Living away from a river/woods and keeping my house relatively bug free in general means that I generally don't see any large spiders in my house at all. Some of that might be due to declining insect populations though.
We had orb weavers all over our porch growing up, slightly terrifying to enter/leave the house if you're scared of them, you had to kind of walk through this tunnel of webs to get in and out. But I think a lot of their presence was environmental factors, being in a rural area right next to a river. If these follow the same rules, I'm relieved, I already mostly know how to manage orb weavers and how to avoid them.
> I think her evident terror upon realizing her mistake would have aroused some degree of sympathy.
Important to keep in mind that arachnophobia isn't really a rational thing; I can appreciate both the beauty and usefulness of some insects/spiders, and even have contexts where seeing them doesn't frighten me. If you're going to manage insect populations in a dwelling place you kind of have to be able to think about them as being part of an ecosystem, you don't really have a choice.
But appreciating spiders or even admiring them doesn't change anything about fear of encountering them in certain situations. You can't logic your way out of an irrational fear, you just learn to manage it or you train yourself to deal with it or overcome it to at least some degree (depending on how far you're willing to go to change your instincts or avoid triggers). Telling yourself that they're not evil, or that they're harmless, or that they're more scared of you -- that stuff only really helps if those are the reasons you're afraid. But for most people, I think their reactions aren't really conscious or voluntary.
Another example is creatures like rodents. I keep pet rats, some of my relatives are pretty scared to be around them. It's not based on anything rational, they know the rats are harmless and cuddly and smart. It's just that they see the tail/hands and it freaks them out to be around them or to think about them. I'm not affected by that, I don't really understand the feeling because I don't feel any aversion to holding them or having them crawl around on me, my brain just registers them as cute. I never had to overcome anything to be able to hold them, my brain had the opposite reaction and immediately wanted to hold them as soon as I saw them. My family and I have the same information and understanding about rats, but for some of my family members there's a subconscious, emotional aversion that they have to overcome even to be in the same room, and for me there's just not.
I'm a little envious of people who don't have an innate fear of insects or instinctual fears around them. I've worked reasonably hard to get it to a manageable level where I can live alone comfortably and where I'm mostly not worried about insects most of the time, and it doesn't disrupt my life -- but that was difficult to do, it was a lot of work; definitely not quite as simple as just learning more about them.
I understand what you say about arachnophobia, but I also can't agree that
> appreciating them or even admiring them doesn't change anything about fear of encountering them in certain situations
because I used to be afraid of wasps and spiders, and what changed that was precisely the experience of being in close quarters with them and having opportunity to observe reactions ranging from total disinterest to mortal fear. Then I started chasing them around with a camera, in order to take macro shots from six inches away, and discovered that even in those circumstances they really couldn't care less about any human not actively antagonizing them - that the occasions of their lives mean as much to them as those of ours to us. There's a basis for empathy in that, strange as it may seem to say in respect of creatures so superficially different from us.
I suppose this is what they call "exposure therapy", when it's done deliberately rather than by happenstance. But whatever we call it, I just couldn't stay scared of these tiny animals that so determinedly and reliably did absolutely nothing to suggest they had any interest in even trying to do me what trivial and evanescent harm they possibly could. After that, it was no great stretch to notice how beautiful and intelligent they actually are.
On reflection, if anything it's odd that I ever did become afraid of wasps and spiders. After all, one of my earliest memories is that of sitting on the tailgate of my mom's truck, watching with quiet but avid interest as a mud dauber picked daintily along the slice of pizza I was holding. I also wasn't kidding when I talked elsewhere in this thread about the black widow who set up shop behind our toilet tank a few years later - that literally happened, and while perhaps I might've done my daily business elsewhere had another bathroom been available, there wasn't and it took me no real time to become entirely accustomed to the circumstance. I don't know what changed to induce in adulthood a fear that in childhood I cannot ever recall experiencing, but that's all the more reason for me to think this kind of fear must be amenable to revision.
I understand not everyone who experiences such fear will choose to try to revise it, but my experience makes it impossible for me to conclude other than that this is, however implicit, a choice. Losing that fear has certainly made me a happier person, both for its own sake and in that it's made me more able to appreciate beauty than I was before. But perhaps I've not sufficiently considered the good fortune I had in stumbling by happenstance into circumstances that made it possible for me to understand - made it impossible not to understand - how absurd that fear really was. Absent that, I don't know if I'd ever even have thought to try.
I mean, great, but... that's not how it works for everyone. Exposure therapy/desensitization isn't about learning a fact, it's about retraining an instinct. Not sure what I can say to convince you that I don't secretly think that spiders are malicious.
That's not to say that a phobia can't be changed; exposure therapy/desensitization/etc are all real things (both formal and informal, and both deliberate and accidental), and my arachnophobia today is not as bad as it used to be growing up. But that improvement didn't come from an intellectual process, it came from a bunch of regular hard work, practice, small exposures, and small victories to try and rewire instinctive responses in my brain, and it was (and continues to be) a very long process. If I could just stop being afraid of spiders by reading a science book or just deciding to think about them differently, then I would have already done that when I was 12 -- but fear response to a phobia isn't a conscious decision, it's an involuntary response to a stimulus, and that involuntary response for some people can be completely disconnected from their conscious thoughts about what is happening. For example, thalassophobia doesn't mean that someone hates the ocean or that they can't think it's beautiful/majestic; it just means they have a fear response when exposed to deep water.
We had orb weavers all over our porch growing up, slightly terrifying to enter/leave the house if you're scared of them, you had to kind of walk through this tunnel of webs to get in and out. But I think a lot of their presence was environmental factors, being in a rural area right next to a river. If these follow the same rules, I'm relieved, I already mostly know how to manage orb weavers and how to avoid them.
> I think her evident terror upon realizing her mistake would have aroused some degree of sympathy.
Important to keep in mind that arachnophobia isn't really a rational thing; I can appreciate both the beauty and usefulness of some insects/spiders, and even have contexts where seeing them doesn't frighten me. If you're going to manage insect populations in a dwelling place you kind of have to be able to think about them as being part of an ecosystem, you don't really have a choice.
But appreciating spiders or even admiring them doesn't change anything about fear of encountering them in certain situations. You can't logic your way out of an irrational fear, you just learn to manage it or you train yourself to deal with it or overcome it to at least some degree (depending on how far you're willing to go to change your instincts or avoid triggers). Telling yourself that they're not evil, or that they're harmless, or that they're more scared of you -- that stuff only really helps if those are the reasons you're afraid. But for most people, I think their reactions aren't really conscious or voluntary.
Another example is creatures like rodents. I keep pet rats, some of my relatives are pretty scared to be around them. It's not based on anything rational, they know the rats are harmless and cuddly and smart. It's just that they see the tail/hands and it freaks them out to be around them or to think about them. I'm not affected by that, I don't really understand the feeling because I don't feel any aversion to holding them or having them crawl around on me, my brain just registers them as cute. I never had to overcome anything to be able to hold them, my brain had the opposite reaction and immediately wanted to hold them as soon as I saw them. My family and I have the same information and understanding about rats, but for some of my family members there's a subconscious, emotional aversion that they have to overcome even to be in the same room, and for me there's just not.
I'm a little envious of people who don't have an innate fear of insects or instinctual fears around them. I've worked reasonably hard to get it to a manageable level where I can live alone comfortably and where I'm mostly not worried about insects most of the time, and it doesn't disrupt my life -- but that was difficult to do, it was a lot of work; definitely not quite as simple as just learning more about them.