Why do I hate spiders so much?

What people say bothers them

Ask people what it is about spiders and the same few things come up.

• The way they move: fast, then completely still, with too many legs to follow.
• That they turn up without warning, on the ceiling above the bed or in the bath.
• The web. Something that sits and waits for another animal to make a mistake.
• The sense of being near something you cannot read at all.

What spiders are actually like

• The reaction starts early. In a 2017 study, six-month-old babies were shown pictures of spiders and of flowers. Their pupils widened more at the spiders, which suggests some of the wariness is there from the start and is not something you chose.Source: Hoehl and colleagues, Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
• Almost none of them can hurt you. Of more than 43,000 known kinds of spider, fewer than 30 have been responsible for a human death.Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
• They do a great deal of quiet work. One estimate puts what the world’s spiders eat at 400 to 800 million tonnes of prey a year, nearly all of it insects.Source: Nyffeler and Birkhofer, The Science of Nature, 2017

What a strong dislike can point to

Carl Jung noticed that what we react to most strongly in others is often something we have pushed out of sight in ourselves. He called it projection, and an animal can carry it as easily as a person can. What follows is a possibility to try on. It may not fit you at all.

With spiders, the quality people most often describe is patience with a plan behind it. The spider builds something, sits at the centre and waits for things to come to it. If that makes your skin crawl, ask how you feel about that way of operating in people. Some who hate spiders describe themselves as open and direct, and are quietly proud of never scheming. Others spent years around someone who ran a household by pulling threads, and promised themselves they would never be like that.

The spider is also a maker. It builds a home out of its own body and rebuilds it every time it is torn down. A strong dislike can sit on top of something you were talked out of: the wish to make things alone, in your own corner, at your own pace, without having to explain yourself.

Three questions to ask yourself

1. What exactly is it about spiders: the stillness, the speed, the web or the hiding? Pick one word.
2. Who in your life works the way a spider does, and how do you feel about them?
3. When did you last want something and wait quietly for it instead of asking outright? What did you think of yourself for it?