When there is a bug around me I can just sense it. Even its hiding. I know its hiding somewhere. One day I went to my friends house. Suddenly, I point somewhere and i said there is a centipede. It was a tiny gap between wall and ceiling. It was hiding. I know it was there. And after few minutes some house centipede pop up from that gap. I hate my life.

I am afraid of most insects but in particular flying insects scare me the most. The ones that make noise make me sick when I hear them. Like cicadas, house flies, and those awful beetles that make the gross clicking sounds

I have been terrified of bugs for as long as I can remember and can't even pinpoint a specific moment that made me phobic. Anyone else feel this way ?

My loyal cat Arty is my defender from anything small and with an exoskeleton. When I didn’t have a baseboard on my wall and the hell spawn millipedes (nothing needs that many god damn legs) would crawl out I threw him at it. If I cricket gets in the house and is making noise arty will track them down. I recommend a loyal bloodthirsty cat to anyone too squeamish to kill a bug yourself.

I have depression and I didn't take the food out of my room and finally i face the inevitable consequence, bugs. I walked into my room and there was a fly by my fan so i freaked out and started getting hyperaware of the stuff around me. I just paused and cried and didn't know what to do and I got the fly swatter and tried killing it while i was in tears and i don't think it worked and i also saw another bug (not the same one) in my bed. I started inching at every feeling i had in my body that was small, and I got extremely freaked out so i grabbed my slippers so i didnt have to touch the floor (i hadnt vacuumed in a while). and got my computer and ran to the bathroom only to find out that the wifi in the bathroom sucked so i had to stay outside of the door and i was thinking abt going downstairs to sleep but i know there might be bugs but i could also go to the basement but that was guaranteed to have spiders so that was a no so i choose my brothers room (he is at his moms rn). Im gonna try to not sleep to fix my sleep schedule by resetting it. I also am gonna try to talk to my therapist about this so she can help me.

Thanks to my online friends for helping me tho.

I’m at the point where I feel like that’s genuinely what I need. I absolutely cannot deal with spiders, centipedes, roaches, beetles, wasps, and so much more to the point where it’s crippling. For example, last night I saw a big house centipede on my ceiling and was frozen scared for 2 hours before finally working up the nerve to kill it after it crawled to a more reachable place; it took me 10 minutes up on a chair looking at it to finally be able to spray it with Raid on the verge of tears, and when it fell on the ground I ran out of my room screaming and crying and had a panic attack. It wasn’t anywhere to be found in my room when I came back which made it worse and I literally cried for 15 minutes afterwards.

This is a serious phobia that I can’t control and I’m just wondering if anyone has tried therapy for their entomophobia and if it was successful? Or does anyone have any other suggestions for how I could hopefully someday get over this?

I will kill every single insect in the world

I found a silverfish in my bed last night. Needless to say, I slept in the couch. I wanted to change my bedsheets today, but I'm afraid I'm going to see it again. I asked my mom to look over me while I did it, but she isn't taking me seriously. I don't know if I'll be able to lay down in my bed again.

I thought it was bad constantly having to see them in the bathroom, but now I know that there are worse things.

I am so sorry for this being so long.

In the winter of 2017 I was living with my Grandma (after a traumatic divorce almost a year earlier) to save money so I could purchase my first home on my own. My Grandma's house is old, really old. It's also pretty dirty because she is in her 80's and can't clean the way she used to. I tried to help, but would take a lot of man power and time to really scratch the surface. It's livable, but.. you know.. So I had my own bedroom, a tiny little space on the second floor. Two little windows, no light except the lamp I had. One window had a window AC in it, it stayed there year round. Which didn't bother me. The gaps were plugged with random things, from what I could see. One night, I was playing video games and chatting online to a friend while we played. My cats were laying next to me like usual. The headset for the PS4 one sits in one ear, so I could easily hear if Gram's needed me or my phone rang or whatever. As I'm sitting there I hear this hard sort of 'thunk' next to me. My two cats immediately honed in on the problem on the floor next to me, which immediately freaked me out. That meant bug. My mind went to spider, which I've always been afraid of. However it was what would come to be my worst nightmare ever. I found a stink bug. I didn't know what it was then and I flew out of the bed with a screech leaving my friend to wonder if I'd died. My hand flew to my nightstand where there was a roll of paper towels (I basically never left my room, so I also ate in there. ) I snatched up the unknown bug and flushed it down the toilet. That's when I noticed an odd smell. It stunk but it wasn't unbearable.

