How can I comfort my spider-phobic housemate?

She’ll get over it if she wants to, as long as you handle the spiders she has no reason to. If they don’t bother you, don’t bother them. The more she deals with it the better. But, I wouldn’t force her if she’s having serious anxiety over it. If she has a serious phobia and isn’t just squeamish or being a prima donna, kill them for her or alternatively, pick them up and put them outside.

I just hate people who can’t crush their own bugs.

Go here, and actually read the entire website. There is more knowledge on this one little website than there is in the ENTIRE COLLECTIVE of Fluther on spiders.

@asmonet killing spiders is wrong, and they are in our homes for a reason. They kill the bugs that actually will bite us. Sheeesh, people are so quick to fear the wrong things.

I take ours outside. A glass (they cannot climb up the side easily) and stiff piece of paper is easy. Show her how to do it then do not help her again.

buy him a plush toy

Encourage her to get treatment for her phobia. It’s not too expensive, it doesn’t take long, and it really works. Any clinical psychotherapist who specializes in phobias can do the job. My preference is for a CBT and/or DBT trained LCSW, but that’s just my bias, as people on Fluther could probably tell you.

Watch Annie Hall together. (Woody plays Alvy)

Sample dialogue:

Alvy Singer: Honey, there’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick.

[Alvy has killed two spiders]
Alvy Singer: I did it. I killed ‘em both.
[Annie starts crying]

Alvy Singer: What’s the matter? What are you sad about? What did you want me to do? Capture ‘em and rehabilitate ‘em?

Alvy was right. Taking your spider outside is pointless if you live in an average apartment building. The last thing I want is to walk through a web on my walk through the carport.

Kill ‘em, kill ‘em all. I wouldn’t spray around my house with pesticides but I do not show mercy to the eight-legged invaders. That’s hippy stuff. Believe me- they don’t stop coming.

I mean, while we’re at it, why don’t we go buy some flies at the pet store and bring them home for our spider friends to eat?

As with anything scary, Tequila and Lime is the solution.

Get one of these.

This gadget allows someone to suck a bug up from a little ways distant and capture it, instead of killing it, and someone else can let it go outside. :) Other bug suckers kill them, but this keeps them alive. And its on the lower end of the spectrum as far as price.

Fear of spiders is pretty common.

@nzigler Why so bloodthirsty? What did the spiders do to you besides kill mosquitoes and flies?

@nzigler : Have you thought about the implications of breathing pesticides on a regular basis?

Read my post carefully.

I don’t share an apartment with my girlfriend, I definitely don’t want to share it with spiders. Non-phobics, would you allow small snakes (even non-poisonous ones) to co-habitate with you?

Come to think of it, I would take a snake outside…

My grandfather was bit my some kind of spider while baling hay. It left a necrotic sore in his arm where the muscle was like a crater. I like to bring it up when people say they are harmless. Obviously, our fear is not commensurate to the threat but it’s not unfounded either.

Sorry to hijack the thread. I should leave SpiderChat now.

“Non-phobics, would you allow small snakes (even non-poisonous ones) to co-habitate with you?” Nah i wouldnt mind especially if they stopped mice from entering my house :P

also the story about your grandfather would be like saying, well as a child my friend was attacked by a dog. As such i want all dogs killed now.

May all of you unsympathetic types be held prisoner by your own fears and phobias. DO you consider your own fears foolish and ripe for ridicule?

@sliceswiththings Do you really want to comfort your roommate? I would find you a scary person to live with since you so easily lie. I think you have the right to say no to spider killing for someone else, but not to lie about doing it. You are another one who simply because you don’t experience her fear, you dismiss it, make fun of it and her by mocking her request, and then lie to her. Nice.

While it is true that she could seek treatment for her phobia, she has not chosen to. That is her choice.

Also, for all you “take them outside people”, spiders that live in houses are generally indoor spiders by choice. If they wanted to be outside, they would.

@avvooooooo And then @sliceswiththings could buy this so she could watch the spider safely.

@Uberbatman read my post. Not commensurate but not entirely unfounded. Now I’m leaving spiderChat as it feels like watching Arachnophobia in slow motion.

Also, you enjoy a unique perspective on snakes! Congrats.

The line between fear and phobia, btw, can be hard for people who haven’t studied them to define. But there is one. “Phobia” and “phobic” are thrown around all too casually. Fears of things generally don’t need therapy/treatment. People can live with fears. Its when things become debilitating and impair normal life function that they become phobias. Basically when fear is excessive and unreasonable and controlling someone’s life, its a phobia. As long as she’s not scared to go outside because there might be spiders out there or something like that, its likely that she is afraid of spiders and not “spider-phobic.”

Comforting her will only encourage the behavior. When my 2nd wife first moved to California from Michigan, she screamed anytime she saw a Black Widow spider (or anything black and round) and would call for me or anyone nearby to kill it. That got old real quick, and I stopped doing it unless I was already with her.

Eventually, her love of gardening got the best of her, and as she encountered them, she started hitting them with a shovel or rake. As time went by, the tools got shorter. Now, she squashes them between the fingers of her gloved hand.

