My daughter and I went to the spider awareness session at Bristol zoo and it was worth every penny - can’t recommend it highly enough. It transformed our lives because we were ruled by spiders. We decided we couldn’t manage another spider season so had to do something.
Neither of us held the tarantula and it wouldn’t have helped us in the slightest if we had because we were afraid of the ones roaming around the UK and, most of all, our house. We don’t see tarantulas and aren’t likely to so we couldn’t see how being near one would help us cope with the ones hiding in corners at home.
For us it was dealing with house spiders that helped. Obviously the lead up to it was needed - the talks and hypnotism - because you wouldn’t have seen us for dust if they’d just produced a house spider at the start!!
Every single person in that room totally believed the spider would leap at them, run up their arm, throw a web and take a swing at their face... I could go on!
What they taught us was spiders (not the ones in our houses anyway) don’t do any of those things. They’re actually very predictable and once they’ve stopped running, you can take your time putting a glass over them and removing them. At the start, most of us were practically throwing that glass while simultaneously leaping backwards, but by the end we were all confidently catching them. At one point they were releasing two at a time and we were all fine.
Honestly, we were sceptical but we knew we had to do something and it’s worked better than we could ever have imagined.
The first time a massive one walked across the living room and my daughter said, ‘There’s a spider’ and calmly caught it in a glass while I sat on the sofa nearby was just amazing! Couldn’t put a price on it, baring in mind our previous strategies have included moving out of the house if there is nobody to catch one!
Hope that helps and I wish you well - it can be a severely debilitating phobia, especially at this time of year.