Arachnophobia is defined as a morbid, paralyzing fear of spiders. This sort of fear is often the material of jokes and comedy, but if you suffer from any kind of phobia at all, you are not going to be laughing very much.
Phobias may sound funny, but they are common reasons for people seeking help from hypnotherapy so they can get some normality into their lives again.
Probably, nobody’s done any formal research on this, but empirical observations suggest that arachnophobia is one of the more common phobias in Australia. People from other countries often notice that Australians in general tend to be a bit more jumpy around spiders in general. This does make good sense.
After all, Australia has a number of highly poisonous spiders, such as the red back and the funnel web, so being a little nervous about spiders does make good sense. Arachnophobia goes beyond the usual commonsense precautions that keep us and our families safe from a visit to the emergency ward.
To be classified as a phobia that requires professional treatment via hypnosis or some other method, the fear has to be abnormal and interfere with daily life. Forget the comic stuff about people turning into jelly and screaming
if they see some tiny little creepycrawly – arachnophobia can make people afraid to carry out common activities such as gardening or cleaning because the fear of encountering a spider is too great for them.
Arachnophobia goes well beyond simply experiencing terror and panic when confronted with a spider or the possibility of encountering a spider. In extreme cases, people with arachnophobia can experience panic attacks even when exposed to things that look vaguely like spiders.
And a number of everyday things can look like spiders to a terrified mind – leaves, other insects, swastikas and the like. It’s not beyond imagining that arachnophobia could ruin relationships
imagine what could happen if a woman with arachnophobia discovers that a nice guy who seemed like Mr Right has a tattoo of a spider? This is why people seek help from hypnotherapy for treating phobias.
Why do people suffer from arachnophobia? This is quite a good question and the answer can vary, as everybody is different. For some people, the problem may stem back to a traumatic childhood experience – perhaps they were bitten by a redback when they were small and had to be rushed to the emergency ward, complete with parents panicking and the like
Or perhaps the need to be cautious about spiders has been impressed on somebody since childhood and this need for caution has grown out of proportion and has turned into a fullblown phobia, especially if the sufferer has a personality type that is more prone to phobias and anxiety disorders.
Culture plays a role – arachnophobia is much less common in ethnic groups where spiders are considered food, e.g. in Cambodia. Gender also has an effect, as women tend to suffer from arachnophobia and seek help from hypnosis more often than men do.
One of the things that hypnotherapy aims to do in treating phobias is to tease out the deep reasons behind the irrational fears so the deep-seated beliefs can be altered at this primary level of the subconscious.
Hypnosis is a gentler way of treating arachnophobia – or any other kind of phobia – than older methods used. A lot of people who suffer from arachnophobia and want to overcome this disorder dread the idea of “desensitization”,
which was a common method of treating phobias. During a course of desensitizatio treatment, the person with the phobia would be exposed gradually to whatever they were afraid of
For example, the therapist would begin by showing the person with arachnophobia pictures of spiders. Once the person was comfortable with pictures of spiders, he or she would progress to more exposure, such as watching films of spiders, watching people handling spiders,
being in the same room as spiders and eventually moving onto handling harmless spiders and even tarantulas (which are large spiders that are fairly harmless). The key thing there is “once the person is comfortable”. And that’s the problem. One of the key traits of any phobia is that it is an irrational fear
even though the rational part of your mind knows that the little house spider spinning its little web in front of you is harmless and it can’t hurt you, your emotions are screaming at you that you are in danger and triggering all the physical responses that produce a panic attack.
It’s this emotional side of things that often makes desensitization unsuccessful in a lot of cases. While desensitization does have some success if the person with the phobia has the will to succeed, the process of being exposed to the thing feared can be so traumatic that the sufferer may not continue with the programmed of therapy and seek help from other sources such as hypnotherapy Gold Coast.
To be successful, any programme of therapy that deals with deep seated emotions should work on the person at the right level of the psyche. Possibly, trauma in the past needs to be addressed and resolved, or some deeply held beliefs – held at the level of the subconscious so that the person with the beliefs is unaware that he or she has them.
If you have problems with arachnophobia and have not yet started any treatment for the problem, via hypnosis or some other method, it may help you to repeat some spider facts to yourself if you are in a situation where you may encounter spiders. This can help you to relax and stave off an impending panic attack:
Most spiders are not poisonous to humans. - Spiders usually only bite in selfdefense if they feel cornered. Usually, they will run away from you rather than attacking you.
You are a lot bigger than a spider and it’s more afraid of you than you are of it – you can kill it with one quick stomp of your foot or a whack with a fly swat. - Spiders can’t bite you through clothing, rubber gloves or shoes.
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