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inevitably-johnlocked · 4 years

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Weird q..but i really dont understand why most fans hate season 4, especially the last episode. Why? I think it gave us a deeper look on both sherlock and mycroft! I felt it tells a lot about mycroft how he had to step in and take control of things ever since he was a kid himself. Also he is not a robot or a killer. Also redbeard thing. It was an appropriate deep psychological trauma (cause most shows usually disappoint in that area). I am not trying to impose my opinion. Just want to understand

Hey Nonny!

It’s all good, and I totally respect your opinion and how you enjoyed S4! It’s totally okay! I know that there are quite a few who got a lot of of S4, and who genuinely enjoyed it.

Sadly, I am not one of those people, and I’ll try to be as diplomatic a possible in my response, but PLEASE know that I don’t think you’re “terrible” or “stupid” for liking S4 because I DO get passionate sometimes in my responses, and I’m just merely speaking as someone who studied the series very closely for quite a long time before S4 aired, and as someone who knows Day-One-ers (ie., people who watched Sherlock on its day one airdate) who also are a large majority of the people who did not like S4. This is just me simply stating why I didn’t like it, but it’s different for everyone.

Stating what I DO like: The acting and cinematography of the first two episodes were brilliant for what they had to work with, and I’ve never faulted any of the actors for the flaws of S4. And for TFP, they did the best with what they had to work with.

That’s… pretty much all I really liked about S4.

Now, here’s my problems with S4:

Nothing made a LICK of sense to the narrative that they were telling in Seasons prior.

This series was always based a bit in reality, and suddenly everything became comic-book rules: X-Men villains, shitty “redemption” arc, destroying favourite characters just for drama, ludicrous physics, explosions that only destroyed one small room in an apt where in previous episodes one explosion destroyed an entire block, etc.

Sherlock was OOC.

Mary was being built up to be a fantastic villain? Ah, nope, here’s the lacklustre twist where tee hee Mary’s just an assassin with a heart of gold that still emotionally abuses Sherlock and John and just won’t fucking stay dead.

And speaking of this, the DVD’s make NO LOGICAL SENSE unless she was planning to kill herself

AND she tries to make her death equatable to Sherlock’s??

Everyone was RIDICULOUSLY out of character in TFP, I’m so sorry: Mycroft is a bumbling coward for the most part, Sherlock disregards John when he gives the Vatican Cameos warning, the Holmes Parents are assholes because Mycroft COULDN’T SOLVE A PROBLEM WHEN HE WAS 12?? ARE YOU SERIOUS???? And that creepy Moriarty / Eurus thing, and LITERALLY they’re implying that EVERYTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE EURUS DIDN’T GET A HUG. Like, I’m so sorry, but that’s lazy writing.

And don’t even get me started on the ridiculousness of the entire character of Eurus. She LITERALLY had X-Men powers, and like… just nothing made sense. Her involvement in the entirety of S4 MADE NO SENSE. Why go back to prison if you can get out?? WHAT IS THE POINT?? AND I repeat: She did all this because she didn’t get a hug. Yes. I’m oversimplifying, but at the base level, that’s what it was, because she wanted Sherlock’s attention. Welcome to the club, kid, stand in line, everyone on the SHOW wants his attention.

The ENTIRE plot of the first 2 seasons got wiped out all because it wasn’t Moriarty who was interested in Sherlock, but Eurus?? What… What about Carl Powers?? Like…. the ENTIRETY of season one and TGG makes no sense now, because of that one 5 minute scene where Eurus “enlists” Moriarty. I… ugh.

The SUDDEN tonal switch from kind-of Sherlock to James Bond, for some fucking reason.

And on that note, how terribly lazy and cheap TFP looks in comparison to the other two episodes. The whole episode looks like it was filmed in a small house with 4 identical rooms.

EVERYTHING that was etablished in 2 episodes prior were COMPLETELY forgotten when Mary was “shot”.

