I understand exactly how this feels. I remember confiding in a colleague when my fear was at its absolute peak, telling her that it would be so much easier to deal with if I wasn’t bombarded with horror stories, exaggerated media depictions of dental situations and everyone complaining about their own dental problems/treatments all day, every day. She said that as a non-anxious person, she was barely aware of these stories and situations being around us but admitted that when she was going through divorce, she felt everyone was talking about falling in love & getting married so she understood how it can feel to have certain things feel like they are closing in on you, especially when it is something you want to avoid.
The problem is that a lot of people who spread these stories, are unaware that they are contributing to a sea of “what if” scenarios that is rapidly coming towards us phobics and adding to the pressure we already put on ourselves.
Unfortunately, it is human nature to want to tell stories, be the centre of attention, turn trauma into humour and share bad experiences. We all do this to differing degrees – bad news and experience certainly travels faster than good. In the past week, I know I have complained both in person to friends and in facebook updates about really shoddy customer service and the same principle applies here. As much as I would like to say I also speak about good experiences, the truth is that as a whole we look for what makes a shocking or humorous story and will get a reaction from others – whether that is sympathy, empathy, humour or a “like” on facebook. Indeed social media has made this attention seeking side of our personalities even worse in recent years and I myself have been left bewildered and slightly freaked out my the dental horror stories posted as status updates. In fact my big bugbear at the moment is that fact that everyone I know seems to be either having babies or partaking in exotic travel; either way I am confronted on a daily basis by updates about injections,
enormous needles, sore arms, crying children and often for the latter – video accompaniments (I will refrain for giving my feelings on this which would fill an entire thread on their own). I find the descriptions absolutely horrifying and often feel extremely queasy which only adds to my own existing phobia.
I think we are also socially conditioned to talk about these things – and probably dentistry more than most – as horror stories. Again this comes down to media depiction. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard someone say they have just come from a dentist appointment only to have someone else ask “
was it awful? Share your trauma, give me all the gory details...” So a lot of people in turn play up to this, even when not invited to do so and this cycle will continue until people stop thinking of dentistry as something necessarily awful and to be feared. Usually now if anyone tells me they have been to a dental appointment I answer with
“oh nice, I love that clean feeling after being at the dentist” Often this is met with a look of utter confusion and then “
yes actually, it was fine and nothing to worry about”. Being utterly paranoid about these things however, I do worry that I might at times be dismissing someone with a real phobia who maybe did need to talk about it.

I mentioned this kind of thing to my dentist once, saying that I had been very confident and anxiety-free until I got caught up in a horror story conversation the day prior to my appointment. He agreed that this is a problem but is solely down to people enjoying playing to a crowd and bad news travelling faster than good news. Dentistry is only a bad example because it is expected to be and because in times gone by, techniques and practitioners were quite nasty. On the other hand (excuse the pun) many people have manicures and haircuts on a regular basis but every so often you will hear a horror story about over vigorous filing, burning from chemicals etc. These are the stories that people like to repeat but it doesn’t mean that 99.9% experiences are painfree and very enjoyable and so it is with dentistry.
Remember also that everyone is different. I sat opposite a colleague for 3 years who had visibly damaged teeth and was always heading off for lengthy and (as she told it) horrific sessions in the dentist chair. She also happened to attend a dental practice where I had one very bad experience

. She would always tell me all the gory details, including the fact that the dentist was always “
angry” at the state of her teeth and when I tried to ask her to stop because I was “ a bit squeamish” she told me that that kind of attitude would get me nowhere and everybody at some stage in their life would end up undergoing at least one nasty dental procedure no matter how well they look after their teeth, it was all just one of life’s inevitabilities.

This thought terrified me for a long time, then I suddenly realised that in all the time I had sat opposite this lady, I had watched her crunch her way through a 500g bag of pear drops every single day, washed down with 3 cans of irn-bru per day. That made me realise that whilst I may still face dental work at some point, I can, to some extent, control the likelihood of this and if and when this does happen, I also knew I was in safe hands with my own dentist who would help me though any treatment.
When I had CBT to help deal with my dental phobia, I was encouraged to keep a thought diary to detail how often I would be thinking about dental problems and possible treatments and then went through these with the therapist to assign “belief ratings” from 1-10. This encouraged me to think rationally about whether these things would happen and what the real likely outcome would be based on my experience and knowledge with a good, sympathetic dentist. It did take some time – at first I could not get beyond
panic and into a rational place but it does work and after a while I was able to trigger a rational response whenever the what if scenarios took hold. Another technique I learned was simple distraction: It became apparent that these thoughts would really take hold when presented with otherwise “empty space” so on the commute to work, during boring meetings

, when trying to get to sleep at night… So I started playing word and number games in my head so as not to give the dental thoughts any space – counting backwards from 100, naming as many bands/films/countries etc beginning with a certain letter of the alphabet. My CBT therapist did emphasise that this kind of thing is a short-term measure to change the way in which you use thought processes and as a technique to overcome the negative thoughts, more focus should be on the ability to answer the negative thoughts.
It is hard though. I wish facebook had an embargo and reporting function for anything to do with needles or dental procedures

. Or that people would just be aware of others’ discomfort and keep their horror stories to themselves.
