Arachnophobia

People who know me well are aware of my irrational fear of spiders. Although I've never been diagnosed, I believe I have a true phobia. I know, logically, that a tiny spider cannot hurt me and is in fact afraid of me. But when I see a spider, no matter how small, my heart starts beating really fast and I start sweating and I have a strong urge to scream and run (which I often do). If I'm home alone and see a spider that someone cannot kill for me, I panic.

When I saw this headline on MSNBC.com today, I couldn't help but read the entire article:
Fear of Spiders Can Develop Before Birth

While the research is interesting, I think it's a bit of a stretch to relate it to humans. I happen to know that my fear of spiders was not innate - it didn't develop until I was around 12 years old, and it resulted from a very specific experience:

It was sometime during the summer, and I was playing outside with my brother and some younger male cousins. We had a tiny, triangle-shaped tree fort built out of old siding; it sat on the ground and had a door that, for some reason I can't recall, had a spinning handle that enabled someone to lock the door from the outside.

I was sitting inside the fort when one of my cousins locked me inside. It was cramped and pitch black. In the meantime, they picked a bunch of daddy-long-legs spiders off the exterior of the house, collected them in a large sand bucket, and then dumped the spiders on me from a crack in the fort's roof.

So I felt spiders falling on me and crawling on me while trapped in a very dark, very enclosed space. And hence the birth of my phobia.

Anyway, getting back to that article about a fear of spiders developing in the womb - I guess if anyone would be a good case study, it will be Isabelle! We'll have to see if she inherited my fear the first time she sees a spider and either squashes it with her chubby fist or starts sobbing...