The complete character assassination of one loyal blogger John H Watson in favour of Mary for some fucked up reason, even though AT HIS OWN WEDDING HE COULDN’T STAND BEING AROUND MARY. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe for one damned second that John would EVER forgive Mary for murdering his best friend after seeing what it did to him. That’s not love from her, and that’s NOT John’s character EVER in the ENTIRETY of the series.

And speaking of character assassinations, Molly’s character being devolved to S1E1 Molly, where instead of giving her agency like they were doing with her the ENTIRE series, so much so that Sherlock picked up on her dominance enough to give her a big role in his mind palace in HLV and TAB, only to make her a sad little self-insert Mary Sue pining for the main character, and in turn made Sherlock a TERRIBLE human being for MAKING HER say what she did. It’s gross.

AND speaking of Molly’s character, they’ve been setting up Mollstrade since as early as ASiB, but I guess that plot line got shafted. Look I LOVE Hopkins, and I am ANGRY they didn’t give her more than 3 fucking lines in the entirety of ONE episode after HEAVILY promoting her actress and character, but they essentially reduced her to a piece of ass for Lestrade to chase. AND THAT’S NOT HIS CHARACTER EITHER. EW GROSS.

The constant plot holes being gaped wide open, and the Chekov’s gun moments where they bring up shit but do nothing with it!!

TD-12? Nope, just a lame reference to a story we like.

John got shot at the end of TLD with a VERY REAL FUCKING GUN? Nope, it was a dart gun.

John not suddenly knowing how to be a doctor.

The TGG one I mentioned up above.

What was in the letter? And who was Anyone??

Moriarty essentially being erased as anything other than a hired thug and had no part whatsoever in Sherlock’s history.

Eurus… Just all of her character is asinine.

Everyone in T6T suddenly not knowing John’s the blogger, which is in direct contradiction to literally the entire series.

The AGRA plotline was ridiculous, in the end.

Baby? What baby? It was only there when convenient.

They dropped whatever plotline they were going to do for Mycroft: He was being set up as either dying, or the villain.

Redbeard. I’m sorry, I disagree with you on that. Mofftiss is trying to tell me that a little boy fell down a well and went missing, and that WASN’T the first place searchers / the police wouldn’t have looked? Sorry, no. And then. AND THEN his parents just… go along with this thing where Sherlock shuts down and they DON’T get him therapy? Yes, I agree the mind is a funny thing, and we can be traumatised into forgetting or dissociating from traumatic events. I GET IT. But… like I don’t believe the Holmes are so heartless as to just never grieve or have memories around about their supposedly dead daughter. It’s another OCC thing for me.

John’s cheating.

Disappearing and reappearing characters, like this scene, and the entirety of the aquarium scene.

Mary and John being terrible parents

OH GOD THIS FUCKING SCENE. That bomb SHOULD HAVE DESTROYED THE ENTIRE BUILDING.

What… who was this girl on the plane? What? Like I know WHO, but if she’s supposed to be Eurus talking to Sherlock, why don’t we see Eurus… talking to Sherlock? I … Ugh.

NORBURY.

The glass SUPER SECRET GOVERNMENT ROOM THAT NO ONE SHOULD SEE INTO in T6T.

Sloppy camera work that some believe was intentional, but if it wasn’t, jesus c’mon.

The RIDICULOUS amount of 4th Wall Breaking. Like… even the actors didn’t give a shit.

Essentially, everything on this list here and in this blog tag here.

And everything mentioned on these three posts:

T6T: 10 Revealing Things That Haunt You Late at Night

TLD: 10 Revealing Things That Haunt You Late at Night

TFP: 10 Revealing Things That Haunt You Late at Night

There’s SO much more I can go into, but please go through my “something’s fucky” tag in that last link.

