Fear of the Dentist…and Other Fears

Last week, I went to the dentist. In the course of the consultation and because my dentist knows what I do, we talked about how many people have a fear of going to the dentist and indeed how some are completely terrified. Some people’s fear is so great that they completely neglect their teeth. This is a terrible shame when so often the first thing we notice about a person is their smile. Techniques are so advanced now with dentistry that as my dentist said “this is the 21st century. We can pretty much do anything these days.” This means also that a visit to the dentist can be pretty painless.

Reasons why people develop fears or indeed phobias can be many. They can for instance come from bad experiences in the past, usually in childhood. I remember my father who was born in the 1920s saying that after having a tooth removed having been given ether, he was too afraid to ever go to the dentist again. Needless to say he did not retain his teeth.

We can also learn fears from others and this can be common with fear of the dentist. If we have a parent for example who themselves is afraid, we may pick this up from them.

Sometimes, we don’t know the root cause of a fear. Sometimes a person is of a nervous disposition by nature.

These kinds of fears can be dealt with quite easily with hypnotherapy. Just this weekend, a young woman came to see me and it came to light that in her childhood she had had an experience which seemed related to the issue for which she was seeking help. Actually there were two experiences. I asked her to rate her discomfort when she thought about them now on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst discomfort she could imagine. She gave an ‘8/9’ to one of those events and a ‘7’ to the other. Both of those events had taken place when she was around 5 years old and she told me that she remembered the event she rated an ‘8/9’ ‘as if it were yesterday‘. This tells me that the event was too overwhelming for the brain to process it at the time and needed some help to do so. The event was very likely still exerting some influence over her behaviour in the present, the high level of discomfort being triggered when she found herself in similar situations.

I did a process with her that is designed for processing traumatic memories; the same one I use with phobias. Throughout the process, which uses deep relaxation and something called dissociation, she was able to follow along with what I asked her to do without any discomfort at all. Afterwards, she told me that towards the end, she could hardly even recall the event. This is a good sign. It tells me that the brain has processed the event which will simply be stored as a memory rather than a trigger for anxiety or fear.

This is how simple it is to work with fears and the more extreme fear that we describe as a phobia. Please don’t let a fear like this stop you from doing something important or that you want to do and please don’t let it stop you from getting dental or other medical treatment. Hypnotherapy can remove fears and phobias quickly and comfortably.