Transesse Coaching's blog

I am an Arachniphobe!
By Karen Nelson, M.A., CHt

That is a fear of spiders. And I should probably not admit this so close to Halloween.

I’m not always afraid of spiders.
If they are where they belong – outside – I have no fear of them (of course, unless one is crawling on me!). In fact, I am fascinated and admiring of their architectural abilities. Can you imagine building your home from something coming out of your belly button???
And, of course there are the folk tales from Ghana, Africa about Anansi, the trickster spider. He is very self-involved and greedy always trying to get more without adequate compensation.

In spite of these ideas, my fear has kept me from seeing the movie “Arachniphobia” and Charlotte’s Web has never interested me.

The first time I became aware of this fear was when I was about 4 ½ years
old. I am the youngest of four girls. Late one night two of my sisters woke me up from a sound sleep. Our parents were arguing very loudly in the living room. My sisters told me to go into the living room to find out what it was all about.
Now, I am 4 years old and have a very limited vocabulary. These two sisters
were 5 and 6 years older than me (so, 9 and 10). I don’t know what they were thinking, and I was probably thinking something like that as I made my way
down the hall. As I got closer and closer to the living room, I heard only one
voice yelling, my mother’s, and I got more and more scared of the anger behind her voice to the point where I couldn’t understand even one word of what she was saying. I looked back toward the bedroom wanting to return to my safe bed. My sisters were peaking out from behind the door and urged me on leaving me no choice – I knew they wouldn’t let me back in until I had accomplished the mission. They had no idea I was suffering from some kind of aphasia at that moment.

When I finally emerged into the living room, what I saw didn’t seem to match
the loud noise coming from my mother’s mouth. I expected her to be up,
moving around and wildly gesticulating with her arms and hands. The living room was lit by two low-wattage lamps. My mother was sitting in a dining room chair, leaning forward as if she were whispering, but screaming at my father who was seated on the couch, not saying a word, head hanging down. I don’t know how long I stood there before they noticed me. I only know that, at
some point, my mother escorted me back to bed (my sisters pretended to
be asleep), tucked me in and left the room. That night my mother kicked out my father. He never again lived with us, and we never saw him.

It may have been later that night or a night or two later that I suddenly
feared there were spiders under the sheets crawling up to get me.
Why spiders? Spiders build their own homes, for god’s sake. My home, that
night, had been destroyed figuratively and literally, it turns out. I wouldn’t
find out until I was well into adulthood that my father, who was an obsessive
compulsive gambler, had secretly taken out a second mortgage on our
house by forging my mother’s name and then gambled away all the money.

This didn’t really surprise me when I found out. The story had long been told of the night I was born. My father was somewhere in Gardena, California, playing poker (and losing) while my mother’s life hung in the balance. It turns out that, after I was born, she was hemorrhaging badly and needed emergency surgery. The medical personnel couldn’t find him to sign the consent forms. My mother’s sister had to rush to the hospital to sign the consent forms.

My mother obviously survived my father’s Anansi-like behaviors that night. Later on her marriage and our house did not.

Hypnotherapy works with just these kinds of fears or phobias. A fear comes from an actual experience of something threatening to the self or life. A phobia usually has no direct connection with an event. Sometimes it seems to come from out of no where.

Now, arachniphobia has not really affected my ability to function in the world. But, believe me, if it had or if I suffered from another kind of phobia that prevented me from functioning in the world, I would definitely seek out my own services!

In experiencing the world, as we grow up and evolve, we each build models of the world as we see it. This originally was a survival mechanism designed to protect us from known and unknown foes or from enemies that our elders perceived. We often forget that “the map is not the territory” and that our model comes from generalizations, distortions and deletions (Bandler and Grinder).

If you have a software program on your computer that is designed to help you with grammar and spelling, you might consider that your subconscious mind works in a similar way: your computer program underlines any suspect word (a word it does not recognize) or a phrase it believes is grammatically incorrect. Now, your subconscious mind (that part of you that responds to the world automatically) does the same thing only it goes one step further: it attempts to generalize the unknown to fit the model, throws out the unknown altogether or distorts it to fit the model. Many people have seen the exercise of reading a paragraph of seemingly nonsense words:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

And we are able to read it because our subconscious mind creates sense out of it. You can raed tihs becuase yuor brian has seltced out the msitekas. It has generalized the unknown to the known. Or there is the exercise of saying the color of a word when the word represents a different color: Green, Red, Blue, Yellow, Blue, Black, etc. In this exercise, unless one can compartementalize easily, clearly our mind distorts what we see with what we hear in our mind’s ear. Finally, we have the exercise where one is asked to count the number of Fs in a sentence:

Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years.

