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Personal Note: I get the creepy crawlies just writing about it!
I know, I know. It’s completely irrational, but it’s the truth: I am scared of spiders.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when this irrational fear began. I grew up with a grandma who always named the eight-legged creatures Henry or Fred and taught us how to relocate them outside using a margarine container and a scrap of paper. But later in life, I realized that naming the creatures didn’t make them any less unnerving–especially after awakening at Girl Scout camp to find them crawling on my pillow.
Years later, the sight of one still elicits a less than favorable reaction and my husband has had to serve as “The Exterminator” on more than one occasion in our four years of marriage. Which is why my science teacher husband is now concerned that I might pass this irrational fear on to our children. And considering that my mother’s reactions to spiders are remarkably similar to mine, I’m sure he has a good point.
But, alas, how to overcome such a ridiculous fear without resorting to extreme measures?
back to top37 Comments to “Personal Note: I get the creepy crawlies just writing about it!”
My sister was afraid of spiders. When we lived together it was always my job to kill the spiders. I’m afraid of snakes. One day after she’d moved back in with mom, I came home from a late work shift to find that one of my cats had left a wounded garner snake in my kitchen. Even though it was one o’clock in the morning I called my sister and said “Payback time. Come get this snake out of my kitchen.” And she did.
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Most spiders are harmless. Even beneficial.
Read Charlotte’s Web. That should cure you.
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“ridiculous fear”?? Why do you consider fear of spiders this way? The little suckers can be very dangerous. I don’t know how many types are poisonous. Brown recluse and black widow and how many others? Maybe you should reclassify your “ridiculous fear” as “healthy respect”.
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I guess you could classify it a “ridiculous fear” when you do as my sister did. She once STOOD UP in a canoe to whack a spider with her paddle.
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I don’t have much fear of spiders till they wind up on my face or neck. And then I get pretty irrational…
I really like jumping spiders and wolf spiders though. They have so much character. We had a little jumping spider wandering the kitchen for a couple of weeks, and neither my wife nor I have killed it or taken it out because we liked watching it’s antics.
Kristin,
They say the best way to deal with fear is to confront it.
Maybe you should watch that movie… Arachnaphobia.
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I don’t like big bees. I don’t know that I am scared to death of them but it is close enough. As a kid at YMCA camp, one of the campers was shooting at a hornets nest with a .22 rifle. A boy having stupid fun. It was a really big nest. They stung him to death. They seemed to think that he may have been sensitive to the venom but we saw him stung at least a hundred times too. Seeing that as a kid made me jumpy around big bees, wasps, hornets, etc.
I also do not like big spiders or scorpions either. I got bit on the top of my foot by a brown recluse or a black widow or a scorpion and it made a hole in my foot the size of silver dollar about a half an inch deep. It took nearly 6 months for it to heal back up.
I think being afraid or these things is natural but being able to control it is healthy if not normal. It is best not to tangle with them if it can be avoided.
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Llama,
Big bees are trouble when you are hit with one when riding a bicycle or motorcycle at high speeds…
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kbells,
That’s hilarious. I wonder if she fell out of the canoe?
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Remember Kristin, all those little itches you feel on your skin as you’re going to sleep are NOT spiders. Probably.
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My aunt was extremely afraid of spiders. One day when my sister was 6, she got a frantic call from my aunt to stop by her house on the way to school. When my sister arrived, she found my aunt on a chair in the far corner of the living room, yelling “get that thing out of here!” There was a daddy long legs across the room. My sister picked it up by a leg and took it outside.
I am told that daddy long legs are the most poisonous, but their mouths are too small to bite us. Anyone know if that is true?
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Ever seen a guy at a distance when he walks into a spider web? He’s just bopping along and then totally freaks out for no visible reason. Hilarious.
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A healthy fear can be a good thing. I know someone bit by a brown recluse, also, who was left with a large hole and a lot of doctoring to save her leg. She was diabetic. This is way up here in the northland where we seldom have much that is poisonous in the way of snakes or insects.
My mother was terrified of snakes and we learned to not even mention them around her. None of her children fear them to that extent. We all learn from many different sources, as will your children. Teachers, dad, relatives and friends will all have some input. Therefore, while asking God to give you a healthier view of the little creatures, I wouldn’t worry too much about passing your fear on.
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LOL, KBells4!
I also loathe spiders and have dropped a board on a big one, then stomped all over the board to kill it.
But my particular fear is wasps, and should one get into the house, I tend to hide in one room and let the wasp have the range of the house. I make my sister kill it.
