Dental phobia
QUESTION: Masters, I’ve always suffered from horrible dentist phobia. I was scared of dentist from the very first appointment at the toddler age for no specific reason. The older I get the worse the phobia has gotten. I’ve had also positive experiences of dentists, always feeling like “now I have faced my fear and won” but when I need to get dentist appointment I get bad panic attack. This affects my life in very negative way, especially when my teeth require dental services often. Do you have any advice for us who suffer of phobias? How to settle the scores with the paralyzing fear? How I can become friends with my dental appointments? ~Ms. M, Finland
ANSWER: Your dental phobia has to do with a couple of past-life traumas. You have continuing fears and negative feelings about your teeth and mouth. It is getting worse because you continue to stimulate the intense horrible emotions from these lives. To rid yourself of this phobia you need to revisit those lives and resolve the issues that created the anxiety.
Your unconscious is working on you to face these emotions by requiring you to need dental treatment on a regular basis. If you didn’t need dental work you would never face your fears. Fears are the sign posts of life lessons that say “fix me now.”
The easiest way to work with the degree of fear you possess is under hypnosis. Find a good past-life regression hypnotherapist who will be able to take you back to the cause of your pain. The process can even be started in the current lifetime by the suggestion that you go back to the first time you experienced this event in this life and examine all the things that played into your fear. You will be able to see that you do not have to carry the fear forward – you can resolve it at the point of origin.
The initial event is creating a trigger point that causes panic any time a similar incident, in this case work needing to be done on your teeth or mouth, is contemplated. Once you can resolve and leave behind the old fear, you will be able to analyze the safety, and almost pain-free techniques, that dentists now employ. Your triggers had nothing to do with dentists but with torture, an accident, and birth defects.
If you can get deep enough into meditation or self-hypnosis, you can even take yourself to these lives to cut the attachments. However, it would be much easier with a hypnotherapist.