Overcoming Trauma At The Dentist’s Office

I had to go to the dentist recently. Apparently, an old filling needed some fixing and my new dentist was much more proactive in terms of cavity filling than my old one. My old dentist was of the opinion that, if it was minor and not growing due to improved dental hygiene habits, then it didn’t need to be filled unless it was causing pain or discomfort or was poised to grow rapidly into something terrible instead of slowly growing worse. That made sense to me, as someone who had poor dental hygiene habits early in life but eventually grew into a collection of very good dental habits, but my new dentist is much less convinced. And far more persuasive than my last one, given that she was able to sell me on getting the fillings.

What makes this significant and worth writing about for reasons other than the misguided assumption that the universe at large cares about my day-to-day life, is that I hate getting dental work done. My childhood dentist did not believe in sensitive teeth, never attempted to address the pain I felt during dental procedures as someone with sensitive teeth in any appreciable way, and wrote off all my complaints and efforts to avoid pain as the normal complaints of a child who doesn’t want to be stuck in a chair. Given my personal situation at the time, I did my best as a child and teenager to endure it, but it left a lasting negative impression on me that endures to this day, even after a few years of actually good dental care with dentists and dental hygienists who take my concerns seriously. Which is, you know, a trauma response.

What really put it in perspective for me was the realization that while I may have been using meditative techniques to make my breathing even, stay physically still, and remain outwardly calm, I was actually disassociating during the work itself. I don’t remember any of the time when the work was being done, just the early bits where I was getting adequately numbed up and walked through the process my dentist was about to embark upon. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t terribly traumatic itself, but being in a dentist’s chair while the painfully familiar whir of a dentist’s implements fills the air is apparently enough to drive me right outside of myself. Honestly, the meditation and embodying techniques I used are probably the only thing that kept me conscious and coherent in retrospect.

When you’re working through PTSD in the type of therapy I’m doing, called EMDR, you and your therapist spend time coming up with a series of techniques for self-management. Containering is a technique for putting away all of the potentially traumatic thoughts you’re working through between sessions, and it’s very useful for dealing with temporary anxiety as well. There’s another technique, which I have forgotten the name for, to help you combat disassociation that would be detrimental to your attempts to process trauma during therapy that you couldn’t handle while it was occurring. My therapist and I came up with a word that I don’t use commonly and attached it to a specific mental construct that had a connection to all of my senses and reflected a moment that I always felt calmed and embodied by. For therapy, mine was the word “Melancholy” and the mental construct is sitting beside a partially-open window on a chilly, rainy day as the rain pounds against the roof overhead. While I keep that word and this specific technique for only therapy sessions and panic attacks, the process of embodying yourself by activating your senses is one I use more generally during meditation and apparently dental work.

Typically, when you’ve been traumatized by something, you try to avoid similar scenarios until you’ve had the opportunity to process the trauma. Unfortunately, if you want to keep your teeth healthy, you have to keep going to the dentist. I tried not going for a very long time and while I did have good dental habits, they weren’t always perfect and I did not receive corrections until I finally started going to the dentist again. So now I make sure to go every six months to avoid future problems and do my best to overcome my dental trauma as on-going care (wisdom tooth extraction, putting a crown on a cracked tooth, and then this recent filling work) happens without pain or significant discomfort. Honestly, my back and hands hurt worse than my mouth did, because of how clenched my hands were for the entire process and how my back muscles kept cramping in the dentist’s chair (gonna skip arm and back workouts on future dentist days).

Still, it is a slow process, recovering from yet another source of trauma from my childhood, but I think I’m glad I’ve been doing it side-by-side with my work on the trauma from my parents and brother. After all, it’s nice to have an example of what it’s like to work through trauma with someone who recognizes you were traumatized and is not only patient with you, but actively working to help you feel safe and comfortable. Like a therapist for my teeth.

Trauma, Video Games, and Acessibility

I took a whole day off. A whole-ass day. I did some laundry, because I need clean clothes for after my day off, but I didn’t fold the shirts (which is what always seems like the most difficult part of doing laundry until I start folding them). I didn’t do any writing. I didn’t check my blog. I didn’t go on social media. I didn’t even spend time trying to get people to play online games with me. I just sat on my couch, caught up on The Adventure Zone, and played Ghost of Tsushima. The Iki Island expansion stuff is interesting, but it did make the game a bit more troubling for me since it takes all of the horrible, traumatic moments of this game about trauma, death, and the question of what is permissible in war, and has started playing them all out again.

