Spiders. My Wife (to be) Hates Them.

[Disco Potato]

I would recomend at least considering professional help. Phobias are difficult to "get over", and it sounds like hers is really having a bad effect on her life.

Seconded. When phobias start to affect a person's life the way arachnophobia seems to be affecting hers (and yours) is when it's really time to get therapy. I've watched videos in psychology classes where people are so scared of spiders and other things that they do things like stay inside their houses all day and always wear gloves, and not wanting to open windows sounds like a milder version of that (not that I'm at expert at these things, of course)

Also, please share your spider experiences, and tell us whether you love them or hate them and why.

My parents and I think I got a spider bite once when I was six...I got a huge, nasty blister, and had to stay in the hospital for a few days while it healed . But I'm not that scared of normal house spiders.

EDIT: You think that's bad, eest? You don't watch enough daytime TV. There was a chick running and screaming away from tin foil.

Did they ever say why she went nuts over it? Sometimes phobias can develop over bizarre things. Like in another video I watched in a psych class, a woman was afraid of closed spaces, like elevators, because she got stuck in a coffin as a child . If it was soap opera, it's a different story.

[eestlinc]

If you are aware that your phobia is irrational, then you must have a rational awareness of the fear. If you know your fear doesn't make sense, then surely you can find a way to stop being so afraid.

edit: I don't watch tv, especially not daytime tv.

[Madame Adequate]

If you are aware that your phobia is irrational, then you must have a rational awareness of the fear. If you know your fear doesn't make sense, then surely you can find a way to stop being so afraid.

Uh no. That's not how it works.

[eestlinc]

thank you for the psychology lesson.

[Miriel]

I'm not sure you grasp the concept of what a phobia is.

Being afraid of something is not a phobia. A phobia is beyond that. If you are afraid of something you really shouldn't be afraid of, to the point where it is disrupting your daily life, that's a phobia. It is uncontrollable and irrational. There are ways to cure phobias but it takes a lot of effort and treatment and therapy to really get to the point where it doesn't scare you any more.

If you are dealing with something that doesn't make sense, that you KNOW is irrational and yet you simply cannot help that overwhelming feeling of fear and panic, you can't just rationalize that away.

Do you think that a bird flies at me and I go, "hmm, that ugly looking creature just might peck my eyes out, I'm in danger!" Hell no. A bird flies at me and my immediate response is to RUN. I don't think about it, I don't plan it, I just get the hell out of there. And then it's after that I think to myself, "I am so ridiculous, why did I do that?" Those feelings of panic and fear just sweeps over you and doesn't give you time to calmly think things through.

[eestlinc]

Clearly there are people who are incapacitated by their clinical phobia and they need professional help, whether they are aware of the silliness of their phobia or not. But there is a difference between what you are calling a phobia and the general way the term phobia is used. Maybe the clinical extreme version of a phobia is the only really correct version, and everything else is just a fear, but I think there is a lot more of a grey area between just being afraid of something and having incapacitating fear. I am just suggesting that most people who say they have a phobia don't really have what you are calling a phobia.

Anyway, if the answer to the question "why are you afraid of X?" is some sort of traumatic experience that has scarred your subconscious, then that's not exactly an irrational cause. The fear itself might be irrational, but at least there is a sensible reason why you have developed the fear.

Contrast that with someone who is afraid of pigs because pigs smell bad. In that case, not only is the fear itself irrational, the cause of the fear is also irrational. That is what doesn't make sense to me. That type of fear is psychosomatic, rather than based on actual trauma.

edit: surely there are ways to proactively confront one's fears, either through therapy or some other means. There are ways to gird oneself and confront such a fear to get the fear out of your instinctive reactions.

[Madame Adequate]

Expecting the subconscious to act rationally is like expecting the Pope to decry Our Lady of Fatima.

