A couple days ago, I had just began to shampoo my hair when I saw a spider dangling under the faucet, struggling to hold on to its filament.
My heart started racing and I had one foot out of the tub before I started reviewing my options—I could end my shower now, covered in suds. I could try and wash the spider down the drain. I could yell for my boyfriend.
I stood there, frozen in indecision and embarrassment, my eyes never leaving the spider.
Irrational fears are hallmarks of humanity. No other creature is afraid of something without a logical reason—even my cat’s fear of vacuum cleaners makes more sense than my arachnophobia. My fear of spiders isn’t limited to black widows and brown recluses. I’m just as terrified of a wolf spider or a daddy long legs (it’s not technically a spider, but it’s close enough for me.) I’m not afraid that a spider will bite or poison me. It’s the sinister aesthetic of the spider that terrorizes me. The bend and movement of those legs screams pure malice and makes a spider look like a demonic hand.
I always thought phobias were limited to people who were perhaps a little off-kilter already, but they’re not. Most phobias start in childhood between ages 4-8. Some are inherited, as we tend to fear what others, particularly our parents, fear, but most, like mine, are learned from unpleasant experiences. The origin of my arachnophobia, then, is fairly typical: one day in elementary school, while standing against the brick wall of the school serving lunch detention, I gradually became aware of something in my mouth. I figured it was a leftover morsel from lunch and spit it into my hand where it unfurled into a spider, those legs emerging from what seemed like a wet crumb.
Who wouldn’t be freaked out by that? But I had no idea that the incident would develop into uncontrollable fear. Being afraid of spiders or snakes or heights isn’t necessarily unreasonable—on a basic level, these fears are helpful to survival. What distinguishes phobias from reasonable fears is the pervasive anxiety, the escalation into panic, or the changing of behavior. Many phobias, like mine, are learned, while some are inherited, as we tend to fear what others, particularly our parents, fear. Other times a perfectly reasonable or natural fear becomes exaggerated by the mind, causing a kind of mental misfire. Even though it’s a common technique for dealing with fear, avoidance can also cause a fear to become a phobia. I’m not exactly sure when my fear became a full-blown phobia, but by the time I graduated high school, I surveyed the corners of every room and if I saw something that could conceivably be a spider, I couldn’t stay.
Once, in college, I was driving to a grocery store late at night and noticed a small white spider running around the perimeter of my rearview mirror. InstinctivelyI threw the car into park and jumped out, leaving the car on the street, door open, still running. I ran to the nearest house and knocked on the door. All the while, I kept thinking, this is crazy, but I didn’t stop or slow down. A guy a little older than me answered the door. “There’s a spider in my car,” I said, realizing how I must have sounded. He stared at me. “I’m afraid of spiders,” I said, deeply embarrassed to be the distressed damsel. “Would you please get it for me?”
To his credit, he didn’t do anything creepy or mean—he didn’t even laugh at me. He walked out to my car where I pointed to the spider and he grabbed at it. “Did you get it?” I asked.
“It fell,” he said.
“You have to find it,” I said, panicked, my throat closing behind the words. “Please.”
I stood on the street while this strange man pawed around until he found—or claimed to find—the spider. I thanked him profusely and got back in. On the way to and from the grocery store I felt spiders crawling all over me. I swiped at my legs as though to knock them off. Later I played the story for laughs, but the incident made me feel crazy. I could sympathize with agoraphobes, germophobes, coulrophobes (clowns), and even metrophobes (poetry).
Irrational fear works in a cycle. I constantly scolded myself for my reactions; the resulting shame was almost as big a source of anxiety as the fear itself. Encountering a spider triggered a landslide of fear-reinforcing negativity, and my arachnophobia intensified as I struggled with the idea that my brain could be so irrational. My arachnophobia was a constant reminder of my imperfections and became synonymous with my fear and shame of being deeply flawed. After a while, they both seemed equally inescapable. Trapped in this cycle, my phobia worsened.
After graduation, I traveled to Europe and stayed at a hostel in the remote wilderness of Western Ireland where spiders clustered in the corners of every room, inside the overhead lights, and over every doorway. My travelling companion, Mike, spider-proofed our room, releasing a half-dozen out the window. Had there been another hostel within 50 miles, I’d have sprinted away. It was my version of hell.
In the middle of the night I went to the bathroom and saw two big spiders pop out of the shower drain. Their sudden emergence triggered something in my brain. I was sure there were thousands of them ready to crawl up into the sink and the shower, to pour from the faucets. I had a full-blown panic attack. Mike, who had known me for years, had never seen me like this—no one ever had. He was scared, and I couldn’t blame him. A part of my brain managed to untangle itself from the consuming terror and ask, is this really me? This quivering mess of a person, unhinged by something normal people step on without thinking twice?
I blocked the shower drain with a hardcover copy of Madame Bovary, but I was on their turf. I crawled into my sleepsack and felt them all over me. I shook my sack out three times that sleepness night, increasingly aware that the spiders weren’t the problem—my brain was.
Roughly half of Americans have some kind of mild phobia and anywhere from 8-18% have diagnosable phobias—an exact number is impossible to deduce, as embarrassment begets silence and many never seek treatment. Women seem to be more susceptible to phobias than men. The “if you can think of it, someone has it” concept applies. People fear everything from the number 8 to air to cotton balls. As I peruse this list of phobias, a voice in my head still says, “fear of Northern Lights? That’s crazy!” Which, I suppose, is exactly the point: cue judgment and shame.
I thought about getting treatment, but there always seemed to be bigger problems to solve. I considered exposure therapy, a graduated and monitored contact with the fear. Generally, a patient learns more about the fear (how rare it actually is to die from a snake bite, for example), then imagines the feared scenario, then encounters the feared scenario. For me, this would mean coexisting with a spider, and then eventually touching one or letting one crawl on me. The thought of this still spikes the hairs on the back of my neck. I didn’t go this route is because I’ve never feared a poisonous spider bite. I also find spiders fascinating—while I get the heeby jeebies, I can watch nature documentaries about them. My brain knows they’re on television, not in the room with me. That all changes once we’re sharing the same space.
Early-life phobias often abate over time, as mine did. Life helped too. I moved to New York City on September 8, 2001. Suddenly, there were very rational things to be afraid of. In NYC I lived above a grocery store and many opportunistic creepy crawlies emerged from cracks in the floorboards. My cat took a liking to cockroaches and regularly deposited them, alive, in my shoes or in my purse. I’m not afraid of cockroaches, but I don’t enjoy them, and finding them in unexpected places was startling enough to momentarily tap into the panic I felt when I saw a spider. But I learned to live with the surprises she left me. This was, in a sense, my own version of exposure therapy. Travel helped too, especially to Central and South America, where gigantic and terrifying insects are a fact of life. I slept under netting, used copious amounts of DDT, and sometimes I forgot to scan the walls of rooms and tents. It may seem like a small step, but the lack of anxiety was profound. It’s similar to the way feeling normal after an illness seems like a miracle.