She mostly got over her arachnophobia by watching shows on Discovery channel about spiders. Learning about them, she has come to appreciate them for what they do for us. She used to kill any spider she saw, but now she only kills the Widows. She takes the others outside or leaves them where they are if they’re not in her way.

@avvooooooo makes a very good point. I should have said she may want to seek treatment if she is in actual distress over this, and it is interfering with the quality of her life.

@virtualist COOL!

I live in an old house with a bare floor basment and it is spider central. I have wolf spiders all over my house amongst others and here is how I handle it if my cat or dog does not eat them first.
Spider in bedroom=dead on sight.
Spider in the kitchen=outside.
Spider in the office=dead on sight.
I’ve had spider bites, plenty. They for the most part are not welcome in my
house or car.

@Psychedelic_Zebra: They are weak and I am mighty. I was offering options, not the most helpful solutions for the spiders. If they make her uncomfortable, anxious and affects her life – as would a phobia and not a fear – she should kill them if that’s what it takes. Putting them outside may be useless, they’ll get back in but it’s more of an ‘out of sight out of mind’ idea.

Speaking as someone who has suffered from panic attacks for over a decade, if all it took was killing a bug to end my anxiety and avoid one, I’d kill the fuck out of any one of them I could find.

Killing a spider will not have that much effect on an ecosystem. Just sayin’.

@asmonet Fears affect our lives, they just don’t control them.

Thank you all. You’re right, she has a fear, not a phobia.

@Marina That is quite the accusation. I never lied to her. I don’t tell her I kill them, she knows they’re still alive, just hard to get to. Please read the details of the question carefully before making character judgments. I am not “scary” to live with nor do I easily lie.

The ceilings are high in our apartment and it would be impossible to retrieve them easily from the ceiling. I use a broomstick to either try to get them down or knock them lower where I can reach them. I would rather not kill them, haven’t you read Charlotte’s Web??

She’s not afraid of bites or anything, they just weird her out.

I beat out any discomfort in spiders working as a counselor as a teenager at a rustic sleep-away camp. The kids were way more scared of spiders than I was, so I had to be brave and routinely remove them from bunks. I think that kind of “treatment” would help her, but it’s had to simulate.

Lastly, she’s one of my best friends. I’m not going to tell her to deal with it herself when she’s scared.

“I don’t want to kill them, so I knock them off the ceiling so she can’t see them.”

“I’ve told her that they’ll avoid beds because they’re hard to walk on”

@sliceswiththings Sorry, if I erred in thinking you were telling her they were dead. I do not think that was totally clear from the wording in your question. As to the latter quote, how do you know that is true? I have never seen information that indicates it is true, and I sure know of a lot of people finding spiders in their bed including me.

If you do truly want to comfort her, it may not be possible. It sounds like she is a true arachnophobe, which means her fear has nothing to do with reason.

I am sorry if I was too harsh in my response. I am afraid I was reacting to several very unsympathetic posts at the beginning of the thread. Really, the whole thread has this callous, “just get over yourself” tone.

@nzigler you mean the one where you said “Kill ‘em, kill ‘em all. ” . A fear of dogs is very rational too, but that is a very irrational reaction to said fear.

@judochop, I find your claim of having spider bites by the dozens to be highly unlikely. The guy whose website I posted up there is an arachnologist, and in 35 years of handling spiders, he has only beeen bit a couple of times. Spiders, in general do not bite people simply because we are there. Unless you actually watch a spider bite you, seeing a wound on your body and assuming it is a spider bite is just plain wrong. I handle spiders a lot myself, and have never been bitten.

The spiders you call wolf spiders are most likely common house spiders. There are around 30 species of indoor house spiders. Wolf spiders are so named not because they are hairy or brown, but because of the placement of their eyes on their face.

For the rest of you, Putting them outside is the same as killing them. Putting indoor spiders outside is not doing them any favors.

@nzigler I agree with @uberbatman I would allow snakes to live in my house because they are pretty much harmless. Even the venomous ones are relatively shy, unless you fuck with them. They rid the world of mice and rats, which carry disease and contaminate foodstuffs, and I’d rather share my home with them than the rodents.

Needless to say, yes, I kill the spiders I find in my house. No, it’s probably not the best in the circle of life. Yes, I’m afraid of them and that affects my judgement. No, I wouldn’t kill dogs (honestly- weak example). And finally- my point with snakes was not to identify which two people claim they would like to live with snakes but that fears and preferences are relative and a lot of you who are so spider-enlightened probably have other fears or quirks.

The holier-than-thou spider-huggers are morally superior to those of us that don’t want to handle or transport them. Case closed. Satisfied?

The holier-than-thou spider-huggers are morally superior to those of us that don’t want to handle or transport them. Case closed. Satisfied?

A little bit :P

@nzigler As a supposed holier-than-thou spider hugger, I only have one thing to say to you. Where you are, I once was, Where I am, you can be, too. translation, I used to be arachnophobic, but through knowledge, learning and logic, I overcame that fear. No self-righteousness needed.

So the case remains open. =)

@avvooooooo: I meant affecting your life negatively to a point where it could be seen as controlling, though I don’t believe every phobia has control over a person’s life. It depends on the severity of the phobia as well as the chances or perceived chances of encountering it. If those are low, if is merely an effect, if high – it will control your life, I agree.