Of course I snatch up my phone and google a description of the thing. Finding out it's a stink bug and not particularly threatening, I relax and go back to my game, proving to my friend that I was still alive. The next night as I'm sitting on my computer I notice one crawling across the lamp shade next to me. For some reason I freeze up, after reading that if I squish them they make the stink, I grab an empty water bottle and as cautiously as possible, without touching it, make it drop into the bottle. It makes that sickening thunk as it hits the bottom. Once more it gets flushed. As the week goes on I come across a few more. Now I'm getting paranoid. I'm checking my ceiling with the flashlight on my phone and hoping beyond hope I don't find another. I start finding it hard to sleep. That's when life decided I needed a ridiculously traumatic event to happen. There are these old, thick curtains over the window with the AC unit. It's December and my room feels chilly so I go to see if I can block any other spots that may be making a draft.

I move the curtain. I see a stink bug crawling along the inside of it. The paranoia kicks in. That's when my eyes slowly turned upwards, to the folds in the top of the curtain. Pure panic consumes me. In each crevice of curtain, each fold, from top to bottom, front and back, is covered in stink bugs. They blended in insanely well. I back pedaled out of my room, tears forming and I start hyperventilating. I get brave enough to pull my cats from the room (crazy cat mom and all that). It's late, I can here the TV going downstairs, Gram's won't even hear if I scream. Trembling I call my dad. He's mister fix it, mister knows how to handle every thing that comes his way, he's my rock. By this time I'm having a full on panic attack and staring into my room from the hallway to see if any of them go anywhere else. When dad picks up he knows somethings wrong. I rapidly and through my tears tell him whats happening. Unfortunately for me, it's the weekend, and my parents camp on the weekends (I call it glamping). He tells me that what I need to do is vacuum them up and throw out the bag into the outside garbage. I can't bring myself to go in the room even an inch, let alone get close and suck them up in a vacuum hose. I tell him I can't and ask if I can see if one of my brothers will come over. He tells me that they aren't home, as far as he knew they were out with friends.

I have no choice. I turned around and go into Gram's room. Vacuum in hand I ever so slowly step into the room. I have never felt such fear in my life. I get close enough so the hose can reach, but try to keep myself as far back as possible. That's when I realize I can't get in between the folds of those thick curtains without pulling it closed more. I don't know how I did it, but with barely fingertips touching the edge I pull it. Then I see how bad it really is. There were easily 30-40 of them on the front side, in little like piles. When that curtain moved they started moving. I was ready to burn the house down. This was the night I learned that the males can fly.. Tight chest, shallows breaths, trembling everywhere, feeling dizzy... I turned the vacuum on. The faster I moved the better. As soon as I started hearing the 'tink, tink' up the tube... it made every thing worse. That meant they were closer to me, even if they were in the vacuum. The noise and movement did not make them happy. They started dropping on the top of the shelves I had below the window. I went for those, then back to the curtain. As I saw the numbers on the front dropping I also saw out of the corner of my eye something fly up to the ceiling and land. I start crying again. I try to turn my brain off and get them all. When the front is finally freed of them. I turn on the ceiling and get the one up there. Then the back of the curtain which was a good 15-20 of them. After an hour or so I'm 98% sure I got them all. I'm still afraid to touch the curtain, still checking every inch of the room. Sleeping that night was impossible. It came to a point that I had take something to sleep because I wouldn't stop looking everywhere with my flashlight for them. My computer was near that window, I didn't use it for months. I vacuumed the room every day.

August 2018 I buy my first home, everything has been fine up until about a month ago. Suddenly I start finding stink bugs in the house. This has made me so paranoid, so terrified of being in my own home. I'm afraid of the curtains and today decided they are all being removed, just blinds is fine. As I went to shower this morning there was one on the ceiling. I bolted from the room and started to panic, tears welled up. My boyfriend was downstairs and I couldn't really talk so I texted him to bring the vacuum up. My boyfriend is a lot taller than I am, so he took the hose and stepped up on the side of the tub and got it for me. We threw it out outside. It took me 40 minutes, leaving the door open, and only moving the shower curtain enough to keep a little water from escaping to the floor. It was the quickest shower I've had. I also shook out the towels for caution. A few hours later and here I am. Realizing I might have a really bad phobia.

PLEASE HELP.

One flew into my room tonight. I tried to kill it, but it ran away and hide somewhere. Now too scared to enter my own room. I've been dealing with this for a while, all by myself, because I don't have close relatives and my SO is far away now. Only my cat to help me, but this time she didn't see it. Just tired, with a headache, scared, my house is a complete mess, and this is taking a toll on my mental health. I live with fear in my own house. Tomorrow I will make some cleaning. I just hope that damn bug doesn't jump over me while I'm on it. Sorry, needed to vent off with people that understand how much this fear is a huge problem for me.