Another miracle is choice. As I stood with one foot out of the tub, I couldn’t eliminate my fear, but I could decide how much to let it affect me. I didn’t linger and I kept my eye on the spider, but I finished my shower. Eventually it got lost in the suds, which prompted a brief wave of panic—the only thing worse than seeing a spider is seeing the empty place where it just was—but by then it was time to turn off the water. As I toweled off, I didn’t look into the tub. I didn’t even wonder if I’d encounter the spider again the next day. I simply dried off like a normal person, with perhaps a touch more pride.
Tags: health, joelle renstrom, mental health, phobias, spiders
Uh yes. I feel your feels. I found a tiny nest of spiders in my fireplace and seriously considered burning the house down like that guy in the news recently. People say oh they are harmless, more afraid of you, etc and I say I KNOW that is why it is a PHOBIA and not a super rational fear of a terrible thing! I’m aware it’s ridiculous, thanks. I live alone so I have to manage this phobia and kill spiders without resorting to fire, so it has gotten…marginally better? HOWEVER:
I once saw a giant spider on my visor while driving, and pulled the car over on the side of the road to Deal With This. Couldn’t find it. Got back in, started driving, and the motherfucker popped back out again like HEY YEAH I AM STILL HERE FRIEND. Called my stepdad (I was nearby, thank god) and he came out and found it and killed it for me. Insane? YES. But I also knew if I kept driving and that fucker peeked out again, I’d wreck the car trying to kill it or escape from it and I didn’t want to hurt anyone else because SPIDERS ARE THE DEVIL and the world won’t admit it.
There was also the time I was at a drive through with my window down, waiting, and a spider dropped down on a web in front of the window so I made a lot of screaming sounds and threw a half full can of soda at it, knocking it into oblivion. Then realized the people in the car behind me just saw me start screaming like mad, flail wildly, and throw a full soda out of my window for apparently no reason. So I hope that was fun for them.
Yes to all of this. I think so, anyway. Honestly I didn’t read the first few paragraphs because I couldn’t stand to see, even peripherally, that gif of Homer with the spiders. Everything after the paragraph with “limited to people who were perhaps a little off-kilter” was spot-on, though.
SAME. That gif!!!! D:
I’m glad you were able to overcome your phobia some!
It’s really hard. My parents tried exposure therapy for me with my beach phobia, but it didn’t work, because they/the therapist couldn’t pinpoint exactly what about a beach gave me panic attacks (it started with just the sand, but now it’s as much the wide openness and the smell of salt water – I have to have a physical barrier between me and the “beach” to be at ease, and the smell of coconut oil makes me anxious. it’s awkward because i live in a beach town and used to live 3 blocks from the beach itself, and i LOVE going out on the river and lakes, where i can see the opposite shore)
My sister is getting married on the beach in December and was very sweet and thought about ways to let me be there without triggering my phobia. She said “it will be cool, so you can wear dress slacks and boots!” and “it’s a beach with lots of driftwood and rocks!” but she didn’t realize about the openness or the smell. I felt awful to have to tell her. And I keep thinking “oh, it’s really not a bad phobia, just me expecting it so it happens” and I try to go close, but nope.
Our compromise is that she’ll put me in charge of setting up the reception, so that I have a reason to not be at the beach, and I hate religious ceremonies anyway (also highly stressful/anxiety-inducing!).
Now, if only we could work out a compromise so I could go to the dentist for the first time in 6 years… Last time, they PROMISED that the sedative would help, but it didn’t, and I remembered everything, and just thinking about calling dental places to find out what they offer for phobic people is enough to put me on the path to a panic attack.
Anyway, my phobias and not-yet-phobias-thank-god are related to the sensory integration problems I had as a child, and in some ways still have, and feeling trapped/helpless in the face of them. Weirdly, when I was very young, I liked the beach and looked forward to going. But I never liked the sand, or having to wait until the rest of my family was ready to leave, and I always wanted to go long before they were ready.
WEIRDEST PHOBIA THREAD
For the oddest phobia you have had or encountered. Mine always goes to the housemate who was afraid of mushrooms. She was perfectly reasonable about it – she didn’t ask that we never bring mushrooms into the house, but we designated an opaque drawer in the fridge as the “mushroom drawer” and she just never opened it.
Once I made a portobello mushroom sandwich and left the stem in the trash can, not, I admit, thinking it through, since she was not in the house at the time. She came home hours later, went to throw something away, let out a shriek and BOLTED to the other side of the house, begging me to please, please cover the mushroom stem. She was completely fine once I put a paper towel over it.
She also was unafraid to eat mushrooms? Like, mushroom bisque or mushroom broth was fine. It was SEEING them.
That is a different one! I knew a guy with a phobia of spoons and peanut butter. (He wasn’t allergic, just really hated peanut butter. Not sure what the problem with spoons was.)
My own weird one, that is fortunately quite avoidable, is snorkeling/scuba diving, sort of. I saw sort of, because it’s really something about seeing the ocean floor and being above it and it’s all just … disturbing. It’s like a mix of claustrophobia with the limited oxygen and agoraphobia with the wide-open, freakish ocean. My husband convinced me to go snorkeling a couple years back, and it ended with me having to frantically paddle to shore, where I sat, convinced that he was out there getting mangled. (He was literally feet from land.)
I wouldn’t say I have a phobia but I tried snorkeling in a very controlled environment once–at an amusement park!–and my brain just nope-d me right out of the pool. The part of me that understood I would still be able to breathe just was not communicating with the rest of me.
The one time I went snorkeling, I spent the first ten minutes clinging with a death grip to the side of the boat and trying to put my face in the water and breathe at the same time. Every time I cautiously dipped my face down my lungs said NOPE THIS IS WATER AND YOU CAN’T BREATHE WATER and seized up. Eventually my brain got through to my lungs and I was able to snorkel, but it took a while to calm down in between attempts. The don’t-drown instinct is strong!
I went snorkeling once while my family scuba-dove and I spent the whole two hours or however long petrified. Not really of the act of snorkeling, mostly I was afraid of big fish. At one point I literally jumped out of the water and over my partner (a very nice old man named Larry) to avoid what I thought was a shark but was really a harmless tarpon.
I just think I have too much respect for the ocean and its inhabitants to think I’m safe in open water.
Is it weird that I have a phobia about flossing my teeth? It seems PERFECTLY NORMAL to me, but it might be weird. I don’t know!
I can pinpoint where it came from, too: my mom used dental floss to pull out my baby teeth before they were entirely ready to come out on their own (or so I believe). She made me lie in her lap, kind of, and used her legs to hold my head in place. I can’t floss my teeth properly without being utterly convinced they will all fall out. I’ve tried to do it, but I wimp out and can never do all my teeth or anything before I get convinced that I’m making it all worse and have to stop right now. Actually, just talking about my teeth and dentists here is getting me pretty anxious so I’m going to go take a shower now.
