Lara Gets Over Her Arachnophobia. Sort Of.

Posted by Lara Masters at 15:40 on 12 Oct 2009

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Lara Gets Over Her Arachnophobia. Sort Of.

Here I am with a tarantula on my hand. This is surprising because in usual circumstances I'm a bit nervy forward slash hysterical around eight legged creatures. Perhaps it's leg envy. This would explain why I'm not scared of snakes but did burst into tears when a centipede fell into my bath in Nice last month.

Anyhoo, (and before my mum points that out as a spelling error again, yes mum, it says "anyhoo" not "anyhow" - it's funny okay), I've just been on a Neuro Linguistic Programming course. NLP is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "a model of interpersonal communication chiefly concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behaviour and the subjective experiences (esp. patterns of thought) underlying them" and is designed to achieve specific life-goals. Richard Bandler, who wrote this definition and co-founded NLP, taught the intensive week's course and people including doctors, pharmacologists, business owners, politicians, accountants and a melange of other crazies gathered to discover the secrets of the brain's machinations in order to "help others" forward slash become multi-millionaires.

One day we were taught how to dissolve phobias which is how I ended up with Tanty-Legs crawling up my arm. I haven't yet practised NLP enough to know how effective it is but was impressed that I went from being uncomfortable even glimpsing a hairy arachnid to feeling quite affection towards Miss Tanty Pants and happily having her crawl on me, in the space of 20 minutes.

However, I was a bit disappointed when I got home and saw a dead house spider curled up on the floor and was weirded out again so clearly need to do a bit more programming, particularly as tarantulas are not really a problem in Cricklewood.  

Next, I'll NLP myself to walk/break-dance. How hard can it be? I just had a love-in with a tarantula for Chrissakes.

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