Conquer your fear of spiders
There was a story on the BBC Scotland news website the other day about how a giant spider had been found in a shipping container at a manufacturing company in the west of Scotland. The Huntsman spider is commonly found in Australia, Africa, and Asia, but this creature was found in Dumbarton. As if to illustrate this were a beast of an arachnid, the BBC saw fit to publish a photograph of a Huntsman spider alongside the article, causing those with a fear of spiders to turn away from their computer/laptop/screen in horror. mobile phone. It’s debatable who was more frightened to discover it: the person who found it or the poor spider found thousands of miles from home and in Dumbarton, of all places…
Fear of spiders is a fairly common phobia for which hypnotherapy can help. Like most phobias, it is not directed at anyone in particular. I have been asked if I can provide help to a variety of people who are afraid of spiders, from big, burly bricks to young teenagers, one of whom recently told me that she has her father “deal” with spiders in the house of her .
A recent example was ‘S’, a man in his 30s. He works in the construction industry and has been in a happy relationship with his partner for almost five years. He is the proud father of a two-year-old boy. You’d think S would be happy with his life, and for the most part, he is. However, there is one problem that he struggles with and has struggled with all his life: his fear of spiders.
S has always been afraid of spiders, but he has always considered that his fear is just because he is stupid. He is not qualified to deal with other problems, for example, he and his partner recently had problems with mice in his house and last year there was a wasp infestation that terrified his partner. Not so S, who approached him calmly. However, when dealing with the seemingly harmless spider, S will run to the other side of the room, calling for help and shouting instructions to whoever is in his company to “get rid of it”.
S approached me as a ‘last resort’ (actually, that’s not as bad as it sounds; hypnotherapy is still a relatively ‘young’ profession). He had tried other methods, but without success. First of all, I told him that he wasn’t being ‘stupid’. And I congratulated him for taking the first steps to improve his life. We arrange a suitable date and time for an initial consultation: I offer a free consultation to determine if my clients will be receptive to hypnotherapy.
S told me he wasn’t sure if hypnotherapy would help cure him of his fear. This was perfectly understandable. He explained that he always associated hypnotherapy with spinning stopwatches and making people dance around the room thinking he was a crazy chicken. Part of the initial consultation is to explain the entire hypnotherapy process to my client. I assured S that he would be aware and aware, in control at all times and that he certainly wouldn’t be doing anything he didn’t want to do.
S told me that just the sight of a ‘big hairy spider with its long legs and the way they scurry across the ground’ scared him. He also explained his reason for being. “They appear out of nowhere, running across the floor normally when I’m in a relaxed state. Their sticky cobwebs are everywhere. And I’ve read that spiders use their own bodily fluids to catch their unassuming prey, before wrapping the poor beast in that material and injecting it with some disgusting substance to dissolve its innards…
If you’re afraid of spiders, that’s probably too much information. But bear with me, S’s thoughts are worth quantifying. I asked him how long he had had this phobia and if he remembered the first time he was afraid of spiders. He explained that he was about 10 years old and was home alone while his mother went shopping. He was lying on the couch not feeling very well when he saw a spider crawling down the bottom of the fireplace. He crawled slowly but steadily and S froze, unable to move, until his mother returned.
It seems this was the catalyst for his fear that has stayed with him ever since. Reduced to its basic form, S’s subconscious mind controls him through his experience of seeing that spider many years ago (sorry S, you’re not really that old). When he sees a spider, his conscious mind, the one everyone we have that allows us to do our usual day-to-day tasks like getting up in the morning, getting dressed, driving the car to work, tells him he’s just a spider, a harmless little beast that isn’t interested in him and probably scared of S , so he furiously scurries across the floor to avoid it. S’s subconscious mind, however, continues to relate to that incident when he was ten years old and feeds on his fear of spiders. Until now…
The more he could talk to S’s subconscious mind, and he took a few sessions that lasted no more than an hour each time, the more his fear of spiders lessened. After a few weeks, hypnotherapy had helped. S is no longer afraid of spiders and when he sees one crawling on the ground, he accepts it for what he is doing.
A life of fear had come to an end.