Notice how probably 90% of that has NOTHING to do with “johnlock not becoming canon” because the Johnlockers get MONSTROUS accusations as to THAT being why we didn’t like S4, even though it was, like critically panned by the GENERAL AUDIENCE who have NO investment in the series other than “I liked it in the past”.

Two of my fave YouTubers have interesting (not perfect, but still good) takes coming at the series as casual viewers:

‘The Day Sherlock Died’ by The Closer Look

‘Sherlock is Garbage, and Here’s Why’ by hbomberguy

So it’s NOT just Johnlockers. I’ve talked to Sher1011ies at 221B con who didn’t like S4 either, because most of them realized how shitty Molly was treated in the last episode. So yeah, a big middle finger to those who think I dislike S4 because of “no Johnlock”. No, I disliked it because I need my stories to make logical narrative sense. I disliked it because I love John and they ruined his character all for the sake of drama and because Moffat has a “hurting Ben” kink. I disliked it because Mary should NOT have been “redeemed” because she was an abuser. I disliked it because Moriarty was turned into a cartoon villain, even though he was already overused in the series. I disliked it because the core of the show – the FRIENDSHIP of Sherlock and John, and their solving mysteries together – did not exist at all. I disliked it because John got sidelined. I disliked it because TFP was a ridiculous episode that, if you replace ANY of the characters, it wouldn’t make a difference, because it didn’t feel like an episode of Sherlock. I disliked it because everyone was OOC.

Anyway. Sorry. One too many accusations my way over the past 1100+ days LOL.

As for your assessment of TFP, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you. There was no growth and actually it implies something far more sinister: That the Holmes are and were terrible parents that gave no shits about their daughter, their traumatized son, and expected their eldest to essentially be a parent. It implies that Mycroft, at 12 years old, orchestrated the ENTIRE Sherrinford thing… Look I can suspend my disbelief, but there’s limits, and this is one of them. A LITERAL CHILD. Perhaps Uncle Rudy had a hand in it somehow, but then why not shit on Uncle Rudy? Why is Mycroft blamed for it all?

Look, I don’t doubt Sherlock had a traumatic experience regarding “Redbeard”. But then why play into the fact that he was a dog? Why bring another character into the series just to have a gotcha moment? Because Mofftiss wanted a “Shyamalan twist”, that’s why. They threw EVERYTHING away for a twist ending either because they GENUINELY thought it was good, or they got tired of doing Sherlock. ALL of TFP is LITERALLY a really bad plot twist because reasons. TFP makes no sense to the ENTIRE narrative structure of the previous 12 episodes. It erased EVERYTHING from the previous episodes, and coated it with a gross closing by a character no one wanted in the series, and then tried to convince us that it’s a new beginning – “a journey they had to go through” – but it SOLVED NOTHING.

Anyway. I have big feels about S4, and the only way I can enjoy it is to watch it subtextually, but even then, I cannot sit through TFP without cringing.

That said, Lovelies, please do not attack Nonny for enjoying S4! I know you guys won’t, but Nonny came out with an olive branch and they just want to understand why the fandom is passionate about S4′s… whatever it was. We can have a civil discussion about it, and point out – without attacking – why S4 is universally panned. It’s okay to like things no one else does, and Nonny was respectful to me in this ask!

So with that, feel free, lovelies, to express why YOU didn’t enjoy the series, or why you did! I’m interested in both “sides” / pov’s whatever :)

#steph replies #long post #sherlock s4 #s4 shitposting #mofftiss #something's fucky #the mary problem #my thoughts #my meta #shitposting steph #sorry gang if you like the season #it's easier for me to enjoy it if i tinhat

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gaiatheorist · 6 years

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Daddy Issues.

The idea here was to write about ‘something else’, to clear my tangled mind of all of the hugely impactive peripheral issues floating in my atmosphere right now. It’s not going to work, and no quantity of “That is in the past.” or “I broke that cycle.” can blase-away the fact that a deeply dysfunctional development skewed my life into what it is now.