(I have really bad dental hygiene as a result and it’s embarrassing as hell, but literally the only way to make it better would be to make me completely unconscious and having someone else do it for me. But I can’ t know. If I know why I’m being given anesthesia, I STILL panic, and then wake up panicked and the association that triggers the phobia expands. This is experience talking.)
Weird question–have you tried a waterpik or does that give you the same icks? I’m not freaked about flossing I just prefer to do it with a jet stream of water (feels cleaner/ easier/ weirdly soothing)
Different icks. The sound it makes is kind of unbearable. My dad got me one when I was a kid, but I could never bring myself to use it because as soon as I turned it on, I needed to turn it off.
I might be able to manage it better now that I’m an adult and have mitigated many of my sensory integration issues (never a full-blown Disorder, but not Normal, either), but I don’t fancy spending the money on a machine and never using it. My dental hygiene phobias are deep, and I shy away from even thinking about things related to it, sometimes, even if it’s things that would help. Irrational and stupid, but. 🙁
I didn’t even think about the sound! D: Sorry! Best wishes!
Haha, no worries! I’m just a giant ball of dumb anxiety and sensory issues.
That sounds AWFUL. I’m so sorry you had to go through that! I’d have a phobia of flossing too if that was how I was introduced to it!
Moths. I freak right the eff out around moths, even little tiny ones. No idea where that comes from. Something about their jerky, uncontrolled-seeming flight horrifies me, but I also hate them when they are still, or even dead!
A former girlfriend of mine has a phobia of butterflies (I’m assuming it extends to moths too). I had wanted to take her on a romantic date to the botanical gardens because every spring they have this “thousands of butterflies loose in the greenhouse!” event, but that did not go over well.
She’s not alone. I turn into a quivering mass of freakout around anything in the lepidoptera department. It’s the markings for me, I think. Anything with spots on it is wrong, but these guys are WRONGITY WRONG WRONG. I cannot look at photos of them. I cannot touch a book if I know there are photos of them in there. I am terrifying myself just writing about this.
One of the many things that confirmed that Spouse is The One for me was early in our relationship, when he found out about this phobia the hard way on a hike, and instead of thinking it was even vaguely ridiculous, he shooed the thing away and wrapped his arms around me in a comforting fashion until I could breathe again.
True love— it happens. It’s wonderful.
My friend is afraid of whales—none of us knew until we went to go see Life of Pi together. That beautiful nighttime scene with all the cool animation and the underwater shots happened to include a whale, so that was the end of that. It’s weird what random things stick inside your brain and give it the creeps.
Also terrified of whales, over here. I refuse to watch Life of Pi because the scene with the whale was in the preview, and I freaked the hell out in the movie theater. I’ve had this fear since childhood- watching Pinocchio was traumatic, and I don’t like those insurance commercials with the whales jumping about. Uuugggh, so scary.
OH MY GOD. Me too, and everyone always makes fun of me for it 🙁 Maybe it was watching Pinocchio or Fantasia as a child, but now it’s like…the whole idea of something THAT BIG in the water, and not being able to see all of it…ugh. I dunno.
I’m currently planning a vacation and found a tour itinerary that looked 90% fabulous, and then the last day was entirely a whale-watching tour. NOPENOPENOPE.
I had a roommate who was afraid of many things crowded together. Like a bunch of sheep on a hill or a pot full of dumplings. Once I was telling her about March of the Penguins and noted that many minutes of film is just footage of hundreds of penguins walking around, and she put a hand up to stop me. Too many penguins, didn’t want to hear about it.
I admit that I teased her at the time but many years later, I had some similar experiences. I can’t even remember with what! Could have been anything–a pile of spilled paper clips, a shelf full of identical boxes–but whatever it was, my stomach flipflopped and my chest felt tight, and then I felt really bad about the teasing.
My roommate has a similar issue! For her, it’s a lot of small, randomly distributed things clustered together. Ants swarming an anthill, or spilled rice grains; stuff like that.
Yeah, I have a friend with a similar phobia: little holes in things all clustered together With her, she knows that it stems from a horrible photoshopped photo she refers to as “lotus boob” (which claims to be a photo of a woman who has a larva/insect egg infestation in her breast).
Trypophobia! Lotus boob got a lot of people that way.
I have it to a certain degree (probably not strong enough to be a legit phobia). I’m fine with honeycombs, holes in cheese, coral, etc. but those awful photoshopped pictures make my skin crawl. No matter how obvious and hamfisted the photoshop job is. Just the idea of massive holes in my flesh. Auughghhghghhh.
Trypophobia is a thing! I’m not fully phobic, but I get a little queasy and freaked out when I see irregular round holes in an otherwise smooth surface. I got it through Surinam toads, not lotus boob, but uuuaaaaaauuugh now I am thinking about lotus boob.
*crosses arms over chest* me too
REGULAR OLD lotus seed pods are bad enough. Why do people use that shit in decorating? WHY.
Ok because clusters are HORRIFYING. Just thinking about round holes clustered together makes my skin crawl. Sometimes I freak out thinking about my pores. AGH
I’m freaking out at work right now.
I mean, “freaking out,” I’m hunching my shoulders up and my back itches. You know what I hate? CORAL. Looking at pieces of coral. Holy shit. Or porous bone! Ugh.
I took a job at a fossil shop and didn’t really think it through. I can now handle the coral and bones, but I still cannot look at them for any longer than it takes to identify the piece I’m showing. If anything can make me get over my ‘not making eye contact’ thing, it’s the choice between that or…the clusters.
My sister had a similar reaction – there’s a scene in Miyazaki’s “Ponyo” where her sisters are trying to pop the bubble that she’s been put in and the opening and closing of their mouths freaked her out something fierce.
I once turned around on a statehouse lawn to see a crowd of squirrels standing behind me. They weren’t there before, so they appeared to be organized and after me. It never developed into a phobia but I now see squirrels as something possibly quite sinister and oddly tribal.
Don’t know if it’s weird, but weeds in lakes; you know, when you’re swimming, and you feel them brush up against your legs? GAH!
That is not weird, that is completely sane and rational. They feel alive! Who wouldn’t be afraid of underwater creatures snaking around your legs?
Man, just fuck water, guys. I know some of you may be into the ocean or lakes or whatever but not for me. Nope nope nope. I’ll look at bodies of water from a distance, thankyou.
I’m afraid of monsters in the water 🙁
Like even sometimes when I’m in a swimming pool :((
Pretty much if i can’t touch the bottom, there’s something down there trying to grab me.