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Not a Young Priest or an Old Priest, but a Middle-Aged Priest

I’m on a bit of a “Matthew Colville” tear this week, so I figured I might as well review the first book in his Ratcatchers series, Priest. As Colville often says in his videos, the best way to support him is to buy his books. Since I’ve gotten so much enjoyment and refreshing information from his videos, I figured I might as well buy his books as a way to contribute to his well-being, despite the fact that I know his recent Kickstarter has helped him build a company that will probably have more to do with his income than his book series will for the next several years. I also figured he’d be a good writer since he does an excellent job with his videos and seems to be a DM people loved to play D&D with.

Priest is a surprisingly complex and nuanced book that stands out from most of the (honestly, pretty awful) D&D-fantasy books I’ve read. To be fair to the genre, I haven’t read most of what people say are the good ones since I get most of mine from used book stores and people seem disinclined to sell the reportedly good ones. I enjoyed it, and I’d say it was a really fun fantasy novel that broke away from a lot of the typical fantasy tropes by relying on the sort of stuff that comes up in a D&D world that is a bigger deal in a typical fantasy novel world.

For instance, the gods are real and have intermediaries who do their bidding, like the titular character, a Priest named Heden who used to be an adventurer. Heden, an ex-ratcatcher–to use the term most people use to talk about adventurers and all the chaos they bring to locals–is a shut-in priest who hates leaving his closed-down inn but is tasked to go investigate The Forest by his immediate superior, the local bishop. Heden not only has to face the dangers of a forest that generally kills everyone who goes into it and brave the mysterious Green Order, an order of knights who protect the locals from the dangers of the forest, but also his own anxieties and PTSD from his past as an adventurer.

There are a lot of mysteries about Heden’s past and Colville does an excellent job of giving the reader just enough information to slowly create a picture without tipping his hand. He lets us know that the past is important because it informs who Heden is and why he’s been chosen to investigate the death of a knight from the Green Order, but he also lets us know that it isn’t a central point of the story. Heden’s PTSD and some of the horrors from his past impact the present, but the important part is him facing them, not exactly what happened years ago. In addition to the glimpses through Heden’s quickly avoided memories, you meet some of the members of his old adventuring group and get a sense that Heden was the reason they’re all retired. Clearly they had all become very powerful by the time they retired, judging from the casual power of the magic items Heden has available to him, but still they all toil away at their own solo endeavors and don’t seem to speak to each other very much.

This cleverly side-steps the problem that arises when you have a large group of very powerful people united towards a single purpose. With all of them together, there would be very little that could stand in their way. Alone, Heden misses important clues in his investigation, can be brought down by sheer numbers, and has a hard time processing what is happening because he’s alone all the time. With the full group, the story would have been over in the first quarter of the book and there would probably be no sequels. Alone, you get to see that Heden still has a lot of growing to do and there is opportunity for mishap when he has to tackle every major task on his own.

The plot was a little frustrating, but that was mostly a personal thing. Heden is supposed to investigate and then redeem or condemn the Green Order, but he struggles with the task because of his own prejudices against knights and because literally everyone seems to put all of the responsibility on him and then do their best to make his job harder. Eventually, you see everyone was acting appropriately, but felt like “there needs to be a problem so everyone is going to be stubborn and difficult” while I was reading it. In hindsight, it was a clever thing to do because it aligned the reader with Heden’s feelings on the matter, but I really dislike stories that have problems because there needs to be a problem, so I almost put it down.

I would definitely recommend this book. It was a lot of fun to read, the characters are all intricate and super interesting, and it deals with something most people don’t consider: what happens to the mental health of adventurers after they retire. Not many stories seem willing to consider they might wind up like a lot of modern combat veterans. I like that Matthew Colville clearly did his research and does an excellent job of bringing PTSD and panic attacks to life in the novel in a way that isn’t so rough that it could easily trigger someone with related issues. I suggest picking up a copy of Priest and giving it a read.