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My mother told me if I went under the house I would be bit by a black widow spider and die. I was five. As a result, I was terrified of the basement–which we accessed through a door in my bedroom because our house was built on the side of a hill.
I’m sure she just didn’t want us rummaging around in there and messing things up, but she planted a fear I have struggled with ever since.
Realizing this as an adult, I made sure my children could recognize black widow spiders–and brown recluse spiders as well (a friend just got out of the hospital after a week on IV antibiotics from a brown recluse spider bite, btw!).
And, even though my husband has told me a million times, “the spider is our friend,” I still vacuum up every web I find. Just can’t deal with them.
Or ants either, but that’s another story . . .
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Mythbusters dealt with the poisonous Daddy Long Legs story. (My husband called, “Come here, Michelle, and watch this one).
I won’t go into the detail of how they extracted the venom, but they concluded it was a myth–a Daddy Long Legs spider can’t kill you.
Thanks be to God.
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I doubt that arachnaphobia is passed on to children. I have a co-worker who is very afraid of spiders – screams for help and backs ten or twenty feet away while someone else gets rid of the offending creature, would absolutely freak out if one landed on her while she was getting in the shower as happened to me last week, would probably cause a major accident if she found one on her in the car. She can’t even stand to see someone touch a picture of a spider. But none of her four children have the same fear.
I had a co-worker at another company who was similarly afraid of snakes. Even a rubber one, after she knew it was fake, still bothered her so much she had to insist it be taken away. (The first co-worker I mentioned has no fear of snakes. She used to have a pet snake and thought nothing of having it coiled around her neck and shoulders. She finally gave it to a zoo when it got too big, six feet long or something like that.)
Everyone has their little quirks, and that’s one of them. It says nothing about the person’s overall character or ability to face fear in other areas of life.
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PeterL, I’ve heard that too but have no idea if it’s true.
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Okay, now you’ve got me winging out on ants . . .
I’m sure it started in my childhood, watching first Them a 1954 sci-fi movie about giant radioactive ants living in the aqueduct near my grandmother’s house! and then grew bigger after seeing Charlton Heston in The Naked Jungle in which a man is eaten alive by army ants! (My husband had to hold my hand during the latest Indiana Jones).
In California as a child, we would get inundated by swarms of ants overnight in the kitchen. You’d leave a clean kitchen and come back in the morning to billions of them crawling everywhere. Raid sprayed like crazy, then wiped up; it gave me the willies.
Running my own home, I could keep things at bay but then we moved to Hawaii–where I had seven different types of ants turning up in my kitchen on a routine basis.
Grit the teeth and clean–though without Raid in my case, I had children. But the worst was an ant’s nest–a boiling, moving, volleyball size mass of ants cropping up over night. I reached for the phone book one morning, and came away with ants everywhere on my arms! I brought the trash can in the house and threw away everything in the cupboard.
And then the morning I found an ant’s nest in the cereal boxes–I ran screaming out into the yard, waking up the children. My husband already having gone to work to keep American safe for democracy, my teenage son had to vacuum them up. I wouldn’t come back into the house until they were gone.
I’m better now.
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Yup. Spiders are FAST…like marsupials. That can be scary. But flies are fast too. They aren’t scary, just annoying…unless it’s the tsetse fly.
I like jumping spiders. They are very cool looking with all those eyes, furriness, and coloring. Plus, generally harmless. They also tend to be quite curious; at least that’s how I interpret their behavior. I recommend getting one on your hand sometime. They’re prettier than flies, and, as Make it Man says, fun to watch.
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I read HOTAIR.COM and, I’m telling you, if they don’t bump that horrid camel spider pic from the page, I WILL throw up. I literally hold my hand on the left side of the page just so I can scroll down and NOT see the wretched thing. I’m with you in the revulsion and cold chills. It’s crazy how much I despise them.
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Kristin- It was my strong desire to not pass on my fear of bugs to my kids that got me over it. You can do it! Take the time to observe them with your little one. They are fascinating- a picture of God’s creativity.
My deal with the insect/arachnid world is that they are welcome to live outside, but not in my house. Step inside my door and I will either escort you out if I can, ot squash you like a… well, like a bug!
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As long as we are on insects—this is a banner year for mosquitoes in our area. Yesterday we finally got a hint that there really is going to be a summer. Several musicians took advantage of the beautiful evening and jammed at the park bandstand. I brought repellent and it was used by several of us. Nevertheless, the music got quite interesting as the night wore on and the mosquitoes increased. I was afraid my husband was going to break his bow by swishing them away. Several of the guys claimed they were big enough to break it, if he hit one.
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Isn’t the mosquito the state bird of Minnesota?