I am afraid of all bodies of water where I cannot see the bottom. I am okay if I know exactly what my feet are touching. Cruises freak me right the hell out. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY STRANGE AND TERRIBLE BEASTS ARE UNDER YOU WHEN YOU’RE ON A CRUISE? ALL OF THEM.
Oceans, man. I feel like I’d be okay on one of those beaches where the water is clear enough that you can see all the grains of sand. I’m fine with wading at the edge. But deep ocean is terrifying.
This doesn’t rise to a phobia, but I get nervous whenever I’m swimming over Too Much water. I remember taking swimming lessons as a kid and moving up to the intermediate swimmers class, where we went from the shallow end/middle of the pool (where the water was just barely over my head) to the deep end, and that was Too Much water. I did not continue taking swimming lessons.
Watching Harry Potter #6 did not help me with that problem. AT ALL.
According to divers (who work in underwater construction) I’ve talked to they all get “The Shark” when they work in muddy water, no matter how used they are to it and however sure they are that there are no sharks around. It is the sudden feeling that there is something big behind your back, about to strike. What they DO get, however, are curious eels. They are attracted to the lamps the divers have on their foreheads and will suddenly lunge at them at high speed and then just disappear. I say “curious”, but they might also do it just to be mean.
Do you know what that sound is, princess? Those are the shrieking eels!
For years I had a bizarre fear of “very large objects underwater.” I love whales, I think the ocean and lakes are rad, etc. It only manifested itself in very specific circumstances, like, “looking into a clear lake and seeing an enormous tree down at the bottom” or that picture of the iceberg that’s MASSIVE and craggy underneath and tiny up top.
This is mostly gone away now, but my parents and I figured it stemmed from them taking me to this springs in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan called Kitchitipi, where you tow youself across this incredibly clear spring in a little boat, and you can see all the way to the bottom. I was about three.
Phobias! How do they work??
that’s it! Fear of very large objects underwater! Shipwreck? NO. Amazing singing whales? NO. Kraken or other mythological beasties? FUCK YOU NO
Well maybe a tattoo of a mythological beasty.
ME TOO things underwater are the worst!!! Every summer my family goes to a particular lake in northern Michigan that has this gorgeous clear water and sandy beaches and is basically the best, EXCEPT there is an old car motor from like the 50’s that someone sunk about 30 yards out from the beach in order to use as a boat anchor. It is horrible and slimy and covered in algae and THERE IS A CHAIN ATTACHED TO IT and I was legit terrified of it as a child. I’ve gotten better, but I still avoid it.
I have never personally encountered a shipwreck, but it would def ruin my day.
OMG, this is making my ocean phobia make more sense! Man-made sunken objects in the water are a definite NOPE. The first time I went snorkeling, there was this suspended chain that had probably once held a buoy and ughhhhhh.
I conceptually think shipwrecks are cool and like watching them on TV but I agree that one in real life would be very bad.
For me, it’s large, deep, clear bodies of water with nothing in them. The deep end of an Olympic sized pool, totally empty but for me! I DON’T KNOW, WHY’S IT SO… EMPTY??
I really don’t like things brushing against me in the water, but I’m fine as long as I’m SURE it’s plants. One summer I went to the beach and some storm had brought in a ton of (perfectly harmless, disc-shaped) jellyfish.
I did not want to go in the water.
Yeah, I love water. I love being in water, around water, running my hands through water, you name it. I hope no one ever captures me and thinks that waterboarding is going to be the best way to torture me because I will just die happy.
But if something touches me in the water, I cannot be held responsible for the expletives that come out of my mouth or the people I drown trying to get out. Seashells, seaweed, little nibbly fish, rocks, branches. I am out of the water and dry-docked for the rest of my vacay.
My friend has a phobia of any pendulous movement. Her parents had to get rid of their old grandfather clock because the pendulum slowly moving side to side caused her sincere terror.
I get the mushroom thing though. I wouldn’t call it a phobia as such, but I have a great fear of mushrooms or any fungus growing out of wounds. I’m always worried that any cut or scratch I get will grow moldy and things are just going to start popping out of it even though this has never happened.
I do not mean to undermine your friend’s phobia at all, but I absolutely must know if this applied to erect penises. They are decidedly pendulous.
I have never even considered the possibility of wounds growing MOLD
why is this a thing that you think about
D:
D:
I started having nightmares about it years ago and I have no idea where this idea came from or why it implanted itself in my brain!
I had a nightmare in which I saw my dead body, which had been dumped unceremoniously by a reservoir that I had never seen before. I was looking closely at my legs and feet riddled with holes that a swarm of ants were crawling in and out of as if I were a feast of feasts. Days later, the only bad boyfriend I ever had took me to see a reservoir that looked exactly like the one in that horrible dream.
I took it as an omen and called the F.B.I.. In under a week, a SWAT Team took him away while I was visiting with a friend. I consider that dream to be my friend and will never have a bad boyfriend again.
…Wow. I got chills reading this. I’d like to shake that dream’s hand for delivering you the message, and your hand for swiftly getting yourself out of there! You are badass. Glad you’re safe now. *hugs*
Thanks for that image, Dany. My skin will be crawling all day in you honor.
Mold. I’m mostly ok with mold and fungus in nature as long as I don’t think about it much, but moldy/spoiled food is a big phobia for me. I rarely buy strawberries because I’m worried there’s a moldy one in there that I won’t find until I’ve started eating. STRAWBERRIES ARE SO STRESSFUL.
I’m mostly fine, though. I just try extra hard to use/freeze/throw out food before it goes bad.
One of my friends is afraid of shut closet doors. Open closets are fine, because she can (at least theoretically) see into them, but she can’t sleep in a room with a closed closet door even if the room is too dark for her to see the difference.
Thunder. Not lightning, but just the thunder. Lightning’s pretty. Thunder is horrifying. Sends me into full-blown panic attacks. When it gets stormy, I plug in some awesome earbuds, put on music with some really heavy bass, and shove my face into a book, just hoping that it doesn’t hit close enough to the house to make it shake, because then all bets are off.
Incredibly silly because it’s the bit that can’t hurt me that makes me panic.
I’m not afraid of mushrooms, but the spindly stuff underneath mushroom caps freaks me out. My shoulders are traveling up toward my ears as I type this. I don’t know what that spindly stuff is called or why I hate it, but there it is.
Did you know that the bottom of your tongue looks kind of like that? Don’t look. Once an ear appeared to me to be an organ that should be tucked delicately out of sight I couldn’t stop looking at them.
For some reason, the underside of tongues doesn’t bother me the way the underside of mushrooms does!
They’re called gills, and they are freaky as all get-out. Solidarity.
I know someone who is afraid of like, wads of hair. For instance, if you clean out your hairbrush and you have this ball of wadded up hair. You can chase her around with them! I wouldn’t, of course (OR WOULD I). Long hair on the head = fine. Wads of long hair off the head = NOPE.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m afraid of wads of hair, but I certainly don’t like touching them. Cleaning off a broom after sweeping and cleaning the bathroom drain are my two least favorite household chores.
