I honestly would have had to buy a new monitor soon after. Not because of icky gross spider memories. Because I would have put my boot through it.
I have a solution for you, brother. It is a bug vaccum Or if you are a little bit more sadist, there is an Electric Swatter (Keep away from kids) My dad have one of them....He tested on me, it is seriously painful.
Fuzzy, your display picture is awesome ! I allways think that there is a bug on my screen for real. lol Arachnophobia, it is the clinical term. My name is theBlackSwordsMan and I'm Trypanophobe.....thats mean I fear needles & syringes. Every time a needle is close to me, I become whiter than white, my heart panics, the air is rarefied or I shake. No joke, if you put me In a Olympic stadium with a needle behind me, I'll win the gold.....Or I'll punch you if you dont trow away this evil weapon.
I think this is spot on, as myself (and everyone else i've known) who is scared of spiders had a parent who was scared of spiders. My dad couldn't be less bothered by the things and will happily grab huge spiders off the wall with his bare hands, but my mum has a rather epic phobia on them. Luckily i've at least come somewhere in-between the extremes, can't stand touching the bloody things, but i'm not so bad as my mum as i'm at least able to remove them from the house using a cup and a piece of paper. Only really bad thing i have is if i know theres a spider in the room and i've not removed/squished it, i WILL NOT be able to sleep under any circumstances :/
My friends tell me simply having a cat does the same job, they love killing spiders. As long as you don't mind disposing of the semi-chewed remnants of course
Ooh! Awesome. I would beat you if there was a spider behind me. For real. I'm cool with piercing needles, but not hypodermics. I can deal with them, but I need to have a bit of time to relax first. Piercing needles, on the other hand, I'm happy with. Hell, getting the septum pierced was one of the weirdest but coolest feelings ever. It didn't hurt, so much as make your eyes water. But try and give me a TB shot and I'll punch you. >.> 2 things stopping me. 1) Girlfriend doesn't like snakes. I'd have to get rid of it if we came to move in together. 2) Currently live with 3 cats and a dog, and someone else who is afraid of snakes. Shame, really. My cats are disinterested in spiders. Don't move fast enough. Mrs. Doyle likes moths because they flutter, but she barely looks at spiders.
But I don't even like that case! And it only has 4 legs! WEAKSAUCE SPIDER. I still wouldn't buy one. XD
I have no idea why I'm arachnophobic. No-one in my family is and the exposure thing does nothing because I'm scared of them, but also fascinated. I often go outside at night and shine a light through the greenhouse glass to look at them. We never kill them as I don't think it's fair, they're not doing anything wrong, it's me who has the problem. So we put them in the greenhouse where it's warm, dry and full of flies so they don't bother trying to get back in the house. Works a treat, putting them outside the door just means they come straight back in. I got myself some Spider Spray (although mine was a different one from Lakeland) and I'm trying that out. Conkers really do work so hopefully this will. I should add one of my cousins does that hypnosis-y thing for phobias, but I won't do it as I would never want spiders crawling about on me so don't see the point. I love earwigs to bits but don't go to sleep until I've caught them if they're in my room. So I don't see that being 'cured' would really help me. I feel I'm tempting fate with this one, but here goes anyway. I spider-proofed my entire room after getting sick of having spiders there at night, stopping me sleeping. I went round and sealed up every possible hole they could hide and breed in, got myself a draught excluder thing which is attached to the bottom of the door. Then shut my door every night before it got dark (and as soon as I went out just in case I was out late). I never leave my windows open unattended, especially not if it's getting dark. It took a few months, but it's been spider free ever since. Here's hoping it stays that way! [edit]With the bug vacuum things don't get the small battery one (it's blue), we got one and it's piss poor. It just tickles them slightly.[/edit]
OK, the psychologist is in... First: phobias are common and lie on a sliding scale with dislike, discomfort, mild fear to outright panic. About 9 to 18% of the population has a phobia or other. Phobias are only partly learned. They are also partly wired. This is why people tend to have fears of things that could be, or would in prehistoric times be dangerous. Think snakes, bugs, dogs, darkness, feeling trapped (confined spaces), deep water (drowning) etc. Very few people have a phobia of fluffy rabbits (yeah, I know there was Freud's experiment with 'little Hans' but that was induced and didn't generalise in a phobia as nicely as he liked to have people believe). There is only one recorded phobia of chocolate. Phobias are irrational. You do not have to be able to recall how you learned it --which in any case may be small, cumulated experiences rather than one traumatic event. You cannot reason with them --they happen in the Amygdala and Hippocampus rather than the frontal lobes of the brain which does all the reasoning, and has no direct connections to the former areas. Phobias are instinctual survival responses. Phobias are self-reinforcing. After a while you become phobic of the panic itself. The spider is now just the trigger of the expectation that you will panic, and that, paradoxically, makes you panic, thus neatly reinforcing the learned association. It is not about the spider any more. The most successful treatment for phobias is systematic desensitisation and graded exposure: the instinctual part of the brain learning by experience that the phobic object/situation is not harmful. The instant steam-hammer approach is 'flooding': confrontation with the phobic object until the panic inevitably winds down (panic always does wind down --there are neurological circuits to ensure that happens before you burn out). So the remedy is: gradually expose yourself to spiders: increasingly large ones, at reducing distances while learning to control the physiological correlates of your panic, such as rapid breath and muscle tension, through relaxation. There are other methods like hypnosis and NLP techniques mentioned above that can help but basically do the same thing.
This gives me images that, while hilarious, are massively wrong and would traumatise the poor spiders NLP: "sneaky ways to influence people doesn't sound quite as catchy"...
As much as I would love to be able to get to the point where I could, say, find a spider on my hand and just get rid of it, the thought of it makes my skin itch. Hell, even just typing about spiders right now is making me have to check my shoulders and arms every now and again. I guess it would be nice to get to the point where I can either paper and cup them away, or crush them with something with no panic. Crushing them is fine by me. They should know better than to come to the spider graveyard that is my walls. What I really need is some kind of cup-and-paper-on-a-stick device. Anyone got Wallace and Gromit's number?
You need a spider catcher. I got one for my other half and it actually works and it does not harm them.
I have one of those, and like a grabby scoop thing on a pole and a smaller cup on a stick with a sliding lid. Always end up using a plastic pint 'glass' and a bit of card though.
I sometimes imagine that spiders have to see a spider therapist for human phobia. "There was this big pink thing, and it just wouldn't stop screaming..." The 'inventor' of NLP, Richard Bandler, once admitted that he just thought up the name on the spur of the moment when a policeman who had pulled him over for speeding asked him what his job was and he wanted something more impressive-sounding than "I'm just dabbling a bit in therapy and hypnosis".
I'm actually claustrophilic (I love small spaces) and feel uncomfortable in massive open spaces without trees etc. Weird
I actually kinda like spiders, although I am talking about the kind of spiders we have in England, a bit puny to everywhere else in the world. My biggest phobia is definitely heights, but serious amounts of height like at the very top of a tower block or staring off the edge of a really tall cliff.
My fear of heights leaves me a bit scared just thinking of climbing a ladder or standing on a roof. Just knowing that it'll terrify me is scary enough! But that's why I do a lot of hiking/climbing/skiing. Some of the very steep slopes and cliffs terrify me but overcoming that fear one instance at a time slowly helps break down the whole fear of heights. Crossing snow fields always makes me think I'll slip and slide down until I hit a tree and die, but once I'm across one the rest aren't so bad! And then on later trips the first isn't even too bad. Of course, some of them end up being the "steam-hammer" approach, such as "crossing this is literally the only way home, so nut up or shut up", but those do help!
