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Stop Suffering from Spider Phobia NOW!
Introduction
Arachnophobia is the scientific name for the fear of spiders. It is a very specific phobia; i.e. an abnormal fear of spiders and sometimes other arachnids, too, such as scorpions and harvestmen. Many people are afraid of spiders and most of us get shivers down our spine just thinking about those pointy little eight legs crawling on our skin. However, a serious case of arachnophobia is much different than someone who just doesn't like spiders.
Those who suffer from the phobia are not only afraid of spiders, but they also fear places where spiders might be, and since that’s pretty much everywhere, this can lead to a very limited lifestyle. People with arachnophobia tend to feel uneasy in any area they believe could harbour spiders or that has visible signs of their presence, such as webs. There are people whose arachnophobia is so severe that they will not go outside during the summer months for fear of encountering a spider. But even that doesn’t solve the problem because a big issue for those with arachnophobia is that spiders commonly live in houses, too.
There are some that think that arachnophobia is a rampant deep primeval repulsion of spiders, despite spiders offering tremendous benefits to humans such as eliminating harmful insects from our environment. Arachnophobia is in fact a kind of fear of something that causes negligible or no actual danger. But try telling a sufferer that!
Arachnophobia can be so infectious that there have even been cases where the dogs of spider-phobic families become start running for cover at the first sign of an eight-legged beastie!
At the end of the day, people usually don't fear spiders because they are poisonous; they fear them because they are just afraid of them. One way to prevent the development of arachnophobia at an early stage is to teach your child to recognise the difference between the nature of spiders and his or her beliefs and imaginings.
Causes
The causes of phobias in general often are not known, but they may begin with a traumatic event in which a person is severely frightened by a particular object, in this case, a spider.
Arachnophobia is, in many cases, the result of a traumatising encounter with spiders in one's early childhood, though the experience may not be remembered. This is called a repressed memory. Therefore, most people consider arachnophobia to be a learned experience, the result of a trauma (remembered or not), or because of a series of negative images or events. It is known that children up to the age of two or three are not normally scared of spiders, so it’s unlikely arachnophobia is inherited.
From a general population point of view, arachnophobia is considered to be a cultural fear that has been passed down to us for centuries because spiders were once believed to be the cause of the bubonic plague. In many areas of Europe, the spider appears to have been a suitable target for the displaced anxieties caused by these constant epidemics; in other cases, its proximity to the real causes of the epidemics may have fostered opportunistic associations between spiders and disease. These misplaced cultural fears have done little to ease human relationships with our eight-legged friends.
Symptoms
The common and regular symptoms of arachnophobia are: breathlessness, dizziness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking, heart palpitations, inability to speak, unable to think clearly, fear of dying, losing psychological control, an enormous detachment from reality. These are classic panic/anxiety attack symptoms and are common to a wide variety of phobias.
Treatment
One-to-one treatment of arachnophobia usually consists of some sort of desensitising (gradually increasing exposure to spiders) therapy along with cognitive therapy (learning spider facts). Apparently when arachnophobia is extreme, other types of desensitisation (liking frequently dealing with real life spiders) is enough to keep many arachnophobes out of treatment.
Knowing something about your phobia, especially if it's directed at some other thing or place, is going to be an important part of overcoming your phobia and arachnophobia is a good example.
Hypnotherapy helps by creating a relaxing and safe environment for the sufferer to explore and resolve the cause of the problem while enjoying a highly relaxed and comfortable state called hypnosis. This can be done in the physical presence of a hypnotherapist or by using the many excellent spider phobia hypnosis recordings available. The latter is a cheap and easy solution and saves the time and cost of finding and visiting your local hypnotherapist. The best recordings even offer a comprehensive money-back guarantee, so you have nothing to lose and your peace of mind to gain.
Conclusion
Spiders are virtually everywhere. They have been for millions of years and will be so for millions more. They are even known to survive in areas of nuclear fall-out! But we don’t have to fear them. Trust me, getting over arachnophobia is one of the easiest things to do. There are plenty of avenues open to us to rid ourselves of any irrational fear, and arachnophobia is no exception.
You owe it to yourself to relax that grip that your mind has over you when you see or imagine a spider. Then you can get on with enjoying your life without that creepy feeling of looking over your shoulder all the time…
Mark Horner CPFA, DHp, ADCHp, MPNLP, BSc (Hons.) Director of Superpower Within Hypnotherapist and Master Practitioner of NLP
www.spider-phobia-hypnosis.com
Articles Blog Superpower Within Home Page © Mark Horner 2009 |
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