Why Bed Bath N' Table love Halloween, but I don't

Today I innocently wandered into a retail death trap set by stealth-like shop assistants, who were intent on seeing me suffer a socially awkward anxiety attack in front of their cash register.  The buggers have have put out their Halloween merchandise and tacky decorations (see: fake spiders) ALREADY. 

I thought I had a few weeks to prep for the trauma that is involved, but they took me by surprise this year.  For the love of god, why do they need to put plastic spiders on the cash register??!   Perhaps I'll take in a big can of Mortein and jam it up their EFTPOS machine.

I used to love Halloween. When I was eight.  Living in New Delhi, India, and attending an American school, my sister and I got right into the spirit of things with our friends, spurred on by the American obsession with celebrating the holiday through jack-o'-lantern carvings, dressing up as ghosts trapped in purgatory, and trick or treating our way through the diplomats in the U.S. Embassy who were stupid enough to open their doors to us.  We had so much fun; it's a shame that Australia doesn't celebrate the holiday with quite the same enthusiasm as Americans.

I took all the trimmings of Halloween in my stride back in the day.  All the symbolism of skeletons, witches and ghosts in low thread count white sheets, and the associated spiders and other creepy crawlies didn't bother me at all.  But that all changed the day a non-itsy bitsy super-spider fell onto the white doona of my bed during a holiday in Northern India.  It was the beginning of my arachnophobia. 

Many moons, and countless stereotypical close encounters with eight-legged monsters later, I can safely say that I got it bad.  People tell me to just go get it fixed, like it was an oil leak in my car.  But it's not a friggin' oil leak, people, I have a friggin' psychological disorder.  And research shows that "hardly any" people seek treatment for their phobia.

Which makes sense, given that sufferers are terrified of the object of their phobia.  You couldn't pay me to voluntarily get treatment, because I know that the process of systemic desensitisation involves, at some point, handling a spider.  

I studied this treatment at uni in psych, and I know that I should be slightly less mortified by the time I handle the spider, but I still can't do it.  No way. 

Plus, I've seen this show from the U.S. where this shrink's idea of therapy is to force their client to spend a night (with the shrink) in a spider-infested house, and they don't know where the spiders are hiding, and then they get all surprised when they find them in the morning and then, presumably, they are cured.  I am still completely traumatised by this documentary. 

But, I can't kill spiders because it's against my rules, so on the occasions that it comes down to me and the spider, it's all about who blinks first, and then the other runs away and we just pretend that it didn't happen.  And then I rope some poor sucker into taking it outside, under strict instructions to not kill the prisoner.  Poor little things.