The ad in the paper was very clever, a large, ugly drawing of a spider and I hardly noticed the small print written all around it. It was the perfect image to capture the attention of all the arachnophobic readers, including me. “Are you afraid of spiders?” the copy read. “Please call us at Stanford University to receive FREE therapy and participate in our study.” I was intrigued. I have an unhealthy fear of spiders that traces back into my early childhood. I mulled it over for a few days, talked to my husband and friends, and finally plunged in to make the call. Could it be true? Could they really cure me? I decided to put my faith in them. Stanford University is a well-respected institution after all.
All of my spider memories and episodes are seared into my cerebral cortex, or where ever long-term memory resides, like a cattle brand. Other things are a complete blur, what my first grade teacher looked like for instance; but all the spiders that have shared my existence, including the imaginary ones from my dreams, are crystal clear. In one recurring dream, I wake up alone in bed at my parents’ house. The house seems eerily silent, and outside the window the sun is shining fiercely. I walk down the stairs and to the front door, looking and wondering where everybody is. Slowly I open the door and peer out. Outside, covering my driveway, the street, the cars and the houses are hundreds of huge, still daddy-long-leg spiders. They are the size of parachutes laid out flat covering everything and completely still. There are no people anywhere. The terror of it paralyzes me and all I can do is stare. Then I wake up.
Phobos was a Greek god, fear or panic personified as the son of Aries and Aphrodite. From a description of the Shield of Heracles, Phobos is depicted as staring backwards with eyes that glowed with fire. His mouth was “full of teeth in a white row, fearful and daunting.” A phobia is an irrational, excessive and persistent fear of some particular thing or situation. Phobias are not fears that make sense, like being afraid while swimming in the ocean and seeing a gray fin appear out of the surface of the water. A phobia is an exaggerated fear of something that is extremely unlikely to do any actual harm.
I called Stanford and set up my appointment. When the day came, I found the right building on campus. I began to feel a little faint when a young man met me and ushered me into a large, clinical-looking room. My first task was to fill out paperwork on my personal information and then several pages of detailed questions about the manifestations of my phobia. A few questions into the survey I started to feel like I was physically shrinking. “Do you ever have dreams a large spider is holding you down and you are trapped?” I felt a weight pressing down on me while I lost control of my muscles and my emotions. Tears were streaming down my face by the time the young man, probably a graduate student, left the room in search of his superior, perhaps the professor or psychiatrist in charge of this research. An older, confident, and pleasant-faced man entered the room walking straight over to where I was sitting hunched and pathetic. He reassuringly explained how brave he felt I was for coming. “I don’t have a fear of spiders at all so this exercise is nothing for me. But you have a clear fear and have decided to come and face it. You are much braver than we are.” He explained that the therapy I would take part in today was desensitization, meaning exposing me to my fear little by little. Even after I understood what was to happen over the next few hours, I felt incapable of fleeing. I was devoid of all physical power. I braced myself for whatever the researchers had planned. A flicker of hope remained that after the ordeal was over, I would be cured.
When I was twenty-two, I spent a few weeks home alone in my basement apartment while my husband was away on a research seminar. I have never lived alone. When I left my parents’ home, I moved into the college dorms and then into an apartment with five roommates. Right after college, I got married. I was neither excited nor dreading my first few weeks alone until at five o’clock one morning when I found a black spider the size of a fifty cent piece in my sink. I had forgotten. Living alone meant no one close by to kill the spiders. I skipped brushing my teeth and left for work at the local newspaper. I convinced my friend there to drive back to my house and kill it for me.
The therapy began with the young man bringing a spider into the room in a plastic jar. He had to show it to me first to make sure I was afraid of it. The last subject they had researched laughed at the little spider they brought in, which they had just caught outside the building. She was from Australia and thought they would have the spiders the size of a grown man’s hand like the ones in her native land. She was excused from the study. My spider was the size of a dried apricot and it terrified me. He placed the jar at the end of a long table, the size that could fit a whole family of relatives for Thanksgiving dinner. Then he tied a string to the jar and told me that I was to wait until I felt ready and then pull the string to slide the jar closer and closer to my side of the table. It took several minutes before I would touch the string.
I was visiting my parents’ house one holiday. I walked into their room one evening to retrieve a book my mother was reading. Out of the corner of my eye I say something big and black on the wall facing the bed. I knew better than to look. I went out and told my dad that there may be a spider in his bedroom and could he please go check. When he walked in, he sort of gasped and then laughed. He called to the rest of the family to come look. They all went in making various surprised noises. I heard comments like, “You should take a picture of that!” “You’re going to kill it?” “That’s amazing” “Be careful. Those big ones can be really fast.” A few minutes later, everyone left the room. No one said a word to me and I didn’t ask. Weeks and months later I would ask people individually what was in there. No one would ever tell me.
Finally I got up the courage to pull the jar closer. I decided that the longer this took, the longer I would have to stay there. In between pulls on the string I would stop and talk to my companion about any random subject. When it got close enough it see clearly crawling around, I stopped talking completely. Soon it was right in front of me, practically in my lap. The man said, “The next step is to take off the lid.” The room got blurry. He picked up a pencil and began touching the spider with it in the jar. “Now, its your turn.” I was incredulous. After a delay, I picked up the pencil and moved it toward the jar. When it touched the spider I jumped and nearly flung it across the room. The man became very cross. He urged me to calm down and warned that we would have to start all over again. I knew it had to be done. After touching it with the pencil, I would have to touch it with my finger.
At that moment, my mind left my body. I started to watch what was happening as if outside myself, as an observer watching another woman get closer and closer to the spider. I could no longer accept that it was happening to me. The man jiggled it out onto his hand and watched it crawl. He was sitting very close to the woman in the chair. He told her she would have to be next. She sat like a statue, not moving and not speaking. I felt so sorry for her and hoped she would be able to get it over with quickly. She was obedient and took her turn, letting the spider crawl around on her hand for several minutes. The young man saw the glassy look in her eyes and realized what was happening to the woman mentally. He became cross again and tried to get her to recognize the reality, that a spider was crawling on her hand and yet she was in no danger. She tried very hard to focus and learn the lesson of the day but still part of her remained at a safe distance away. When it was all over, the spider went back into the jar and back on the table. Only then did I return to reality.
After what seemed like hours—I still have no clear memory of how much time passed—I was allowed to leave. The man gave me directions about how to behave from now on. When I saw a spider in my house, I was to catch it in a jar and go through the same steps I had gone through today. Very soon I would be completely cured. Once, a few months later, I actually tried it. I had my husband catch it in a jar and I got to the point where I could touch the jar. I never tried again.
I was walking through the woods behind my house a few years ago with my baby in my arms. We accidentally walked right through a big web and I saw something fuzzy and brown on my baby’s head. I carefully and quickly swiped it off and tried not to think. I stayed calm for her and acted naturally. New good and bad things appear everyday in a child’s life making even regular experiences seem magical and exciting. There is no reason to start viewing those adventures as threatening. Something I could never master for myself, I refused to pass on to my daughter. A decade after that day at Stanford, I made a bold, critical swipe at the very object for which I had cultivated years of built up fear, not out of carefully practiced desensitization, but out of instinct and love.