THIS. No wads of hair must touch me. No hair that doesn’t belong to me and is not currently attached to a living thing must touch me. I rented an apartment a while back and almost passed out when I opened a drawer in the bathroom and found it was full of someone’s beard clippings. (I hope beard. Please let it have been beard.)
Curiously, cat fur does not bother me on as visceral a level.
Birds. I’m terrified of getting them caught in my hair, because then there would be all this frenzied flapping, and aaaaargh.
This has never actually happened, but it regularly appears in my nightmares. I walk around city centres looking askance at all the pigeons, and the thought of Trafalgar Square makes me want to vomit.
Also, my mother is afraid of balloons, which I’ve always found strange. She’s explained it to me before, and apparently it’s because she never knows when one is going to pop & startle her, so she’s just in a constant state of anxiety/anticipation when she’s around balloons. It actually makes sense when I think about it.
I have that. My parents claim that a balloon popped in my face as a baby, which left me scared of loud noises (although I no longer seem to be scared of fireworks, which is good!). I get really anxious around balloons because they could just pop at any time. (It’s worse if a child has a balloon, because they squeeze them and poke them so I feel like it’ll pop any second, and the child will be upset and so will I.)
I have a phobia of alarms (specifically fire alarms). This is supposed to be pretty common for kids but I’m 21 now and alarms still bother me. The round smoke detectors are perfectly fine, but a little box that says “fire” on it with a speaker and a light completely sets the phobia off.
I had so many panic attacks in high school because we had to have a fire drill every month. It got to the point where my poor overworked counselor just sent me a note before there was one each month to pull me out of class. My parents had no idea what to do about all this so they’d just tell me things like “oh, its just for a few minutes, its not that loud” and “wouldn’t you rather everyone be safe from a fire and know what to do” as if I was somehow suggesting that my phobia was more important than fire safety. Luckily, when I went to college, we didn’t have to have drills anymore and my anxiety calmed down a lot.
Its not completely gone though. I went to geology field camp at another university (I actually just got back two days ago!) this summer and I had to stay in their dorms. The first thing I noticed in my room when I walked in was an alarm over the door. I couldn’t sleep that first night because I had a full-blown panic attack. The next morning, my dad (after some complaining about “you still have that alarm thing? I thought you outgrew it”) put a cardboard box over the alarm and the panic magically went away. I still knew the alarm was there, but it didn’t trigger my phobia. And it worked for the five weeks I was there! I still think its hilarious that it worked (and also I’m super relieved).
Brains are so weird.
I was petrified of fire alarms/drills when I was a kid. In kindergarten, they would warn us before it would happen and I would go lock myself in the bathroom to be alone with my anxiety. 🙁
I’m scared of mascots/costumed characters like the Easter Bunny. If the head is covered, MAKE IT STAY AWAY. I’m afraid they will “get me.”
I have a fear of cannibalism, which obviously I will almost certainly never have to face in real life. But conversations or jokes about it, or even vague references to it in books or movies, can set me into panic mode. If it comes up in conversation (which happens more than you’d think?), and the people involved won’t change the subject, I just have to leave the room. I’ll get nauseous and have trouble breathing. I will even sometimes ask a friend to check the plot summary of movies to make sure they’re “safe” before I’ll watch them, but I’m still sometimes caught by surprise. I haven’t seen this on any list of phobias, and trying to do any more research than that makes me feel panicky, so for all I know I’m the only one… but I can’t be the only one, can I?
posting my first comment to say this but: TAXIDERMY. i’ve had a phobia of taxidermy animals since i was at least 2. my dad remembers bringing me to a wedding at an elk’s lodge or somesuch and there being a giant moosehead over the stairs and i burst into tears and wouldn’t look at it at all.
i’ve been actively trying to rid myself of it, and it’s gotten to the point where i can totally deal with small pieces of taxidermy and birds (i even considered buying a really beautiful pheasant because exposure therapy and also because it was beautiful). horns/antlers are ok, although my grandfather had a four foot pair of bull horns in their guest room when i was growing up and i hated them then. anything particularly large or close to me is a huge no–basically, if i feel like i’ll turn a corner and it’ll be there, i can’t deal. often i try to look at images of big game trophies on ebay to try to get used to seeing it. if i see it from far away and can acclimate myself, it’s usually ok–i walked straight up to three elk heads at a flea market and felt that was a crowning achievement in my day.
i’ve never been able to explain it and i’ve never met anyone with the same fear.
I will not say I have a phobia, but we recently had mice in my apartment and I was just so embarrassed of how I reacted to them. This was very comforting to read. I saw one when I was home alone and I was just sobbing. I couldn’t sleep, I had a constant tinge or pain in my chest any time I was home.
But if I were sitting at work, it all seemed so FINE. “I can deal with mice, just a cute little mouse, looking for food, poor mouse. I am so tired, I can sleep no problem.”
I’m sorry, I had to stop reading at “wet crumb.” I’m going to go vomit and freak out all day now–thanks so much.
My brain knows they’re on television, not in the room with me.
That piques my interest: I wonder how your brain distinguishes between a phobic trigger in the room and a phobic trigger on a screen.
My mind does not, and that’s a problem since I’ve been writing a story that involves researching the thing that triggers my phobia, which means I’ll be reading and scrolling and reading and scrolling and BAM BIG CLOSE-UP PHOTO that makes my heart start thrumming like a faulty engine.
My mind doesn’t either. I have never seen a narwhal in person (and hope to god, I never do) but just thinking about them/ typing the word/ seeing a photo of one I start sweating/ feeling uncomfortable/ hyperventilating.
It’s weird!
I have absolutely 0 issues looking at a beach through a window or from the deck of a boat or on TV. But put me physically there and I am DONE. GONE. Driving along the open waterfront in Milwaukee or standing in a park that overlooks the lake? Fine. But going down to the lakeshore itself? Nope!
But even show me a drawing of a dentist’s chair or hearing an advertisement for dentists and teeth-whitening on the radio means I need to get away RIGHT NOW and stop thinking about it. (And yet when topics about phobias come up, I can’t stop talking about mine and getting myself keyed up. Great logic there, keri.)
I have no idea why one is triggered so much more abstractly than the other, since the root causes of the two phobias are almost identical. Maybe there are so many more images of beaches out there, and it’s not an inherently terrifying thing, the way dental work is?
Mine’s a sound-based phobia (thunder), but I have no issues when it’s in the movies, or TV, or music. Yay for weird brain quirks?
It used to be possible to turn off images in web browsers. I suspect it’s not in the standard easy-to-use settings anymore, but it looks like there are add-ons to turn off images, at least for Firefox.
THE WORST.