They and them, and this and that caused me to develop into what I am, an unemployed, 41 year old she-ish thing sitting typing into a knackered old Chromebook, with loads of keys missing, mainly on the left side, so I have to keep correcting typos, where I think I’ve hit the key with my dead hand, and it turns out I haven’t. That’s a literal observation, but also a fitting metaphor, a damaged person, using an unfit for purpose tool, to the best of their limited ability, in a tenacious-draining attempt to just keep functioning.

It’s not the ponies, and the foreign holidays, and the ‘stuff’, of course there’s a niggle that my eldest half-sister was given a house, and my younger one is undertaking her second degree at Oxford, interspersed with exotic holidays, when I’ve never even held a passport. I chose this path, I willingly elected to remove myself from their lives, I can’t resent them their indulgences, because I was the one who opted out of those spheres.

There was no real drama to me ‘running away from home’ at the age of 18, no screaming rows and flouncing out, I’d been spending increasingly longer periods of time at the boyfriend’s house, one night in October 1995, I just didn’t ever go back home. He’d given me a Yale key, and told me the combination of outside-lights-on that mean his ex-girlfriend was there, and I ought to walk another lap around the block until she was gone. That’s a weird thing to remember, that if the outside light was left on, his ex was there to walk the dogs, and I was to stay out of sight, like dirty laundry. I was his rebound from her, they’d separated, after 11 years, in the July or August, I met him in the August, and I’d fully moved in by the October. For a few months, I was a shadow-thing, second-best, in hindsight, he might have held out hopes for a reconciliation with his ex, familiar ground and such, he always did prefer the easy option. I’m not easy.

It wasn’t as ‘planned’ as the time I was going to leave sixth form, and take a job in a pharmacy in town, renting a room from a friend’s boyfriend. It wasn’t as dramatic as the time I was going to leave and live in my boyfriend’s grandma’s spare room, in the house where the gas and electric meters kept running out. My mother physically attacked me that time, screaming at me that I wasn’t taking THAT because she’d paid for it, dragging my clothes out of the bin-liners I was cramming them into, and tearing out a fair-sized chunk of my hair, when I just continued stuffing things back into bags. I needed to be out of there, for both of us, for all of us, we’ve since acknowledged that our respective ‘escapes’ from our fathers and families were more similar than either of us wanted to admit. We’re more different than we are similar, but, in a way, I also ‘jumped into bed with the first man that would have me.’

Her father was a monster. He was a paedophile, and he’s the grain of sand at the core of my oyster of not-telling, and not-asking-for-help. Why ask for help when there isn’t any, why change situations to protect others, when that takes away all of your own protection? I broke that cycle, I ‘saved’ my half sister and female cousins. Yes, I destroyed the family, but a family based on secrets and lies is worse than a fractured one. (Weird side-thought, I’m the only one of my siblings and cousins with a male child, I might have protected those girls, too, he’s dead, he died during his prison term, but his wife is still alive. If I hadn’t spoken out when I did there are at least five girl-children that might have been placed in his bed.)

Her out-of-the-frying-pan was more obviously abusive. My father, not quite a monster, was violently unstable, and emotionally controlling. Bruises and scars fade in time, but the memories of emotional and psychological abuse are always there, temporal trip-wires, ready for the next trigger. My father, and her father, are the reasons I’ll never work in certain industries. Un-pretty-ing myself is a defensive mechanism, protecting me from some predators, and reducing the risk of being accused of being a try-hard slut, who will never be pretty, even under three inches of make-up. I’m content in combats and a ponytail, I don’t feel any need to paint myself pretty, but part of that links back to my father constantly berating and belittling any early attempts at femininity in me. I am clumsy, not graceful, and I’m never going to be a classic beauty, I accept these facts, but my non-binary, middle-ground ‘aesthetic’ rules out most customer-facing work. Cheers, Dad.

