I’m OK with snakes, the dark, lightning and thunder, even scary heights and small spaces. I even love going to the dentist and I enjoy dogs. These are just some of the top 10 phobias.
By I do have a phobia about spiders and rats. As a former friend who was Italian used to say, I “shkeeve” just seeing either of the two, and thankfully I never see the latter. But this year, for some unknown reason, spiders have been prolific outside and even inside my house. A day doesn’t pass when I am not confronted by one of these creepy crawlies. I have been clothes-lined at least 10 times by uber-spider webs. Yuck.
There is good news for those of us with spider phobia or maybe any phobia, I am happy to report. A new study by the University of California claims that speaking your fear goes a long way in overcoming in it. This makes sense to me. Who hasn’t heard about the virtues of facing one’s fear, illustrated in the old saying “You have to go through it to get to it.” So I’m going outside right now to test this, since I know my deck is currently under web-reconstruction and I should be easily able to find a few, large hairy crawlers. I’ll be right back.
Click here for cheezy elevator muzak.
I’m back! And yes, it does work. I mean, I don’t want to take the spider out for drinks or anything, but I did find an appreciable decrease in my anxiety, enough so that I could actually move closer to examine it. And while I didn’t cotton to what I saw, I didn’t feel faint either. Who knew? Now I need to try this with my mortgage payment.