Ants: Taro works great at getting rid of them.
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Agh! Jumping spiders! There you are, innocently typing away on the keyboard and one springs up at you! I run screaming away and the children are heroes: “It’s just a spider, Mom.”
Oh, and the swarming termites twice a year–a friend stood in her kitchen and just held the vacuum cleaner hose up in the air sucking them in for two hours!
We used 37 tubes of calk trying to keep insects out of the house in Hawaii. Still, the scorpions and the stinging centipedes managed to sneak in.
Then there was the night we sat at the dinner table and one of the kids shouted, “look how big the gecko is!” (Geckoes were routine in the house).
Wow, it had doubled in size. Then we looked at each other. What was it eating?
Thank you, American taxpayers, for sending us to the banks of Pearl Harbor. I actually had a wonderful time–other than the fauna.
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I find it odd that spiders, ants, bees etc are all supposed to be just great for the ecology and us. We aren’t supposed to kill these beneficial creatures at all if knew what was good for us. But thankfully for us, even though we kill them almost all the time, we still can’t get rid of them.
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I don’t kill spiders in my home. I figure that they eat insects. If I have insects, the spiders will eat them, and that’s good. If I don’t have insects, the spiders will die on their own.
I do have a fear of black widows, though–we had lots of them in Phoenix. If you walk into their web, you can hear it tear–a very freaky thing when you hear yourself walk into the web of a poisonous spider and you don’t know where the critter is!
In Northern Arizona we had trapdoor spiders–fascinating creatures. One day in Phoenix I saw a particularly hairy wolf spider. I poked it with a stick and the “hair” moved as about 100 babies ran off their mother’s back and scattered. I’ve always been fascinated by animal life, including many insects and spiders (I detest roaches with a passion, and very large beetles like the rain forest ones they have in zoos). But if I had had any fear of spiders at all, I would have screamed when those little ones ran.
When I was a kid, I used to enjoy making the other little girls think I was weird. I’d go over to a field of flowers and if there was a bee, I’d watch it. That wasn’t to get attention, but bees fascinated me, and I’d read a lot about them. Some other girl might wander over to look at the flowers and see the bee and scream. Sometimes I’d actually carefully pick the flower with the bee on it so I could look at it closer, and that really freaked out others of my sex.
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I used to get into bed and feel something crawling over me- potato bugs. It only happened twice but that was all it took. I still don’t like potato bugs.
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I have been bitten very badly three times by spiders. The bite I received in Saint Barts was the worst, and then there were two others here in California. I had to go to emergency twice with one of them.
I kill every spider I see.
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Roly Polies!
We had a lot of fun rolling up the potato bugs when I was younger, and then rolling them down an incline…
I still do it today with those large black and red centipedes that emit an almond smell.
And click beetles. I have more fun with those things… I mess with ‘em just to see ‘em jump!
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And when you consider that all human beings have swallowed at least one spider in their sleep in their lifetime… yikes.
Oh, well what r ya gonna do?
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A guy I met while hiking had to get eye lid surgery because he was sleeping out in the open and a wolf spider scurried onto his face. Half asleep, he went to rub the offending itch from his face and got bit on the eye lid. Wolf spider venom tends to destroy flesh and eyelid skin is too thin to take the punishment. Fortunately, the only thing I had sitting on my face, as far as I know, while sleeping in the woods was a mouse. He immediately scurried off when he felt me wake up.
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We have to deal with Amazon-sized roaches in FL. I spray them when I can because the *crunch* they make when squashed is unnerving. Ick.
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Bianca, you didn’t have to tell me that.
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NJL, she couldn’t help it, she wants us to stay awake tonight, waiting for the ‘walk across the face’ – and then the SWALLOW!
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I was staying at a friend’s house, a couple years ago, and chatting with her husband, and the subject of insect bites came up. He said that if you wake up with bites in the morning, most likely they were spider bites, because the spiders bite you while you’re asleep. Not bad bites, just little itchy ones.
The next morning I woke up with several new bites. So whether he is right about spiders in general, it certainly seemed to hold true in his house. I don’t generally get bites like that at home – I don’t know if it’s the difference in where we live (Iowa vs Pennsylvania), or maybe the spiders in my house have some other source of food and leave me alone.
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I generally don’t have a problem with live spiders; I’ll kill them all day. It’s dead ones I don’t like. Dead things in general, really.
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I have always had an irrational fear of spiders. In our shed, we have wolfies that are as big (leg to leg) as the palm of my hand, and their eyes glow from across the room.
My brother, knowing my fear, recently sent me a blown up picture of a soldier holding a camel spider. EVer seen one of those???
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