I really appreciated this article! Ugh yes, spiders are sent straight from the depths of hell and I don’t understand people who aren’t bothered! (though thank GOD for them and their magical powers). I’ve met multiple sets of new neighbours by asking them to enter my home and remove spiders from various places, at all times of day and night.
It’s a complete mental block when I encounter one – just an immediate NOPE and leaving the room til its gone – can’t hoover it, can’t cup it, can’t wait for it to go, can’t do anything except avoid, avoid, avoid. Pictures of them give me the same reaction, and to be honest I don’t even like the word because of what’s associated with it. One of the worst experiences was when the largest spider I have ever seen blocked my way to the door of the room when I was home alone – I stood in the corner of the room and hyperventilated and cried. I’ve NEVER been so panicked.
HOWEVER it is fortunate that this phobia is at least fairly common and understood (though I and the writer of the article seem to have extreme versions). It must be even tougher fearing something that seems completely innocuous like buttons or ketchup (as friends do).
I deeply admire your chillness about cockroaches. I grew up in a marshy, humid city and it was common for cockroaches–the big kind, not the small infesty kind–to just saunter into the house because they were flooded out of the ground. They could be anywhere: usually on the floor but sometimes on the ceiling, in a silverware drawer, between my pillows. I would kill and clean up after them, but I never, never got to be cool about this. Never will. And last time I saw a cockroach in my apartment in Philly (like six years ago) I got on a train and left town (to spend the night at my boyfriend’s, but still), so I don’t know if I’d call that a phobia but there you go.
Palmetto bugs, perhaps? The ones that fly?
My sister used to have a phobia about them, from when one flew up her dress when she was five, but I think she’s managed to get it down to mostly just extreme dislike and hatred rather than debilitating fear. I mean, we live in Florida. The things are endemic.
They are not fun. I don’t think anyone is 100% cool with them, even if we manage to keep our heads while removing them from our immediate presence.
I do not recommend clicking this link, but if you do, it will show a picture of a bug that is all too familiar to me, and the wiki page briefly distinguishes these guys from palmetto bugs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cockroach
To be fair, I looked up palmetto bugs and definitely would not want want of those up my dress either. *shudder*
Oh, wow!
I had no idea there were TWO DIFFERENT SPECIES in Florida. I knew that our typical ones aren’t the ones you get up north, at least.
I learned something today!
I’m one of those weird people who doesn’t have bug-phobias (except for earwigs) and doesn’t really mind them, as long as they aren’t in my personal living space, like on my pillow or near my food. Or unless they’re poisonous/venomous.
I’d rather not have to deal with them, because gross, and I refuse to touch them barehanded, but I’m the one who gets called to remove them from the premises around here. My stepdad has a mild phobia for your ordinary lizard, and our back porch has a little infestation, so I get to deal with them, too.
I guess I don’t mind roaches too much, I’ve only encountered them recently in Southern CA. They just look like little beetles to me.
But then one day there was one inside the roll of toilet paper, I shit you not (hehe), of course I screeched and shook it out, then, after I was dressed and running out of the bathroom to get something to smash it with, it fucking FLIED UP INTO THE AIR.
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE
The worst part about cockroaches flying is that they cannot steer. They can’t, for example, fly away from you, which is no doubt what they’d prefer to do. The best they can do is a sort of controlled falling, but frantically getting away from a human who is equally frantically trying to get away is not the ideal circumstance for this, and they may well land on you even though they and you both very much wish this would not happen.
*catches a ride on the NOPE train outta town*
*screaming forever*
Aaaaagh cockroaches. They are SO TERRIBLE. I feel similar to you — I don’t know that my reaction to them quite qualifies as a phobia, but just thinking about them gives me the shuddery creeping horrors.
TRAUMATIC COCKROACH STORY BELOW, DO NOT READ IF ALREADY FEARFUL ABOUT COCKROACHES
I’ve always been terrified of them, but it got much worse in high school, when I got a ride home from somewhere with a friend of a friend whose car turned out to be infested with small roaches. I was sitting in the backseat with another girl, and she and I were chatting when we had this sudden, simultaneous realization that the backpacks we’d set down on the floorboards were covered in tiny roaches. And then that we ourselves were covered in tiny roaches. I somehow held on until we got to the other girl’s house, which was closer, but as soon as the car stopped I was out, on the sidewalk, shrieking and hyperventilating. I did not speak to the dude whose car it was again.
Why did I read it. You told me not to read it. I read it anyway. Why. Why did I do that. WHAT WAS I THINKING?
If you don’t mind spiders on TV, I recommend you go to youtube and look for “the spider who couldn’t hide”, it is probably the cutest non-puppy thing I’ve ever seen.
I can’t see you, you can’t see me, I am hidden. My favorite!
I lived in a city that has a ton spiders for awhile and I got to the point where I could get close enough to kill them if they were small enough (or knock them into the bathtub with a broom if they were the ones with tiny bodies and really thin legs). Anything bigger than nickel or the kind with fat bodies and pointy legs I cannot deal with. I once put a boot on the end of a stick to kill one from a distance.
I haven’t had to deal with them for over two years though, so I think any sort of exposure benefits are probably shot to hell.
I have a phobia–maybe a semi-phobia–of talking on the phone, and answering the phone, and most things to do with phone calls. It’s better than it used to be, at least. I remember being a young teenager and we were going to order a pizza for dinner, and my brother told me it was my turn to call in the order; I walked around with the phone in my hand for half an hour sobbing with fear and trying to work up the courage to dial the numbers. That doesn’t usually happen anymore, but it also took me multiple years to schedule my first appointment with a therapist because I kept avoiding making that first intake phone call. I can talk to my parents okay, but something about being on the phone with most people, especially someone I don’t know, makes my mind go completely blank.
I don’t have a phone phobia, but my social anxiety can sometimes make phone calls very difficult. I have no problem answering my work phone because there’s pretty much a finite set of things that can happen during a work call, but I’ve pretty much eliminated phone calls from every other aspect of my life. ZocDoc and Seamless are lifesavers.
Oh my god the inhumanity of CALLING FOR A PIZZA. I have a very similar memory of crying with the phone in my hand because I was hungry but the idea of actually making the call was insurmountably awful. SEAMLESS 4EVER.
Oh god, phones. I don’t remember having a problem with them when I was a kid (I had my own phone in my room, in fact), but by the time I was in college, I was seriously phone-averse. I’ve gotten better and can actually initiate calls without more than an hour of active avoidance most days, but it’s still hard. In my case, I know it’s connected to anxiety issues.
I actually think it’s pretty common. My first semester in college, a friend and I had a really long standoff over who was going to order the pizza we both wanted because neither of us wanted to call for it. We ended up trying out the newfangled online ordering system one chain had, so we got a pizza… but I very much suspect that had it been just a few months earlier, we would’ve ended up hungry that night.
My people! My friends always laughed at me a bit about how much I hated phones…I definitely made them always call for pizza!