[Rye]

People aren't usually aware of what causes their trauma, though. The unconscious mind is a pretty powerful thing. Something may have happened very early in their child that they associate with the thing that they fear, but in reality has nothing to actually do with it. For example, someone might have a phobia of heights because when they were little and sitting on their father's shoulders, his/her parents started to fight, and he/she associates that unpleasantness and fear with heights.

Check out the Little Albert experiment too, it's pretty neat. The way that people can be conditioned to fear things that they were previously unafraid of just by association is pretty wild.

[eestlinc]

The subconscious doesn't just become the way it is by magic. conscious behavior and outside stimuli can alter our subconscious impulses. Just because you have a subconscious fear doesn't mean you can't do anything consciously to change it.

[Big D]

My God, there are a lot of pointless insensitive bull replies in this thread.

Getting over a phobia is a tough task. While arachnophobia is an irrational fear, it's not enough to simply prove that spiders are harmless. The fact that many spiders can cause pain or injury to humans means that there is at least some rational basis for an aversion to spiders.

I'm not a trained psychologist, though I've talked about phobias with several psychology student friends. Overcoming a phobia usually involves a slow, careful process which gradually increases a person's exposure to the thing that they fear. This is generally done in a controlled, safe environment, to help reduce the person's fear. For severe arachnophobia, it might begin with showing the person photographs of spiders for a certain amount of time. Once they can cope with that, without severe anxiety, they might move onto model spiders they can hold in their hand, or watching videos of spiders in the wild. This process continues incrementally, over quite a long period of time, until the person can finally tolerate being around actual, live spiders.
It's definitely something that should only be attempted with the help and advice of a trained professional, though. My description here is brief, imprecise and undoubtedly lacks a lot of crucial details.

Personally, I'm nyctophobic. Darkness and nighttime can, under the right circumstancs, terrify me. I'm just lucky it's a mild phobia. I very rarely get panicked, though sometimes I'll avoid going outside or into an unfamiliar building at night in order to avoid the fear. One time I had to get a friend to walk me to my car at a campsite, even though it was only a couple of hundred feet through some trees, and I'd been there and back numerous times during the day.

[Madame Adequate]

The subconscious doesn't just become the way it is by magic. conscious behavior and outside stimuli can alter our subconscious impulses. Just because you have a subconscious fear doesn't mean you can't do anything consciously to change it.

This presumes a level of understanding of both psychology and the brain itself which we frankly do not possess.

[eestlinc]

Psychology itself tries to modify the subconscious through conscious stimuli. Even if we don't know what we're doing or how it works, we can still try, and we do have some success.

[41-Inches-Wide]

My husband to be (lol I wish) is afraid of spiders. Whether it be the innocent jumping spider, daddy long legs, tarantula etc, he's totally afraid of it. It's not a phobia, but it really the only thing he's afraid of. The only thing good you can do is to protect him from spiders (which means having to meet his quota of killing at least 80,000 spiders / day xD ) and not making fun of him being scared less even if he looks so funny when he jumps in surprise.
I just whack spiders any chance I get. It's all to protect him!
/knightinshiningarmor

[Roto13]

EDIT: You think that's bad, eest? You don't watch enough daytime TV. There was a chick running and screaming away from tin foil.

Did they ever say why she went nuts over it? Sometimes phobias can develop over bizarre things. Like in another video I watched in a psych class, a woman was afraid of closed spaces, like elevators, because she got stuck in a coffin as a child :Oo:. If it was soap opera, it's a different story.

I saw a talk show where this woman was afraid of hair. The producer had really long hair and she flicked it and the fat scared lady screamed and she was like "BITCH I MAY HAVE A PHOBIA BUT I STILL KICK YOUR ASS!!!" and the producer flicked her hair at her and she ran away.

It... was awesome.

It wasn't really a phobia though, cause at the end of the show she was touching it. Stupid drama queen.

[Rainecloud]

My God, there are a lot of pointless insensitive bull replies in this thread.

I don't mind a few sarcastic replies now and again. If all the replies to this thread were straightforward, it would be somewhat boring to read.