I have had an intense phobia of insects for a very long time (mainly caterpillars/worms/snails/slugs but really all of them in the right setting). I’ve had extreme panic attacks over bugs in the past but the other day my boyfriend noticed some type of bug in my hair (I asked him to never tell me what kind it was) and I had a complete breakdown. I screamed, cried, pulled at my hair and completely scratched up my arms in panic for like 20 minutes.

I left long red angry marks all over my arms and now my parents and boyfriend are so worried, sad, scared and generally freaked out. They want me to go to therapy but I just don’t see how talking about it can help me in the moment.

If there’s a bug on or near me I’m going to panic because in my mind it’s literally life or death and I have no control over my thoughts and actions.

Have any of you been to therapy for stuff like this? Does it actually help? I just don’t people around me to think I’m a nutcase but the marks on my arms certainly don’t help :(

so this has been happening more recently so i can describe it pretty well.

I have a big fear of bugs and i feel like puking when i see them sometimes. but that's not all.

so sometimes randomly i will be eating food and ill think I'm eating bugs or that the food has bugs inside it. (feeling small bites usually) and try hard not to gag. sometimes its bc of certain textures and other times bc i randomly think its happening when I'm eating or drinking something sometimes.

does anyone else experience this or is this something else?

For me I hardly care if it’s an ant or a fly. I’ll still kill it, but literally anything else and it has to die, even if it’s the friendliest bug in the world, I’m going to squash and squish until every last bug in my sight is dead.

For me it probably started when I was real young, about the time I would be in 4th grade. My mom hung our clothes from a clothes line at the time to cut down costs on electricity and when she did it one night a couple of wasps stayed in one of my shirts. I didn’t realize what had happened until after I put the shirt on, but I felt one fall out and hit my foot (not that I saw what it was exactly at first).

When I finally saw what it was I backed up to the other side of the room and felt the other one crawling in my armpit, thinking it was just an itch. I went to scratch it and the wasp stung me, but since I didn’t see it and thought it was just a bad itch, I kept scratching. It stung me a total of about 3-4 times before I realized it was another wasp. It was like a secret paper cut, it wasn’t bad when I didn’t realize at first but afterwards the pain grew exponentially. At that point I threw the shirt off and didn’t touch another one until a day later. Had to take the day off from school to let my arm go back to normal.

I never liked bugs before then but I definitely have a deadly fear of them (usually deadly to them, but still.)

After that, especially when wasps, hornets, or yellow jackets are around, I have a sense of where they generally are as long as I still hear them. If only I could react fast enough I could maybe pluck them out of the air.

It’s a similar deal with flies but it gets annoying given how tricky they can be to kill.

TL;DR: There is an infestation where I live, and I am terrified I might harm myself soon.

I have been afraid of insects and spiders for my entire life. My family always said I would grow out of it, but it has only been getting worse. Recently there has been a carpet beetle infestation in my mother's house (where I live) and she is not willing to do anything about it. It started in my bedroom, so I have been sleeping in the living room for at least 4 months. Now they are spreading to other rooms, along with another type of beetle (not quite sure what kind). I also struggle with anxiety and depression, and with this addition of stress, I am seriously worried I might end myself. I have expressed these concerns to my mother, but she doesn't care. I can't move out because there are no apartments open, and I would have to get a job, which is extremely difficult, both because of the pandemic and my depression. I really don't know what to know. I'm scared of what I might do when I spot the first beetle in the living room.

My family keeps infantilizing me for my intense fears especially of cockroaches and bed bugs.

Recently we've been having a roach infestation in the kitchen and everytime I see one dread and panic wash over me.

All I can do is run away and gasp/yelp. I feel so useless and pathetic.

My family just laugh at me and mock me treating me like a child saying things like "oh no it's gonna eat you." In a really sarcastic dramatic tone.

5 years ago I had a bed that was infested with bed bugs (thrown out) I still occasionally can't sleep in my new bed because I feel like they are still there crawling all over me.

When I have to change the sheets I always take everything off the bed and lift the bed off the bed rest so I can investigate.

I can only do this when I'm home alone because I'll get called "over dramatic", by my mom otherwise.

I hate this and anytime I try to talk to my mom or brother and explain to them my feelings I get told to "grow up".

Sorry for typos-My phobia started later in life BUT has only gotten worse. Not only that, at some point it seems that bugs just keep following me EVERYWHERE I MOVE! (I’ve moved a lot). Now, my current place has an issue with centipedes. First the house ones and now actually come up the drain wiggle and interrupt my pee/many legged centipedes! (Currently still holding my pee. I’m too afraid to go back to the bathroom)

This past summer I had my worse night mare come true. A massive cockroach crawled on my me while I was in bed next to my toddler at night. YEAH! I had to take off my clothes and then it landed on the ground. I screamed and cried while holding my son just panicking! I really thought EXPOSURE like this would have helped me.

