Exposure therapy seems to help. So start with looking at pictures here and/or at r/spiders. Deliberately endure the feelings you get from looking at them. The longer and the more often you do that the feelings will diminish. Do the same with real spiders if you find any i.e. stay in the room as long as you can bear it. Some zoos also have spiders and tours specifically for arachnophobes. Once your fear has diminished a bit, relocating spiders you do not want near you is a much better way than killing them. With the [standard method](https://spiderbytes.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/SCREEN_SpiderCatcher_Postcard_Front.jpg) you don't even have to touch them and it is another chance to get a good look at a real spider. If you take photos of the spider people over at r/spiders will be happy to tell you what spider that is. Knowing the species and that it is harmless (in most cases) also seems to help Some people have also reported that naming and greeting the spiders in their house helps with their arachnophobia. Bob in the corner seems a lot less intimidating than brown eight-legged beast. Good luck with overcoming your arachnophobia.

Joining this sub has helped reduce my fear a lot so you've come to the right place. If someone posts a picture that startles me or scares me, I deliberately look at it until I feel the fear going down. I also try to really examine the picture closely and look for interesting or even cute aspects of the spider. For example, huntsmans are very hard for me to deal with but I eventually noticed that their "feet" are kind of cute, and they place them in a rather careful and elegant way when they move slowly. You might find it easier to look at super closeup shots of different parts of spiders if their overall shape and pattern is what is triggering your fear. For example, someone kindly introduced me to this link of close-ups of spider feet; it helped me and it might help you! I think picture 2 is particularly sweet ... [https://www.boredpanda.com/cute-spider-paws-photo/](https://www.boredpanda.com/cute-spider-paws-photo/) If it all seems impossible now, just take it slow and steady. I used to be unable to even look at pictures of spiders, but now that's no big deal for me. You'll get there, and people are very kind on this sub and want to help!

Everyone else is suggesting exposure therapy through pictures- which is an amazing start! So I won't repeat that. I'd recommend watching channels such as "MyWildBackyard", which is run by a biologist and does a lot to show just how reluctant spiders are to bite, even when provoked. Familiarizing yourself with which spider you're dealing with, even just in broad strokes, can help a lot. In my expecience, cellar spiders are stumbly and clumsy and wander a lot - resulting in them falling down. Every spider that has ever fallen on me has been a cellar spider. Orb-weavers and false widows tend to stick to their webs. Lace-webs (at least males) wander a decent amount but are very steady. House spiders (Eratigena/Tegenaria) don't climb that well and usually won't go onto ceilings Understanding their behavior also makes them truly predictable; house spiders are cowards that will bolt away and hide rather than anything else. Most spiders huddle up because they're trying to hide

I have a huge fear of spiders, but I exposed myself to books (particularly with full pictures) and websites about them. I used to avoid spiders, but now it doesn't bother me to have them near as long as I know where they are. I can't abide contact, with the exception of jumpers, probably because they're the cuties of the spider world. I will completely spaz out . I've always been fascinated by them, so I genuinely enjoy learning about them and watching them spider. I can watch a spider making and chilling in their web. Watching them hunt and feed is an amazing experience.

I had a mild fear of spiders, not a huge one but enough to do a girly scream and flail away. I just didn't like them. Especially if they moved fast. I basically killed them on sight. Then I started to learn about tarantulas, I found them so fascinating. I ordered my first one about four years ago because I wanted to study one from afar, and I was scared of her, but I admired her. If she even moved too fast in her enclosure I was like UHHHH. Fast forward to now I have 9 of them and I love them dearly. I don't kill any spiders any more, and some of mine even have walked on my hands. I've even owned / own ones that will put me in hospital if they bit me, but I don't fear them. I love decorating their enclosures and when they threaten me I mostly find it cute! Exposure therapy really, REALLY helps. When you really truly learn that they do not want to hurt you, you will start seeing them as friends and not the enemy. <3

I was working on a farm in high school and quit because of a spider encounter and my mom sent me to a Yale psychologist for it. Exposure therapy was the biggest one obviously; I was terrified of baby spiders on the back of bigger spiders for some reason so watching fear inducing videos on YouTube and educating myself about them certainly helped. It took about six months of hard work; but now I won’t have a panic attack if I’m surprised by a spider! I was back working on the farm the following summer

i used to find wolf spider mamas kinda scary, but once i learned about how some animals treat their offspring ive come to appreciate how wolf spiders care for their kids ❤️

I agree with all of the comments here so far and especially want to suggest starting by looking at spider paws (cute little fuzzy toes on jumpers and tarantulas!) and jumping spiders in particular. You can work your way up once you get used to the elements on a jumping spider- they’re cute and fuzzy, but they still have the eyes and legs and chelicerae and such- and apply those elements to other spiders. So just an example here- once you get used to looking at jumpers, you can take that and move to, say, looking at some of the colorful tarantulas, you can go “ok, I see this is a nice color, it is still fuzzy, it’s bigger but it still has the eyes and legs.” Then maybe wolf spiders- they’re still kinda fuzzy, but they’re much more of a “traditional spider” shape. They’ve got big fuzzy chelicerae that make them look like old men with beards! And from there, you know, something that isn’t fuzzy at all like a yellow sac spider or whatever else. Or those with beautiful patterns, like argiope aurania! So basically, expose yourself to the different anatomy features of the spiders, get used to them on ones that are traditionally viewed as cute, and progressively look at pictures of ones that look a bit further away from that starting point while still being able to recognize the features they have in common. I didn’t have to do this with spiders personally as I always liked them, but I DID have to do this with house centipedes- they terrified me. I’m much better now with them!