I still actively avoid making phone calls when I can, though if it’s unavoidable, I’ll do it, but not before procrastinating about it for ages.
I am finally, finally 90% okay with making phone calls (although if anyone had told me that my career required talking on the phone so damn much, I would have picked a different one. Not kidding). I’m about 95% sure that it’s because at this point I pretty much know how the phone call is going to go- the OMG anything could happen what if I don’t know what to do? feeling doesn’t win so much. And I can totally deal with customer service people since they have a script, so I have a script. I still make my husband call to order chinese food, though.
On the other hand, I’ve developed this delightful verbal tick of not being able to say my name properly in the sentence “hello, this is (my name)” when answering the phone so…tradeoffs, I guess. (Weirdly, the only time recently where this wasn’t a problem was when I was waiting for the call to negotiate my job offer- answered perfectly for that one. Do not understand).
I don’t know if this is the same as arachnophobia or something different, but:
On top of your run-of-the-mill aversion to spiders (they don’t cause panic attacks, I just can’t get too close to one), I somewhat frequently have anxiety dreams about them. Usually, I dream that I am lying in bed and a giant spider lowers itself in front of me from a web it has apparently spun on my ceiling. This is particularly distressing because it’s hard to tell the difference between dreams and reality when you’ve just had a dream about lying in bed.
These dreams have caused me to jump out of bed and run screaming into my living room, waking up my poor roommates. Usually I have to talk myself out of a panic by reminding myself that I don’t live in a climate where spiders that large can exist, so the spider couldn’t have been real.
the spider-lowering-down hallucination is actually a pretty common Thing that happens! I did some research on it a while back because my husband has it periodically, & it took a long time of sleeping next to him before I stopped being all “a spider?! in the bed?!?!? AAAH”! & switched over to “you’re dreaming; go back to sleep.” I think something about seeing the ceiling through your eyelashes reads to your half-asleep brain as “spider.”
also, I’m on a porch & just looked to my left to see a pretty large & weird-looking spider–like a jumping spider but WAY bigger than they usually are–& it definitely freaked me out more than it normally would’ve thanks to all this spidertalk. I may need to go inside now.
AAH GODDAMMIT IT’S GONE WHERE THE HELL DID IT GO?!
Ohhh the ceiling-through-eyelashes thing makes perfect sense!
And I really really hope you track down that spider. D:
no dice. I was pulling up the camera on my phone because it was so unlike anything I’d seen before & then it vanished–I assume it just doesn’t like having its picture taken. (although I also have a “spiders of [state]” page open in another tab right now, which I’m sure will terrify me further as soon as I try to figure out what it was.)
Anxiety? That’s horror, love.
I’ve always assumed our human fears of things like spiders, snakes, heights, thunder and the like are because we’re hardwired to know these things can kill us.
I used to have such an intense fear of spiders that I couldn’t even kill them. That’s abated somewhat, and I can kill the ones that find their way indoors with a beautiful equanimity.
And then I moved south, and I can’t deal with cockroaches. I haven’t been able to kill one yet. I freeze completely, it’s the most awful thing.
Yup. Can’t kill them, because I can’t touch a thing that’s touched ’em. They are repulsive.
I grew up in Texas. The big roaches eat the little ones, but some people are clearly more disturbed by their size. Roach cookies with boric acid work great. When I was a kitchen manager in a student housing coop with a 24/7 open kitchen, 32 residents and some boarders and many guests; the roach cookies killed and killed thoroughly.
Roaches can’t fart and that’s their Achilles tendon— boric acid makes them crawl off and die quietly as their innards explode. There really should be a happy tune about this. Yet, the first thing a roach does when touched by a human is wash itself, which is just one more reason to kill it to preserve your rightful place on the totem pole of life. The nerve of those insects!
a recipe: http://www.windtraveler.net/2012/11/how-to-kill-c…
I just lay down all of the baits and hope they die a horrible evil death. I have found that baits usually do the trick (although if you’re in an apartment complex you have less control over total cockroach death). I put the last round of baits out in my place sopping wet wearing a towel after having one join me in the shower. Nope!
Diatomaceous earth was also a quality investment.
Mine is canoes! Or kayaks. Small wobbly boat things. I can a) swim and b) be in a motorized, larger sized boat without issue. But trying to get in an inflatable raft to float gently down a calm river with my cousins = sobbing and panic.
HELLO EVERYONE let me tell you about the time that baby spiders hatched in my childhood bedroom and blanketed my ceiling with their tiny spider bodies and had to be vacuumed. Off the ceiling. HUNDREDS OF BABY SPIDERS.
I slept in my parents’ office for like a month afterwards and was NEVER THE SAME AGAIN.
Hahahaha yeah no I moved into a place that turned out to have a German cockroach problem last August, IN ADDITION TO the wood/American/Oriental roaches + palmetto bugs that roam North Carolina. When I was starting a brand new Ph.D. program. I had a nervous breakdown and moved to another apartment in mid-September.
The other apartment has a strict and proactive pest control policy. But by mid-October all I could do was sit on the futon in the middle of the room and cry because WHAT IF THEY WERE IN THE WALLS. WHAT IF I GAVE MYSELF CANCER BY SPRAYING CHEMICALS ALL OVER EVERYTHING. WHAT IF THEY ARE JUST WAITING TO COME OUT AND GO UP MY NOSE AND CRAWL ALL OVER ME LIKE THE LILLIPUTIANS FEELING UP GULLIVER. WHAT IF THEY HAVE A COORDINATED PLAN TO FART ALL OVER MY COUNTERS AND GIVE ME DISEASES FROM WHICH I WILL NEVER RECOVER.
Now I have a few anxiety disorder diagnoses and some meds and a therapist! The only roaches I have seen in my apartment since are juvenile, non-infesty, and either have their toes turned up or are about to shuffle off this mortal roachy coil. That’s as close as I plan to get to exposure therapy.
When I’m stressed out I still have to check every speck on the carpet/the walls, though. :/ But it’s better to the point where I catch myself doing that and can check in to see where I’m falling down on my self-care.
My fear of spiders began after seeing a babysitter’s husband covered with bites when I was seven. He had been working in an attic and was swarmed. He suffered a host of neurological problems from the spider venom.
Eventually, I made my peace with house spiders and decided to let one live in its corner by my bed. Still, I had to check repeatedly to see if it was there before I could close my eyes. One night, I was lying on the floor listening to music through my headphones, and caught movement in my peripheral vision. I startled, the spider startled, then we looked at each other briefly before House Spider, Wolf (that’s what I named it) ran to hide under the bed. After that, I starting liking wolf spiders; but the Spider of Horrific! Death that crawled out of an organic banana box while I was working at a hippy grocery store haunts me to this day. I didn’t see where it went. It could be anywhere. It could be standing behind me right now; because spiders live for 25 years or more, don’t they?