Nope! We are here today. Holding our pee because a centipede decided to show up in bathroom!

Idk if exposure therapy would work on me, anyone have any other methods that they have used?

Idk, I just really need to vent this somewhere.

TW: light description of me trying to kill the cockroach.

I've been somewhat conscious that I had at least a small degree of entomophobia, but oh boi, just today I realized how bad it actually is.

I wasn't always like this, I think when I was younger it wasn't terrible because I liked playing in my garden but now that I'm older the sight of any insect that isn't just a fly makes very uncomfortable. Even flies at times make me jump when I'm not expecting them.

Well, so I recently moved out and this house is an area where there's more bugs than in my parent's house. I knew there were cockroaches but I just saw them every now and then and I could tolerate it as long as there wasn't that many.

But today I woke up and there was a giant cockroach standing on my wall next to my bed. At first I saw it and went "welp" but I had classes so I opened the window hoping that it could go away while I wasn't home. I totally forgot about it until I entered my room again and saw it in the same place, of course it wouldn't just go away just because I asked nicely, so I decided to kill it.

Now, I did everything to postpone the moment of truth, I cleaned a lot of things and even went to the store just to not confront it. But when I ran out of things to do I just stared at it with a broom in hand, I swear I spent hours just getting the courage to poke it. After some pokes it fell and I threw my boot at it. I couldn't get myself to crush it, I just can't.

I'm so anxious right now that any sound makes me jump and I'm at the verge of tears. I want to ask for help from my roommates but it's so embarrassing for me because I've never felt such amount of distress over something so... Idk, seems simple enough but I can't stop shaking, the thing it's already on the floor, I stepped on it but I know it's not dead, I just can't deal with it.

I'm currently just ignoring it while listening to my online class but oh God I'm having a terrible day.

Update: didn't kill it but I managed to sweep it and throw it in the trashcan. Happy ending

whenever i find a bug in room at night even if i kill it i always get paranoid that things are crawling all over me or that the bugs are in my room. does that happen to anyone else? if so does anyone have any way to help that?

This year I'm going to work on it.
Small steps at a time.
If anybody wants to join me on my journey let me know. I will be posting updates on how I'm doing.

Yesterday I saw a bee walking on the ground while I was walking on the trail and I let it touch my hand and it didn't hurt me.

Absolutely terrified of stink bugs. I’m extremely brave when it comes to most things. In fact I own multiple snakes and arachnids. Don’t mind public speaking and rollercoasters are my fav. STINKBUGS.. I cannot do at all They purposely land on me all the time. Like if there was in my room (I can tell because I hear a loud hum and then a thud) they will fly right at me. They get really bad around here and I always find them in my room. (IM WRITING THIS AT 2:30am AFTER BEING WOKEN UP FROM THE HUM AND THUD) Please explain how to get rid of them or ease my fear. TIA

I work for a cleaning company and they put me in this daycare that tests my mental fortitude every day. I swear I feel like I'm playing animal crossing with the amount of creatures I've seen here. Yesterday was by far the worst. I was ruthlessly bullied by two flies and introduced to what I can only assume is a literal dinosaur. I have no idea what it is but it looks like it survived the fuckin ice age. I did find bug spray but that thing could get me in a choke hold and I refuse to go near it.

90% of the time when I go to the bathroom I see one of these. Two days ago I saw one in the bathroom drawer, and I haven't opened it since.

My parents don't take my fear very seriously, so I often joke around with them ("the silverfish don't pay the bills, so they shouldn't be in our home, amirite?") but it's definitely exhausting for me to always have to see these things

Some kinda huge bettle thing I dunno.

Was about to go to sleep and HAPPEN to get up and notice.

All my life had people around to deal with it. Last night had to handle it myself. It took a minute or so.

Raid "kill on contact" is BULLSHIT i sprayed soo much and ended up squashing it with a lamp...

My anxiety... through THE ROOF.

I've had this fear forever. How to stop looking/calm my nerves about it today.

Even writing this my stomach is clenching so much. Ugh today is hard. I keep looking everywhere expecting something.

Hi all - I am a psychiatrist and years ago I had a Fear of Flying which thankfully I was able to get past using a set of techniques. I am thinking about creating a training on the solution to Entomophobia and phobias in general, but also trying to gauge if this is something people would be interested in before I start working on it. Would this be something people would be interested in? Drop a comment, I appreciate it. Thanks all and have a wonderful day!