A Nature Lover Confronts Her Fear of Spiders

Tracy Twombly's critter-phobia is very specific, and it goes back at least as far as kindergarten.

This memory is strongly solidified in my mind.

A bunch of kids were standing on tables, and Tracy was one of them.

We had seen a spider.

I was terrified.

Someone said it was a really dangerous one.

And I don't know if this is the exact point when my arachnophobia developed or if I already had it before then.

Tracy runs a native plant nursery for a living, and she recorded part of this story for us while working in her greenhouse.

That's why you're hearing background sounds like this garden hose.

So Tracy grew up in Kansas in the countryside.

I was always outside, I feel like.

Playing in the barn

was so much fun.

Loads of great memories, except for the spiders.

Her bedroom was in a basement.

This damp, musty basement

that has so many wolf spiders.

Sometimes she'd see one in a room, and so she'd go sleep in the living room instead.

Unfortunately, the fact that spiders really freaked Tracy out was a source of amusement for people around her.

She says she has the kind of family that are just super into teasing.

So, for example, this one time when she was a kid and they all camped in the yard.

We set up a tent in

the backyard.

The next day, one of my parents had trapped a wolf spider in an empty tennis ball container.

and told me that they found it crawling on me in the tent.

Now, that wasn't actually true, but it gave Tracy a really bad scare.

So I never wanted to camp out again, and I didn't until I was an adult.

Another time, one of her Christmas presents was a box with a fake wiggly spider in it.

It scared her so bad when she opened it that she flung it across the room.

This was funny to everybody else, but this was incredibly traumatic to me.

Tracy does not think that anyone meant her any harm.

But her family didn't get it that teasing and pranks were just amping up her fear and stress.

Same goes for people outside her family.

In high school, a boy put a spider on her shoulder.

I went into...

What I think most people maybe can relate to an extreme panic attack.

I was hyperventilating.

I was instantly cold and sweating.

Yeah, I couldn't hardly breathe.

The boy later apologized.

He hadn't realized how serious a fear could be.

But even now, the memory of this incident is so vivid that it'll make her shake and shiver.

And her phobia has held her back at times in life from things she really wanted to do.

It put her on edge when she just wanted to relax on a woodland hike, made it hard some days to even walk into her greenhouse and do her job.

Over the years, it finally reached a point where she felt like the anxiety and grief this phobia was causing her, it was just too much.

In my 30s, after over

three decades with arachnophobia, I felt like I was over it.

I didn't want to carry

this part of me anymore.

And a series of things line up in Tracy's life that put her on a path to finally finding relief.

From Harvest Public Media and KCUR Studios, you're listening to Up From Dust.

I'm Celia Yopis-Jepsen.

Arachnophobia is one of the most common phobias out there.

And as a culture, I gotta say, we seem bent on reinforcing it in the way we tease each other, in our pop culture, movies like Arachnophobia.

But life's more fun without phobias.

And Tracy's story shows how even if we're suffering from a really strong fear of a specific animal, there are ways to gradually feel less fear so we can enjoy the outdoors more.

Today on Up From Dust, how Tracy got to the point of getting help, what it's been like for her, and how she's using her own experience to help the young'uns in her family enjoy being outdoors too.

Tracy Twombly's critter-phobia is very specific, and it goes back at least as far as kindergarten.

This memory is strongly solidified in my mind.

A bunch of kids were standing on tables, and Tracy was one of them.

We had seen a spider.

I was terrified.

Someone said it was a really dangerous one.

And I don't know if this is the exact point when my arachnophobia developed or if I already had it before then.

Tracy runs a native plant nursery for a living, and she recorded part of this story for us while working in her greenhouse.

That's why you're hearing background sounds like this garden hose.

So Tracy grew up in Kansas in the countryside.

I was always outside, I feel like.

Playing in the barn

was so much fun.

Loads of great memories, except for the spiders.

Her bedroom was in a basement.

This damp, musty basement

that has so many wolf spiders.

Sometimes she'd see one in a room, and so she'd go sleep in the living room instead.

Unfortunately, the fact that spiders really freaked Tracy out was a source of amusement for people around her.

She says she has the kind of family that are just super into teasing.

So, for example, this one time when she was a kid and they all camped in the yard.

We set up a tent in

the backyard.

The next day, one of my parents had trapped a wolf spider in an empty tennis ball container.

and told me that they found it crawling on me in the tent.

Now, that wasn't actually true, but it gave Tracy a really bad scare.

So I never wanted to camp out again, and I didn't until I was an adult.

Another time, one of her Christmas presents was a box with a fake wiggly spider in it.

It scared her so bad when she opened it that she flung it across the room.

This was funny to everybody else, but this was incredibly traumatic to me.

Tracy does not think that anyone meant her any harm.

But her family didn't get it that teasing and pranks were just amping up her fear and stress.

Same goes for people outside her family.

In high school, a boy put a spider on her shoulder.

I went into...

What I think most people maybe can relate to an extreme panic attack.

I was hyperventilating.

I was instantly cold and sweating.

Yeah, I couldn't hardly breathe.

The boy later apologized.

He hadn't realized how serious a fear could be.

But even now, the memory of this incident is so vivid that it'll make her shake and shiver.

And her phobia has held her back at times in life from things she really wanted to do.

It put her on edge when she just wanted to relax on a woodland hike, made it hard some days to even walk into her greenhouse and do her job.

Over the years, it finally reached a point where she felt like the anxiety and grief this phobia was causing her, it was just too much.

In my 30s, after over

three decades with arachnophobia, I felt like I was over it.

I didn't want to carry

this part of me anymore.

And a series of things line up in Tracy's life that put her on a path to finally finding relief.

From Harvest Public Media and KCUR Studios, you're listening to Up From Dust.

I'm Celia Yopis-Jepsen.

Arachnophobia is one of the most common phobias out there.

And as a culture, I gotta say, we seem bent on reinforcing it in the way we tease each other, in our pop culture, movies like Arachnophobia.

But life's more fun without phobias.

And Tracy's story shows how even if we're suffering from a really strong fear of a specific animal, there are ways to gradually feel less fear so we can enjoy the outdoors more.

Today on Up From Dust, how Tracy got to the point of getting help, what it's been like for her, and how she's using her own experience to help the young'uns in her family enjoy being outdoors too.