Phobia – spiders and other things
I was amazed to discover that more than a million New Zealanders are living with a phobia considered severe enough to limit their lives. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10624648 The phobia could be a fear of spiders, moths or heights, the kind of thing most of us think of as a phobia. Or it could be a social phobia in the form of extreme shyness, agoraphobia or an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) such as the need to wash hands over and over, or repeatedly checking that the oven is switched off.
There was a time when I too had a phobia – to spiders. I couldn’t touch a picture of one in a book and found it difficult to look at it. I couldn’t watch a spider on T.V. If a spider got on me I went crazy to get it off. Knowing this my (now ex) mother-in-law thought it tremendously funny to throw a big rubbery toy spider at my face. Unfortunately she chose to do this after a family dinner while I was drying a stack of a dozen of her dinner plates. I dropped the plates and ran.
Then one day I followed along as I watched an NLP practitioner take someone through a process to overcome a fear of spiders. Since then I have no fear of spiders, though I can’t say I like them and I choose not to see the film Arachnophobia or watch a tarantula on T.V. Today a small spider running over my arm brings no reaction and I can effectively dispose of a large black spider myself ….. a markedly different reaction.
What surprised me in the Herald article was the number of people affected and the prevalence of social phobia.