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It’s unusual for anyone to hold a tarantula in England, but amazing for
someone who has arachnophobia.
A conversation with my mother last autumn when I was staying with her
was very much less robust.
‘Mum! There’s a spider in the bath. Please could you remove it.’ This
wasn’t just a frightened daughter asking her mother for help and
comfort; it was a sixty-three-year-old grandmother asking a
ninety-year-old great grandmother to cope. Leopards don’t easily change
their spots.
I’ve been an arachnophobe all my life and was not best pleased when my
son and daughter-in-law paid for me to go on the Friendly Spider
programme. I’d put off the invitation for eight months before finally
landing up in June 2005 at the London zoo.
‘It’s going to be a wonderful afternoon; I can feel it in my bones,’
said one of the many volunteers helping with the afternoon’s experience.
I was sitting with my fleece fully buttoned up in a freezing cold room,
very much doubting that the experience would be anything but horrible.
The Friendly Spider programme, a combination of cognitive behavioural
therapy and hypnotherapy, is now in its eleventh season. It has an 85
per cent success rate, and the remaining 15 per cent are ‘better than
they were originally’, according to John Clifford, who organises it. The
aim of the programme is to be able to deal with spiders in a cool, calm
and relaxed fashion, to ignore or to be able to pick up a spider and put
it outside.
What is it about spiders?
Arachnophobia is a learned experience, the result of a trauma, or
because of a series of negative images or events. There are as many arachnophobic men as women. Children up to the age of two or three are
not scared of spiders, so it’s unlikely arachnophobia is inherited.
What is it about a spider that stimulates negative responses? Everyone
(about twenty people) on the course had ideas on this subject: it’s
their unpredictability, their speed, their legs, the way they move, the
fact that they bite, their colour, their hairiness, their knees, their
disjointedness, the list is endless…
Reactions to seeing spiders are numerous, often excessive and may be
serious: your heart rate soars, you sweat, jump, cry, scream, attack,
freeze, feel cold, get goose pimples, shout, feel faint, nauseous,
defecate, go into shock, have a panic attack, or become hysterical.
These reactions are instinctive; it’s part of the body’s natural defence
system.
The responses to the reaction are also numerous and equally excessive:
probably you want to get away as fast as you can and, if possible, get
help. But you might want to throw something, attack the spider, hammer
it to death, hoover it up, squirt it with insect repellent, hair spray
or firelighter, use cats or dogs to capture and deal with it.
‘You don’t want to be doing this, surely?’ says one of the volunteers.
‘After all, a spider is fifty times smaller than a bunny, and you
wouldn’t want to hammer a bunny to death, now would you?’ The trouble
is, a spider is emphatically NOT a bunny.
A brief history of the spider
There are about 40,000 types of spider. They have been around for three
hundred million years, a lot longer than we have, thus they are not
going to evolve into something we want them to be. Most spiders can
bite, but they usually can’t pierce the skin.
There are four dangerous types of spider: the funnel web (only found
within ten kilometres of Sydney in Australia), the black widow, the
violin and the wandering spider. There are no dangerous spiders that
live naturally in the UK. Therefore it is perhaps surprising that there
is a high incidence of arachnophobia in the UK but a very low incidence
in South America and Australia, where there really are dangerous
spiders.
Spiders are not out to get you. We should be nice to them because they
are ‘good guys’; they do a natural, organic job of getting rid of
predators. They are predators themselves, but only eat things their own
size or smaller. Birds eat them in turn.
How we get to meet the spiders
Following the facts, we were allowed a cup of tea and biscuits, most
welcome because of the temperature. Then there was light group hypnosis,
conducted by John Clifford that lasted for about half an hour. We lay
down with eyes closed, were asked to imagine a comfortable room where we
would feel safe and were told that we would no longer be plagued by fear
of spiders, that we would be able to confront our fears, that everything
would be all right.
Afterwards I felt slightly nauseous and, for a short while, a little
dizzy, but somehow ‘better’ and certainly a lot warmer. I was able to
unbutton my fleece and it remained unbuttoned while we walked over to
the bugs department in the zoo. This was the bit I had been really
dreading: meeting and, horrors, touching the spiders.
To obtain a certificate – or, you might say, a degree in bravery – you
have to place a bottle over a British house spider, entice it on to a
napkin, then hold the napkin and walk around with it with the spider on
top.
Egging each other on was most important for a positive result. To start
with, no one volunteered, but after a while one poor, white-faced
trembling man was induced to do what had to be done. Then, one by one,
we all did, or at least all of us that were able to. (One person on the
course couldn’t get to the bugs department and another managed to get
there but could do no more.)
You could do rather more – achieve a Masters in bravery – if you were
man or woman enough. For this you had to touch the legs of a spider and
move it around a plastic box – to show that you rather than the spider
are in control. It took a good ten minutes of thinking, sweating and
shaking before I could bring myself to do this.
For the PhD, you had to hold a tarantula. Frieda seemed to me to be
about a mile high, six miles wide, with talons the size of a tiger. In
fact she fitted very neatly into my cupped hands and didn’t move. Her
talons were the size of ten grains of sand. Her underbelly was as soft
as a baby’s bum. I don’t know how I did it, but I did. After all my
fears I was in fact one of the 85 per cent who had succeeded.
Will the effect last?
I’m not sure how long the treatment for reducing my arachnophobia will
last. On the following day I went into a garden shed to find a spider
but (conveniently perhaps) didn’t find one. Yesterday, a tiny spider of
less than one millimetre in diameter crawled over a manuscript I was
working on. I gently brushed it away rather than using an angry flick,
hitherto my wont, so I guess the treatment is still working.
For further information, contact the Friendly Spider Programme, London
Zoo, Zoological Society of London, Regent’s Park, London NW1 4RY; 0207
449 6400, or email ppk@zsl.org .
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