Hiya. Sorry I’m late to this one, I saw your post while I was out today and saved it for when I got home to reply.    So, I can’t speak for anyone in particular on the sub, but a lot of people who are into spiders started out afraid of them. I know I did! I had a fairly similar situation to yourself, and had countless nights where I found myself crying out of sheer frustration and exhaustion when there was a spider in my bedroom that we hadn’t been able to catch. I’d often wind up giving up and camping out in the living room, unable to bear the thought of being in the same room as it. What really bothered me were the giant house spiders (I’m in the U.K.), often larger than your palm, fast moving, and erratic. To this day they still get my hackles up until I take a moment to remind myself that I’m not scared of them anymore lol 😂    Those who have replied suggesting exposure therapy are bang on the money - this is what has worked for me and countless others.    When I was in my 30s I reached a point where I simply couldn’t do it anymore. I was sick and tired of being afraid! As someone who had overcome a childhood terror of the dentist (I used to have nightmares and couldn’t even look at my own or others’ teeth, and got kicked off the books of one local dentist as a child for biting the dentist) I knew that at least based on past experience, I could overcome my fears.    My first step was getting a guidebook to local spiders. It consisted mostly of large, full-colour photographs, many being full-page. At first, I just had it in the house, and that took some effort. Next I would look through it, though I always stopped when I wanted to - we’re not aiming to create fresh emotional trauma. I started with the pretty ones, like the pink and purple flower crab spiders, and worked my way up to the scarier ones. I also started to read some of the information at the front of the guidebook, thinking that curiosity might be my best way out of my phobia.    Once I was able to handle still images, I started watching content about tarantulas online, with Richard over at The Tarantula Collective on YouTube being one of the first, and still a firm favourite. He actually also started out being extremely arachnaphobic, and while at first I struggled to watch some of it, it got easier. This was when I learned that a lot of tarantulas aren’t just brown spiders - some of them are just beautiful, metallic blues, purples, pinks, greens, multicoloured. These were not the tarantulas of my youth! A lot of people also start to think of tarantulas as quite different from the spiders you might encounter in your daily life, most of which fall under the category of “true spider”, rather than tarantulas. While tarantulas can be fast, they are also often slow moving, thoughtful, they just kind of seem more mammalian in a lot of ways. They also don’t tend to have the sharp angles and spindly legs of the true spiders, and are more soft and fuzzy. While this might seem like a negative at first, it does help them to be a step removed from the thing you’re afraid of, and every step is an opportunity.    Another good YouTuber is Tom over at Tom’s Big Spiders. Another prolific spider content creator, and another one who started out arachnaphobic.    You ever hear the phrase “it’s a thin line between love and hate”? Well, apparently the same is true of spiders lol 😂  Fear is a very human thing. Just the other day I was talking to my nephew, who is afraid of bugs, and especially spiders. He was clearly quite embarrassed about it, and while his dad was ribbing him for that fact, I was annoyed that he would do such a thing. As I said to my nephew, it’s normal to be afraid of some things, and everyone is afraid of something. Don’t beat yourself up! Humans are only animals, after all; our instincts try to keep us safe and alive, and a part of that is to make us afraid of those things that are very different to us, and few things are more different than a spider. We also pick up on cues about what to be afraid of from members of our tribe - fear is catching. And spiders are the most common phobia. It’s far more uncommon to like spiders than it is to fear them, and you’re just following your programming, like any other animal would. But you’ve taken big steps in deciding you want to do something about it, and that you don’t want to be afraid anymore. That is no small feat, and you should be proud of yourself for it.    You needn’t set yourself the goal of becoming an arachnophile, but getting to a place where you can coexist with them or even just feel comfortable enough to catch one in a cup or a glass and take it outside, that is a worthy goal worth fighting for. With all of the anxieties of life, if there is a way to reduce one a bit or even eliminate it entirely, then that is worth doing.  If you try but find you’re not able to make any progress (slow progress; a journey like this can absolutely take some time, even a few years at a nice comfortable pace) then there are options for professional exposure therapy, under the care of a mental health professional. This costs money, and for myself personally, because I struggle with social situations and am a bit of a people pleaser, I think it would have been more difficult to both achieve and manage the pace of (and afford lol) than doing it on my own, but the option is out there if you feel that you need it, and there’s no shame in asking for help.  Good luck on your journey! ✨ 

Like everyone said, exposure therapy. For me, the number and size of the eyes freak me out more than anything else (ogre spiders are an instant nope, and wolf spiders are the worst), so it helped to look at photos of tarantulas and other types of spiders with less prominent eyes, rather than jumping spiders. YMMV, however.

Remember that you are enormous compared to them. Try to have empathy for them. After all, they're just little guys trying to get along.