740: There. I Fixed It.
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. As long as you can remember, going back to when you was a child, Sam was scared of spiders, but not scared of the normal way where lots of us don't feel great when we see a big spider or a snake or a big bug or whatever. It invaded all aspects of my life at all points in the year. I was thinking about spiders all the time. Any room I walked into, I looked in the corners, I looked under the table, crouched down. Every night before I went to bed, I fully unmade my bed. Walking down the street, I wouldn't walk under anything that I would try to avoid right angles to the best I could because that's where spiders going to make its web. But you were scared that one would fall on you or just because that's where they are. Whether or not it would fall on me was really irrelevant. Just seeing a spider, not moving, moving, large, small, it just created a feeling in my body that was just, I would shake, I would throw up, I would faint. And of course, if you're constantly going through your life looking for spiders, you'll find one. As a kid, he didn't do sleepovers, didn't do summer camp, other kids made fun of him. People did not understand. People pityed him. When he grew up, it did not go away. His fear ruined dates. He once found a spider the size of your thumbnail in his car and sold the car that day. I had went to psychiatrist for exposure therapy. I had went to psychiatrist to talk about it. I couldn't watch an image of a spider on a TV screen. Let me ask you. Does this name anything to you? Peter Parker. No. Oh, Spiderman. Yeah, could you watch those films? No, absolutely not. I don't even know if Spiderman has anything to do with spiders, to be honest. And then, he was seeing hypnotherapist and he was going nowhere. When he read in the New York Times about this new treatment for phobias, they can get full results in just one day, and he reached out to the doctor behind it, a psychologist, Dr. Merrill Kent in Amsterdam, and she invited him to be part of a study and get the treatment. If you could hear nothing that was food in the Netherlands, a film crew captured what happened during his treatment for a documentary series called A Cure for Fear. You're doing fine. Are you nervous? Yeah, it's okay. Sam and Dr. Kent stand outside the door of her room. She opens it. He looks in. There's an aquarium with a brown furry tarantula, maybe four or five inches in size. Yes, there's a spider in the tank, but let's not wait too long, so it would be very good if you can already walk in a room, and then I close the door for our gauge. Great.
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