It sounds like you have every justification for your phobia!
My mother is arachnophobic, and probably slightly worse than you and with less reason. She certainly can't look at pictures - I have to go through newspapers and magazines and cover over any pictures of spiders with a plain piece of paper with a smiley face drawn on it. If I forget the smiley face, the mere fact she knows there is a spider underneath worries her. I once experimented on her to see how close I could get to a drawing of a spider before she freaked. The answer was as soon as a plain circle had more than four straight lines added as legs, she wouldn't look at it. The knowledge it was theoretically going to be a spider was enough. And there is no known source of her phobia, she has never been near a dangerous spider, there are no dangerous spiders in the UK and the largest spiders we have are only about two inches across. The only possible source is her parents used to run the village shop and a tarantula once crawled out of the bananas and my grandmother had to kill it with a broom - but Mum wasn't even in the building at the time, she just heard about it later. So I reckon it is atavistic rather than having a specific source.
For myself, I dislike it when spiders run across unexpectedly, but otherwise I am fine with them. And ones that make intricate webs or have interesting lifestyles are fascinating and often beautiful. I had to draw them for biology classes and would happily paint them now except Mum would freak if she saw the picture by accident.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2017-07-25 08:34 am (UTC)My mother is arachnophobic, and probably slightly worse than you and with less reason. She certainly can't look at pictures - I have to go through newspapers and magazines and cover over any pictures of spiders with a plain piece of paper with a smiley face drawn on it. If I forget the smiley face, the mere fact she knows there is a spider underneath worries her. I once experimented on her to see how close I could get to a drawing of a spider before she freaked. The answer was as soon as a plain circle had more than four straight lines added as legs, she wouldn't look at it. The knowledge it was theoretically going to be a spider was enough. And there is no known source of her phobia, she has never been near a dangerous spider, there are no dangerous spiders in the UK and the largest spiders we have are only about two inches across. The only possible source is her parents used to run the village shop and a tarantula once crawled out of the bananas and my grandmother had to kill it with a broom - but Mum wasn't even in the building at the time, she just heard about it later. So I reckon it is atavistic rather than having a specific source.
For myself, I dislike it when spiders run across unexpectedly, but otherwise I am fine with them. And ones that make intricate webs or have interesting lifestyles are fascinating and often beautiful. I had to draw them for biology classes and would happily paint them now except Mum would freak if she saw the picture by accident.
I hope your rail yard visit gets good weather :)