Go toward what hurts

The story of my dental trauma

Warning…dental trauma and the most vulnerable post yet ahead…

A couple of weeks ago I had to go to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned.

“You’ve had a lot of work done.”

That’s what the dental hygienist said when she pulled up my chart on the computer as I settled in the chair.

My X-rays popped up on the screen in front of me, all kinds of funky looking forms and shapes on the page. Weirdest of all were the three metal screws that bizarrely live inside my mouth. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of work done.

As I write today, there is part of me that finds it difficult to access how panicked I was that morning. The visit was fine, certainly nothing particularly painful or upsetting.

This is what I wrote that morning as I was on my way:

“My chest feels so tight and I feel kind of woozy and disassociated from my body. Like I’m kind of floating, rather than grounded and present. This is the reality of what I’m about to do: I’m about to go into a nice, fancy office with generally kind and professional people. I’m going to lay on a comfy chair and the nice hygienist is going to clean my teeth. It will be over in less than an hour. I would do pretty much anything to not go through with this. All I can hear is: this is so dumb. I am feeling so panicky right now. I want to pull over. I want to cry. I hate this so much. I’m trying to breathe. “

I read that now and think dang, that girl was really freaking out. And even though I knew I wanted to write about this today, I feel ashamed that something as routine as a dental cleaning stirred up feelings of that magnitude.

I had an accident on a trampoline in the spring of my seventh grade year. I had recently turned 13, gotten my braces off and was ready for April Taylor’s birthday party in my new white jeans from Holidays. I have two memories of that night before the accident. I remember my parents dropping me off and walking across her yard alone; they said they were going to the movies, something I rarely remember them doing. And I have one other memory of climbing onto the trampoline in the dark and thinking about how many people there were on it. My mom had always warned me about how dangerous trampolines could be. The next memory I have is hitting the back of Jessica Polk’s head and sitting on the black fabric with my hand covering my mouth.

It feels obvious now that this event, this accident, was a traumatic event. There was no safe adult there, only April’s mom who I didn’t know. There were no cell phones, no way to contact my parents. Somehow my uncle showed up and drove me to my dentist’s office after-hours where my parents joined us. Following the accident, my parents did everything they could to take me to all the dentists, all the specialists, all the people who would help a scared and insecure baby teenager navigate knocking out her four front teeth. But no one was talking about trauma in the 1990s and certainly no one close to me was equipped to help me process the events of that night and all the ways that I experienced the weeks, months and years following. When you are a painfully shy, awkwardly tall, already anxious 7th grader, let me tell you that the last thing you want to be is the talk of the school when you get back from spring break and everyone wants to look at your teeth. I can still feel the heaviness I felt in my body walking down that hallway on the first day back at school, wishing desperately to disappear. The body keeps the score.

Was everyone really looking at me and talking about me? Probably—okay definitely—not. But my body stored that experience as if they were. To this day, whenever I feel on display or out of control of the narrative that is being constructed about me, I want to hide. The body keeps the score. When your brain perceives a situation is similar in some way to a situation that felt dangerous at some point in your life, your brain will activate a fear response. It’s trying to keep you safe. We are wired to feel safe and protected. There is nothing wrong with you.

I didn’t know anything about trauma until I adopted a child, gave birth to another and found that motherhood would be the thing that pushed me to the very edge of myself. Until then, I could mostly pretend that I was okay. There is much more of this story to tell.

But for now, the thing I want to say is that the reality that even the simplest of dental cleanings ramps up my anxiety no longer fills me with shame. I feel so much kindness and compassion toward myself. As my friend Nancy Carroll would say, sometimes the “lie guy” voice in my head still tells me I should feel stupid about my fear. That I should hide it from the world, hide it from the dental hygienists, hide it from whoever might read these words. Because the truth is I have worked so damn hard to be kind to myself about this part of my story. I have told myself that it wasn’t THAT big of a deal, it wasn’t a car accident or it wasn’t some other arbitrary measure of what actually counts as a trauma.

Adam Young says, “the essence of trauma is helplessness combined with abandonment by potentially protective caregivers. It is for this reason that a seemingly “insignificant” experience can lead to trauma. Without minimizing the damage resulting from the traumatic event itself, most often the event itself is not the most damaging part of the broader experience. What really wounds the brain is the helpless terror (perhaps of not being able to move your body or use your voice in such a way as to make the awfulness stop), and then the concomitant realization that you are utterly alone (that no one is coming to your rescue).”

When I feel that deep in my bones fear that tells me maybe I should just be quiet and not tell this part of my story, I’m going to choose to share it with the hope that it helps someone else to be kinder to themselves, to trust your body when it tells you something, to offer compassion to your fear. I don’t know if you can get an entire paragraph as a tattoo but if I ever did, it would be this:

“Go toward what hurts. Stay with it. Be so rigorously compassionate that your body learns that you are what is safe. There is this thing in me—I would call it the Imago Dei. I would call it Spirit—but this is in me. This force that always turns toward pain with love and says, “No matter what is happening out there, we will always be together and I will always be kind to you.”

Dr. Hillary McBride on Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens podcast