Years of very hard work have enabled me to mostly disable my flinch-reflex. I’m one of the dead-behind-the-eyes types of abused children, rather than one of the hides-under-a-table types. My mother and father were both physically violent to my brother and I, so we learned the dead-response, our parents wanted the gratification of a reaction, and the two of us were already so emotionally messed up that denying the reaction was the only power-play we had. We would probably have had a lot less beatings and broken-things if we’d rolled over and showed our bellies, but we turned into resistant rock-children, unresponsive to the battering and berating, to frustrate our parents. Cheers, Dad, I can now stand face-to-face with violent and aggressive individuals, and keep my body language and tone of voice neutral.

My father was unreliable, and unpredictable. When we still lived with him, there was no indication whether he would pick up his mandolin, and sing a nonsense-song with us, or backhand-slap us for no apparent reason. There were giddy-good times, but they were always tinged with the trepidation that we might do something bad, and set him off into a rage. We were never the reason for his rage, he was just mentally unstable, but that existence, coupled with the Catholic upbringing, caused behavioural shifts in my brother and I. He’s more ‘outward’, more hedonistic, more careless, he is more settled now, but for quite a long time, he lived a what’s-the-worst-that-can-happen sort of life, dangerous behaviours and risk-taking. I’m the other end of the spectrum, everything I ever do has to be risk-assessed to the nth degree, I’m incredibly self-limiting, and that probably has impacted on my mental health. (Piss off, well-meaning articles about the importance of an active social life, my Daddy Issues have really screwed up all of my human interaction.)

Not wanting to ‘set off’ my father, and being hip-deep in the slurry of Catholic guilt complexes, I became a timid, invisible thing, so worried about being ‘caught’ and punished, constantly on-edge. That constant, all-encompassing paranoia tips your ‘normal’ anxiety response, being on-guard all the time for what other people might do to you doesn’t leave much energy spare for ‘yourself’. I never really built a sense of identity as a child, my adolescence was spent raising my half-sister, because I’d had the temerity to do away with my mother’s free childminders, so there wasn’t much time for exploration and development. I frustrate people-trying-to-help, when they ask me what I ‘enjoy’ doing, what I do ‘for myself’, because I can’t answer. Outside of a very strictly limited range of activities, I don’t know what makes me ‘happy.’ (I’ve just looked at Facebook, my younger half-sister is in Thailand, I’m sure she knows what makes her happy.) Thanks, Dad, for having so much ego of your own that I skipped that step entirely, and became a different kind of doormat to my mother. That malleable need-to-please suits some people, but it never really sat easily with me. The little girls who grow up being told how nice and pretty they are seem to continue to seek that affirmation as women, it was something I’d never had, so I’ve never ‘missed’ it as such. I know I’m not ‘ugly’ or ‘stupid’, or any of the other things he called me, but that ‘cutting off’ behaviour is hard-wired, I don’t seek meaningful bonds with people because they might turn out to treat me like he did, and I piss people off with my ‘get the first one in’ self-deprecation. (Bored of telling professionals “I’m being facetious.” when I mock my disability and such.)

My mother left him. I don’t know how many attempts she had made previously, but there were a lot of blood-and-snot-and-dufflecoats-over-pyjamas midnight car trips to stay with friends of hers for a few days. Children normalise events, ‘most’ people would be traumatised by those escape-flights, I suppose we were, until they became our ‘normal.’ I was seven, and my brother five, when we started having to sit very quietly in the waiting room of the solicitors. We looked at houses, and there was very little said about Dad not moving with us. She moved back to the village where her parents lived, and, for a little while, we were a single-parent-family, with Dad not paying the maintenance money on time, and either turning up, or not, to take my brother and I to his house at weekends. When he did bother to turn up, there were arguments, there never seemed to be any food in at his house, and he’d just bugger off and do his own thing all weekend, leaving my brother and I in the house. He started to lock us in after someone complained about us running feral, and he started to unplug the phone from the wall when we’d phone our mother to say he’d locked us in again. The overnight access stopped, there were more rows about the maintenance money, and we ended up going to the ‘Education Office’ for school uniforms, coats, and shoes, you could tell the other children in similar predicaments, because there were only two kinds of coat available, the better-off kids used to yell “Edjo!” at us. The lesson I learned from that was that people, in general, are untrustworthy. So I don’t trust people. There is always food in my house when I have my son here, and most of it isn’t the horrible cheap-tasting freezer-shop rubbish my mother used to buy, for convenience, because she worked long shifts, and because she was a genuinely awful cook.

