Love this! Love and hugs to you for inspiring me to put into words a lot of things I’ve been thinking.

Yes, knowledge is paramount to dispelling fear. In my experience, the most crucial piece of knowledge in dispelling any fear is the knowledge of who I am.

The way to view fear that most resonates with me is a way I've heard Abraham-Esther Hicks describe it, which is that fear (in whatever form: panic, anger, anxiety, frustration, etc) indicates that one’s beliefs and thoughts about oneself are not keeping up with the person one has evolved to be.

For example: A tendency to feel anxious when leaving the house (did I leave the stove on, did I lock the doors, were both cats secure, etc.: worry, worry, worry) prompted me to examine my beliefs about myself in this way. I first attributed the anxiety to leaving the house in a hurry, running around unconscious focused only on getting out the door, so I started slowing down; before leaving, I would take a deep breath and do a measured walk-through of the house. When I KNEW I had checked the stove, the cats, etc., and my body and mind still had an anxiety response as if I hadn’t, I was more than ready to ask some questions.

Once the fear had dissipated and I had found clarity and calm again, I looked at the pattern objectively, asking myself what belief I might have about myself that would cause such an obviously irrational emotional reaction (and of course, all fear is irrational). I realized that in that fear of having failed to secure the house and my animals was present a belief of incapability, a belief that I’m always on the cusp of making a mistake/of failure.

In fact, I know myself to be a capable, responsible person the majority of the time. I have much more evidence of that than I do the contrary. I believe I am capable of amazing things, limitless, really. In fact, I know those things to be true. The anxiety had grown and progressed in proportion to my growth and progression AWAY from that old belief about myself.

I reached a point in my growth that the belief of myself as an imminent failure could not be held alongside the knowledge of myself as not only a capable human being (of which my life experience is the evidence), but more poignantly, the knowledge of myself as infinite consciousness/awareness. So every time that belief reared its head, I had a severely uncomfortable reaction because I was being pulled back and away from who I truly am. Too much discord.

The same thing can be applied to arachnaphobia in my case, and (I think) that of @thedragonanarchist. The beliefs that I could not co-exist with spiders, that they were not friendly, that they needed to be stomped out of existence in any house in which they appeared—those beliefs were not mine, and those beliefs were not in alignment with my knowledge and understanding of myself, other beings, and the world.

Those beliefs were given to me and reinforced through behaviors I observed in others. Again, looking at the evidence: I’d never been attacked or injured by a spider; if I were pursued by a spider, I was confident in my ability to defend myself or get away (so silly, I know, but I had to work through it logically in order to move past it). Ultimately, it was not natural to Me (my higher consciousness) to smite any creature for trying to live its life with no threat to me, despite that it seemed natural to those around me.

This is where it gets fun: realizing I could choose something else. If I knew I didn’t want the fear, and I knew I didn’t want to cause harm, what did I want? I wanted the spiders and myself to live our lives peacefully and happily—that is the basis of my true values, and that is why I now calmly relocate most spiders I encounter to the outdoors. Some stay inside and perform their services, and I acknowledge and appreciate them for what they do.

This is where it gets even more fun: using any instance of unpleasant emotion (fear in whatever form: annoyance, sadness, anger, etc) as an opportunity to identify and leave behind a limiting belief. As I was writing this, in a zone, thinking, typing, inspired, my cat interrupted loudly, demanding attention. My initial reaction was to get annoyed, which I promptly stopped to examine. Why would I get annoyed that my cat, who I love and appreciate, got up from a nap and was so excited about the beautiful day and the birds outside, and being alive and healthy that she requested to enjoy it with me? I wouldn’t. I think that’s awesome, and I think she’s awesome.

The annoyance was not me. It was a fear of not having enough time, of having too many things to do—neither of which is actually a reality. Taking 30 minutes to sit outside and feel the sun and watch her be happy and ridiculously cute isn’t going to make or break my schedule and goals for the day. “I’ll never have time to get this done” or “I have so much to do that I can’t afford an interruption” are just stories that a lot of us tell because many people around us tell them and have been telling them. So, when it comes to any fear:

Do I want to believe and tell the story that takes my power and keeps me upended and unbalanced, or do I want to believe and tell the story in which I have the power to live the reality I want to live with more clarity and freedom than I’ve ever accessed before?

(If you were wondering, I paused, took my cats outside, and it was lovely. And in the course of enjoying that time, I came up with another way of understanding and stating a couple of concepts I wanted to include in this response. Coincidence? Or evidence that not making decisions based on fear is actually what propels us towards the things we do want?)