Now, I shudder at the Fucking Bastard Spider (that’s what I named it) and the mushrooms that seem to be growing out of every orifice I have right now. Thanks, Dany. I hope this haunts you back.
This is a quibble but I really hate the “humans are the only animal that x” trope. I really don’t think it’s true in this case, and also, why say it?
Otherwise, YES, phobias AND spiders are terrible. One time I wished for a gun to shoot a spider, which may be the most insane thought I’ve ever had.
Watching Harry Potter #6 did not help me with that problem. AT ALL.
They're called gills, and they are freaky as all get-out. Solidarity.
Nucleomituphobic represent! I don’t know what the hypothetical exposure (heh) therapy would be. “Radiation burns aren’t *that* bad, really. Now, let’s drop this small tactical nuke down your street…don’t look at the flash, now!” Uh, no. *pause to gibber* I’m a child of the Cold War, okay? We all thought we were gonna die by ICBM before we were twenty.
I had managed to push my terror to the back of my mind for a couple of decades. Recently, having ordered a highly recommended recent book, I found myself breaking into a cold sweat at the mention of intercontinental strikes and a moonbase armed with nuclear weapons pointed at the Earth. I skipped through the more triggery parts of the book, but had an unpleasant, sleepless night. I have, however, overcome some of my instinctive terror enough that my husband can play Fallout 3 without me leaving the room, and I even enjoyed playing Fallout New Vegas, which is much less post-nuke wasteland and more recovering frontier territory.
I still can’t read “When the Wind Blows”, though. I get sweaty palms just writing this.
My people! My friends always laughed at me a bit about how much I hated phones…I definitely made them always call for pizza!
I still actively avoid making phone calls when I can, though if it's unavoidable, I'll do it, but not before procrastinating about it for ages.
THIS. No wads of hair must touch me. No hair that doesn't belong to me and is not currently attached to a living thing must touch me. I rented an apartment a while back and almost passed out when I opened a drawer in the bathroom and found it was full of someone's beard clippings. (I hope beard. Please let it have been beard.)
Curiously, cat fur does not bother me on as visceral a level.
I HATE having my kneecaps touched out of some irrational fear of my knees dislocating (I can make myself anxious just thinking about it, which I am now, ahhhhhh). My boyfriend doesn’t understand because it’s such a weird fear and I’ve never talked about it in therapy for the same reason. But, dang, IRRATIONAL PHOBIAS man, the worst
Thank you for the serious case of Shudders.
I think the arachnophobia goes back to me at five, sitting on a stool at our old kitchen in Palmdale (read: desert wasteland), when a giant ass spider crawled up my dress.
I haven’t been able to handle them since–any other bug? No big. Cockroaches, pill bugs, june bugs, whatevs. But spiders???
HELL TO THE FUCKING NO.
On my last camping trip, a tarantula showed up, and caused me to levitate about thirty feet into the air.
I may or may not have spent that night in the car, crying.
I feel this so hard, I’ve had a similar experience except with centipedes. I am opposed to spiders but don’t have a phobia of them. centipedes, however, are always occupying some spot in the back of my mind, JUST IN CASE one appears.
I had a breakthrough just last week when I saw one on the wall, a couple feet from the end of my bed as I was lying down about to go to sleep (omg worst nightmare). I did my usual PANIC DANCE, jumped out of bed, got my Centipede Murder Toolkit, then I was like… wait, I could just let it go about its business and eventually disappear, and then I won’t have to deal with its big squishy body, and probably the world won’t end if it’s alive in my apartment, and probably it has no desire to get into my bed with me. then it did disappear somewhere on my window. then I slept soundly. progress!
but now I’m just ever-vigilant for its return, ’cause those things live like 10 years.
I also have a lot of nightmares in which centipedes are inescapable and my loved ones refuse to kill them for me. analyze that. (this paragraph resonated with me a lot: “Irrational fear works in a cycle… My arachnophobia was a constant reminder of my imperfections and became synonymous with my fear and shame of being deeply flawed.”)
Same here! Papaya inners get me bad, and the ubiquity of chia seed 'pudding' makes my skin crawl. Just something about it sets off a "eat that? no, no …….. nooooooo" reaction.
I have a fear of very big things, but only particular things! Whales are cool until I think of the actual size of them, the concept of the megalodon freaks me out, the size of space shuttles (thrusters or the ship themselves).
I don't know why, these things just cause my brain to switch from "ok, normal thing… ok, normal thing a bit bigger… oh God No Too Big PANIC"
I was petrified of fire alarms/drills when I was a kid. In kindergarten, they would warn us before it would happen and I would go lock myself in the bathroom to be alone with my anxiety. 🙁
I’m pretty good with bugs. Size definitely comes into it though; the bigger the spider/cockroach/centipede, the less calm I am about getting rid of it. I found a huge, HUGE spider in my bathroom three or four months ago and it took me half an hour to work up the courage to cup it and throw it out the window. ;___;
While I don’t have any phobias, I’m pretty darn scared of snakes. I remember watching a movie when I was four in which a snake bit a bunch of people and there was lots of screaming and fear and some blood. It was probably a really crap B-movie, but it scared the hell out of me. I can look at them, but I prefer not to see photos and I wouldn’t get close in real life at all. Not even if it’s behind glass in a zoo and completely safe. I don’t understand how people can have them as pets. I visited a friend a few years back and as she drove me to her house, she told me her toddlers had been handling their pet snake (a tiny, perfectly harmless snake) in the car and LOST IT and they hadn’t been able to find it since, so if I saw it could I get it? I actually curled into a ball on the passenger seat and jumped out the minute we stopped at her place. *shudder* Who loses their pet in their car and doesn’t do a serious search for it? WTF.
I really really wanted to read this entire article, but my own arachnophobia is so severe that reading/thinking about spiders for too long makes me paranoid and upset and completely on-edge some times for hours. I read the first couple paragraphs and the last few, though, but I just couldn’t make it through the whole thing. A bit too real, perhaps.
My own phobia has also dulled some as I’ve gotten older, as my parents always said it would, but it still persists pretty badly. I currently have an overturned cup on my bedroom floor with a sign on it that say “Do Not Move – Very Small Spider” its been there for weeks as a warning to people viewing the apartment and its probably dead by now but here we still are. I could probably write a novel of the ridiculous things I’ve done and thought upon encountering spiders. One thing that helps me, somewhat, is being able to recognize how irrational and silly the things I do are. In the sheer and utter terror of the moment anything seems reasonable to do, but years after the fact I can be like yeah ok it is a little hilarious that I was locked in my own bathroom for 45 minutes.
I have also considered therapy but I’ve also just kind of comes to terms with it. This is a part of me and I have come to accept that, and I honestly can’t imagine being any other way. Even if it gets to the point where I can handle them on my own I’m never going to like them, and I don’t really want to. It’s too much my way of life now.