The single-parent-family thing lasted a couple of years. Mum-got-a-boyfriend before Dad-met-a-lady, with hindsight, they both reverted to pattern, she found a violent alcoholic, and he latched onto a quiet mouse of a thing, who wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouth full of it. My brother and I didn’t like the new man, we were already both damaged enough not to want to ‘bond’ with this stranger in double-denim who had moved into ‘our’ space. Our ‘normal’ wasn’t his ‘normal’, we had been raised in chaos and squalor, he had been raised by a mother with very exacting standards of behaviour and housekeeping. From the familiar, disordered squalor of living with a mother who vacuumed the downstairs carpets once a week, and was so lax with the laundry that we grew out of anything at the bottom of the laundry basket before it was washed, to new rules. Stupid rules, like slippers indoors, and dishes put away as soon as they were washed and dried. Those rules made no sense to us, because we’d never known them. We didn’t like him, and then he started hitting our Mum. He battered her, we’d been there before, we’d phone the police, and chase him out of the house, and lock the doors. (Back then, the police wouldn’t ‘interfere with a domestic’, but if they had a drunk and disorderly causing a public disturbance outside, they had to do something, my brother and I were street-smart.)

She didn’t learn, one of the many reasons I don’t really have a relationship with her. We, her children, would try to protect her, because she wouldn’t protect herself. She always took him back.

He battered my mother, he attacked my brother more than once, but never laid a hand on me. I like to play fierce on that one, to pretend he sensed the fire in me, but I suspect he just knew how the police would view him assaulting a young girl/woman.

I couldn’t live there, with that, I made sporadic attempts to get out before I eventually did, and inherited a new ‘father’, whilst creating another. Too fast, too young, too much, “I want to give you babies” was a line from a Pulp song we’d puppy-love say to each other. His reaction when I showed him the pregnancy test was the reason I only ever bore one. (Fairly certain that a student who passed through the school I used to work in was his daughter, though. That’s a different story.)

I gained a functional-patriarchal father-in-law. Christ, we’ve butted heads over the years, we’re both obtuse. I’m stronger, and faster, and taller, and leaner than all of his various daughters, step-daughters, and daughters-in-law, he didn’t understand me, he didn’t try to, he tried to feed me cake, to make me soft, and compliant. Not my style. He had some very rigid ideas of what females should, and should not do, we ‘should’ work in shops, or be nurses, and wear nice blouses, we ‘should not’ be capable of independent thought, or ever challenge the authority of a superior testicularly endowed person. You can imagine how that worked out, along with the “Here, lass, you can’t lift that, I’ll get it!”, and such. That was his way, and he was set in it, there was no point in me trying to change him, but my son has seen me tense and clenched-of-jaw enough times to know what I object to.

