11/11/2025
Many people with spider phobias run a kind of inner cinema where the spider isn’t a creature any longer but a towering, eight-legged colossus. Their mind takes a thumbnail-sized reality and turns it into an IMAX spectacle. A spider that would fit on a fingernail becomes something with presence, weight, and an almost mythic largeness. It fills the mental room the way a shadow puppet fills a wall when the torch is too close.
Clients often describe this without realising they’re doing advanced special-effects work. They’re enlarging the creature, sharpening its edges, dialling up the contrast, turning up the movement, and adding a sense of looming. Their nervous system then responds not to a spider but to the giant they’ve created. It’s as though their imagination is playing a prank on their physiology, saying, “Look at this massive thing!” and the body dutifully fires up the alarms.
When I hear these descriptions, a private thought often wanders through my mind: if spiders were actually that size, I might join the stampede as well. Because inside their mind, the spider isn’t the modest little architect building corners of webs for a living. It’s a creature of legend. So the fear makes perfect sense once you understand the scale they’re seeing.
And this, of course, is the elegant doorway into NLP change work. This weekend, in our Licensed Practitioner of NLP, our students will be learning how to help people get rid of their phobias. We have spiders and snakes being brought in, too, for them to test their work afterwards.
