintains that she remembers her first spider bite at age 2 in her crib.
My opinion is her older sister, also aranophobic, imprinted that memory (true or not) into my wife’s little brain.
My wife is extremely terrified of spiders, even believing that every one of them is out to attack her. Once she jumped out of the window of her car at and drive-up ATM to avoid her mortal enemy. (consequently having her ATM card sucked back in a swallowed by the machine)
A year after dating her I noticed that even I had begun to be startled at the sight of these eight-legged marvels, which made me to wonder if fears can be contagious. Maybe some type of phobia VD. (joke)
I have noticed as my wife is slowly transferring this fear to my son. Little games like “the spider’s going to get you” and her dramatic reactions to spiders in his presence have already left there mark. It is however a learned phobia, around me my son is perfectly calm and inquisitive.
uhh…yep
Almost all spiders are poisonous (there are a few exceptions), but of the thousands of different species only a relatively small number have venom powerful enough to hurt a human.
I suffer from arachnaphobia, but I don’t think that the fact that spiders are venomous is a factor. After all, there are many other insects and animals that can bite and sting, but its mainly spiders that people have a (mostly) irrational fear of. Also, in my personal opinion, learned behaviour is not a factor; neither of my parents or my sister were scared of spiders as I was growing up.
The strange thing is, I’m only afraid of certain types of spider; for some reason tarantulas don’t bother me too much, or harvestman spiders for that matter. Its more the dark smallish ones that you find in the bath or scuttling across the floor when you’re watching TV or whatever.
I really can’t pin down the basis for my fear but I think it may be to do with the way come spiders look and move; the ones which are brown, quick and long legged seem to be the ones that get under my skin the most (there’s a nice thought!).
Gradually learning to get closer and closer to a feared stimulus is called systematic desensitization. Google could help you more with that. Another interesting approach to getting over your fears is called flooding.
Basically you lock yourself in a room with hundreds of (harmless) spiders for a while, flip out and eventually after nothing really bad happens you get over it. I don’t know how often this is used, but I’ve heard it works.
I disagree 100% with the “fear of spiders must be learned” hypothesis. I am the only person in my family who is terrified of spiders and I have been since I was in the cradle. And I mean that, my mother said I would scream uncontrollably at the sight of a spider in my crib before I was even 8 months old. She did her best to teach me otherwise (“Spiders are great! Spiders are good for us!”) but I didn’t believe her.
No matter how much I understand them intellectually, spiders give me the willies. Even if they didn’t have any teeth and couldn’t possibly bite me, they’d make me twitch. Yet, they don’t compare to a nice big centipede. Earlier this year one of my childhood fears came true: while I was in bed, a centipede fell from the ceiling onto my face. Jesus Christ!