My son. I made a child, and, in doing so, made my ex into a father, apparently ahead of his schedule, but my reproductive system is very badly damaged, I didn’t know if I’d ever conceive and carry again, so I took that one chance. I’ve reflected back frequently, over the last couple of days, since Fathers Day, about how the ex ‘parented’ our son. He didn’t. That was ‘my’ job, because he’d been raised to think so. Aside from the biological fact that I breast-fed the tit-limpet for a year and a day, and that my body was slowly recovering from childbirth, I can’t see a biological distinction to validate the weird division of everything. (I’ll gloss over the fact that I had such massive post-natal depression that I was hallucinating, and shaved my head, but continued zombie-ing on, with a forced smile, because ‘at least he is not ginger!’) The ex “couldn’t” change nappies, because the wipes, the bags, and the nappy-tapes were “meant for women’s hands.” Obviously, he couldn’t breast-feed, but he didn’t pick up the midnight-screaming ‘grub’ either, he never learned the subtle differences in ‘hungry’, ‘wet’, ‘soiled’, and ‘attention, please’ cries, they were all just an elbow in my ribs until I made them stop, with my weird woman-magic.

He didn’t like to handle ‘the grub’, he said he felt that the baby was too small, too fragile, for his man-hands. I may as well have existed in the 1950s, where children were strapped to the woman until school-age. (There’s a ‘Dinosaurs’ aside, the boy didn’t call him ‘Dad’ for years, we were ‘Mum’, and ‘My Mum.’) He was a Saturday-Dad, except Saturdays were band-days, I worked on Sundays, so, after Sunday lunch at the in-laws, he’d take the small one to the park in town, where he said he “Felt like one of those Dads with weekend access.”, hmm, I wonder how you could change that? As the boy grew, nothing much changed, I was responsible for him, and the house, and the ex. The ex was ‘emotionally absent’, some computer game, some TV show, some band practice, he never taught the child to ride a bike, or lace a pair of boots, because he was always ‘busy’, or ‘tired’. I have taught the boy many, many things, but it hurt my heart a little to have to ask the ex to show him how to shave, that’s something I couldn’t teach him.

I have had some incredibly bad examples of fathering, and I married a man who didn’t fancy getting involved with the process. Fathers Day is awkward for me, because I can’t join in on the love-fest. I have Daddy Issues.

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we-dentalwiz-blog · 7 years

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Overcoming Dental Phobia

I am a dentist and I wear it proudly on my sleeve! But the responses are plenty and varied with the people I meet and introduce myself to. And one thing I can say for sure, they’ve generally been negative!

I had this really sweet lady without a single mean bone in her body say, “It’s not you, Doc! It’s just what you do! I really do hate dentists!”

The other time I met this group of fine looking, educated and suave gentlemen, but once they got to know I was a dentist then there was no stopping them with all the funny dentist horror movies and jokes.

I could go on and on and now I laugh with people when they make funny dentist jokes. I’ve realised it’s not them but their genuine fear of the dentist, dental pain or dental phobia that’s setting off their reactions.

In the past few years of being a dentist, 18 to be precise, I’ve seen all kinds of people. The really compliant ones (yes they do exist J), the fearful ones,the ones who start off being really scared and then settle down beautifully for the rest of your life, the ones who make sure each appointment is like the first one in their life and traumatise themselves and the dentist and then we have the ones who never ever settle and need a little more help than just a good dentist.

They have a genuine problem and ever so often I have seen busy dentists getting all angry and riled up with a patient for wasting time. The worst strategy according to me, makes the patient go further into a shell and less compliant as minutes pass and the dentist gets angrier.

It could be a case of dental anxiety or dental phobia and I’ve seen both very closely.

Those with dental anxiety will have a sense of uneasiness when it’s time for their appointments. They’ll also have exaggerated or unfounded worries or fears.

Dental phobia is a more serious condition. It’s an intense fear or dread. People with dental phobia aren’t merely anxious. They are terrified or panic stricken and it’s a genuine problem.

I’ve had a patient who exhibits a classic case of dental phobia. She would come to the office building but before she could take the lift to our office, she would turn around, sit in her car and drive back home. She would call from her car and say, “Doc am heading back home! I just can’t get myself to come into the office!”

Of course we found a way to treat her, but differently. I will tell you in just a bit how we dealt with her.

We see dental anxiety in all our patients.The word dentist has something magical about it that evokes the anxiety response.

