flashbacks

[742617000027]

i wish i could forget the awful feeling of vulnerability. it felt like oral rape, being held down, my mouth wedged open, screaming at the top of my lungs as a drill whirred away at the chip in my baby tooth. i was only 3, i was all by myself. my mother was in the waiting room and entrusted them to take care of me. i remember five adults holding me down, the dentist had a tray of drill bits laying out and she told me if i didn’t stop crying she would use them all on me. no local anesthesia. this was about 2009. now i’m 17 and have a cleaning on tuesday and all i can think about is that vulnerability. my boyfriend will be with me “protecting” me but if something genuinely starts to hurt, what then? what if i have cavities? i havent had my teeth cleaned since august and that was an absolute disaster. the staff is very gentle with me but i cannot control my trauma reflexes after 12 years of dental abuse.

 

[NervousUSA]

@742617000027 Don't know if this will help, but I will tell you about an experience of mine in case something about it is useful for you. I had to go to counseling for a couple months over medical trauma, which was caused by abusive medical experiences with some things in common with your experiences as a child with dentists, but in medical situations in my case, and some other types of problematic dental situations as a child, different from what happened to you, but still traumatic. The reason I went to this counseling was because I needed to have medical and dental treatment after avoiding medical situations for many years, and my life had become unbearable because of my trauma related misery in the run up to to it. What the counselor told me many times, was that my issues were greatly related to lack of informed consent and that informed consent could help me. They said I had been put through things that I would never have consented to, and definitely would never have consented to them if I had been informed of what would was going to be done if I had been given a choice (though I wasn't). The counselor told me that it would help me in medical situations to do the following 1. telling people like dentists or doctors that I want informed consent, which means having all procedures described to me in advance, and for my consent to be obtained before anything is done. I wasn't even able to talk about this, or barely talk at all, at first so at the first appointment I went to, which was with a doctor, I did something the counselor told me to do, I brought a notebook with me that said "I am dealing with medical trauma. I would like all procedures to be explained to me and for my consent to be obtained before doing anything" and showed the notebook page where I had written that to the doctor. 2. they also told me over and over to remember that I can say no, say stop, or leave, at any time. If the doctor or dentist had a bad reaction to #1, that would be a reason to leave. For me, this helped, and I have made a lot of progress dealing with this type of situation over the past few years. Maybe something in this might be useful to you, I don't know.