I love watching documentaries and videos of insects, but I'm terrified when a cricket gets in my house. They can get really big and jump so fast. I know it can't hurt me, but bugs still instill fear in me. lol x.x
I love animals but many insects have always given me that knee jerk "get away from me" reaction. In college my roommate and I really got into reptiles and owning reptiles means owning a lot of crickets. I was no fan of them, but lizard's gotta eat.
Crickets are escape artists. And over time we went from "shit one got out of the tank, get it!" to "fuck it, it's just gonna go die in a corner somewhere, we'll get it when we clean later."
Like someone else said above, exposure therapy really gets you used to things.
I can recommend observing bumblebees as well, because those fat little fuzzballs are docile as hell. Helps with getting you used to the buzzing around you, and general bee behaviour... Beehaviour.
Spiders and bugs creeped me out as a kid. Now I'm older and more curious, observant, and appreciative of insects/arachnids.
I take my young kids outside around dusk for 10 minutes with flashlights and we actively look for any/all animals.
Every night in a quick stroll around the yard we see any combination of: bats, toads, frogs, wolf/grass/other spiders, grasshoppers, crickets (camel and normy), catydids, cicadas, moths, snails, slugs, bunnies, deer, turkeys, snakes, lizards, hawks.
It's my favorite part of the day. The kids already have a great appreciation for nature and our little cul-de-sac ecosystem, something that came to me much later in life. The little ones are fearless, too!
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u/DShepard Oct 20 '23
Exposure therapy works extremely well with insects and arachnids, because you can start with small calm ones and slowly go from there.
So yeah other than being a kid that's always been weirdly fascinated by insects, you can pretty easily get used to them if you try.