Patients may force themselves to go, but they may not sleep the night before. It’s not uncommon for people to feel sick or in some cases, to actually get sick while they’re in the waiting room.

And of course we have ways to deal with that too!

Statistics reveal that 10 to 20 per cent of the people never end up seeing a dentist at all and that’s a huge percentage!

So what is it all about? Why the fear?

Research has shown some common factors like:

Fear of Pain

The fear of pain is most common in adults 24 years and older. This may be because their early dental visits happened before many of the advances in “pain-free” dentistry.

Feeling Helpless

Patients in the dental chair need to sit still. They can’t see what’s happening and have to submit themselves completely, making them feel helpless and out of control which may trigger anxiety.

Embarrassment

The mouth is an intimate part of the body. People may feel ashamed or embarrassed to have a stranger looking inside. This may be a particular problem if they’re self-conscious about how their teeth look. Dental treatments also require physical closeness. During a treatment, the hygienist’s or dentist’s face may be just a few inches away. This can make people anxious and uncomfortable.

Negative past experiences

Anyone who has had pain or discomfort during previous dental procedures is likely to be more anxious the next time around.

The changing face of dentistry and pain management today

As time has gone by and dental practice has become more evolved and patient-centric, the level of dental anxiety and pain management has become a serious business.

Some new research has set shop for gadgets that make dental anxiety seem like a thing of the past.

Dentalvibe

The Dentalvibe gadget was invented by DrStephen Goldberg DDS. This invention focuses primarily on helping to reduce pain in patients during dental procedures. Obviously this is quite important because dental pain is one of the major reasons why people don’t get the dental procedures they need as often as they need them.

The way Dentalvibe works is by tricking your brain into not feeling pain while a needle is inserted during dental procedures. Your brain will tend to ignore rhythmic sensations, but pay careful attention to more random ones that don’t follow a rhythm. So, by creating just such a non-constant rhythm, the device will get your brain to pay attention to that instead of the pain of a needle during gum procedures.

Dental Button

One problem with many dental procedures is one of communication. When you have a drill in your mouth, how do you properly communicate with the dentist that there’s a problem? This leads to many patients feeling like they are completely out of control during procedures even though they are conscious.

One recent solution to this is the ‘Dental Button’. This is a tool that connects to a dentist’s drill and allows the patient to press the button and cut power to the drill if they are uncomfortable with what is going at any point.

Many dentists have said that they use the button and it lets patients feel much more at ease and in control, even though few of them ever actually use it. But the psychological fear of being out of control is a major problem for many dental patients, so even the potential control that patients get back can go a long way to making procedures less stressful.

The Wand

Most injections at the dentist’s office are handled with a needle. In order for it to be done properly, the dentist needs to make the anesthetic injection at exactly the right speed. If they go too fast, it can cause the stinging sensation many people are used to during a dental procedure.

The Wand is a device that controls the injection electronically using a computer, so that it goes much more smoothly without any human error problems. This can take the guesswork out of the procedure on the dentist’s side, and make people a lot calmer and assured about the entire process on the patient’s side.

Dental Lasers

Hard tissue lasers are getting popular as they can be used to cut tooth structure without using the dental drill. The sound of the drill and the fear it evokes is one of the biggest problem dentists deal with. The advent of the hard tissue laser may make dental drilling a thing of the past.

No noise and no pain! Dentistry couldn’t get any better.

Hypnosis

Research in the field of dental hypnosis is making great strides and with great success. The process needs to be regulated. But for a patient willing to be hypnotized, the dental experience can be magical!

Conscious Sedation

Dental phobia can now be easily dealt with Conscious Sedation. It involves sedating the patient with a cocktail of anesthetics which makes them completely comfortable and leaves them with no memory of the dental treatment later.

An advantage of this is that it can be carried out in the dental office and does not need complicated equipment but the dentist has to be thoroughly trained to administer it.

Keep smiling till I see you next week!

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