Now count the F’s in that sentence.

Count them only once; do not go back and count them again.

How many are there?

Because our brain pronounces the F in the word OF as a V, we tend to delete the F in that word. We simply do not see it. There are six Fs.

When we depend on these models made up by our subconscious minds we are led into living a life where our time moves very fast and faster with each year, where we are out of touch with who we are most of the time because our subconscious minds (brilliant as they are) are designed to protect us at all costs by making a map of our world. When you drive the same route to and from work or the grocery store each time, the drive seems to go very fast. Occasionally, it can go so fast that its hard to recollect the drive. You went on “automatic pilot.” The cost of this automation is the sense of self. The subconscious mind does this automatically without our conscious attention. We forget and think that the map is the territory, causing us to lose focus on what is truly important for our physical and emotional health: that which gives us juice in our life, the things that give us joy and pleasure, a purpose in life, the journey!

Of course, our subconscious minds do many more things without our conscious knowledge or permission. It can keep us awake all night worrying about something we cannot effect right away. It can distort our perception of time. Remember the last time you took a trip to a new place or somewhere you haven’t been for a long time? Going there probably felt like a long time, but returning, time seems to fly by even though it was the same distance. Certainly, time itself is an invention of our minds, isn’t it? It truly does not exist outside of our minds though we love to think so! On January 17, 1994, Northridge, California and the surrounding areas experienced a large earthquake. Exactly one year later, January 17, 1995, Kobe, Japan experienced a large earthquake. Of course, we in Los Angeles at the exact time of the Kobe earthquake, experienced the date as January 16, 1995! So, where does time exist?

Now, many of us, as we grow older, experience time speeding up, quickening so to speak. Why is that? Is it because any unit of time represents a smaller portion of our total experience? When I was three years old, I remember feeling that the two weeks before Christmas was like forever! Now three and a half months seems like two weeks! Can you believe its nearly 2012? I believe this ratio idea is part of the explanation. Here is the other part: when one feels time passing very quickly, it has more to do with one’s lack of connection with one’s higher self and purpose, with living in the map. [With the exception of when you’re having fun and time seems to pass very quickly. This is a misnomer. Time doesn’t pass quickly in that instance, it is simply outside of your awareness.]

It is said that a watched pot doesn’t boil. This can easily be translated to a watched clock doesn’t move! If we are bored, time doesn’t move at all, it seems. So, our perception of time passing is dependent on what we are doing. Aside from those times when we are having fun and time is outside of our awareness, our brains look for evidence of our beliefs or values or for the map we have manufactured, and the focus, then, is on the past or on the future in a misguided attempt to protect us. If the subconscious mind can identify the “map,” it goes on “automatic pilot.” However, in those moments when you are in touch with your mission, with your goals, with your purpose, with the journey, time slows down to normal. This is when you are in touch with NOW.

Here is one way to consciousness of Now (paraphrased from Echart Tolle):

Focus first on your breathing. Take three deep in the belly breaths. Then, while you continue breathing normally, focus on the inside of your body parts: the muscles in your shoulders,

your arms,

your hands and fingers,

your chest,

lungs,

heart,

stomach,

your thighs,

your shins,

your ankles,

your feet.

Next become the observer of your own thoughts. Say to yourself in your mind now, “I wonder what my next thought will be.” And listen for it.

Listen for any emotions associated with those thoughts without labeling or judgment. Hold onto this moment as long as you can, focus on what thought will come to you and do not judge that one doesn’t. Finally, observe the transformation inside of you, the decrease in tension, the fact that time has slowed down but does not crawl, and imagine experiencing this every day as you go about the business of being the best you, enjoying the life and freedom you were meant to enjoy.

Ten minutes a day will give you a minimum of 59 hours a year of real time.

Real time in which you will find your mission, your purpose if you have not yet done so. Time to hold the space for it to grow and mature.

This is the purview of hypnotherapy.

In hypnosis, you will experience this kind of NOWness as well as when you meditate in a way similar to what I’ve shown you here today. The difference is this: hypnotherapy is focused on helping you make the changes you specify to those models you have formed through identifications, associations and habit. It works with both consciousness and sub-consciousness to modify the associations you have built up over the years. And as you work through those associations, you will find it easier and easier to connect with your higher self.