Nothing personal, but...

"Nothing personal, but I just really hate the dentist."

It’s one of the most common phrases I hear when meeting a patient for the first time. It’s often said with a nervous laugh, sometimes with an apology, occasionally with a kind of pre-emptive defence — as if to soften what comes next.

And I always find it interesting.

Because we don’t begin many relationships this way.

We don’t sit in the hairdresser’s chair and say, “Nothing personal, I just hate hairdressers.” - Even though we’ve all had a haircut that felt a little too short, or a colour that didn’t quite turn out how we imagined.

We don’t say it to the person making our coffee.

Or to the receptionist.

Or even to the parking officer standing beside a fine on our windscreen.

And yet, in dentistry, it’s almost expected. Normalised. Practically part of the introduction.

So what is it about the dental chair that makes people feel the need to say this first?

Dental examinations are full of anxiety triggers. Our subconscious mind immediately starts an inner conversation, whilst it processes why we reach out to some stranger, who, for some strange reason, is interested in looking inside our mouth.

"Even you don't look at yours much!" - it tells you.

As your dental appointment day nears, you find yourself looking at your mouth in the mirror, as if trying to understand it.

"It's dark, full of funky shaped pearls, that never seem white enough, even though I'm spending a third of my income in the fanciest toothpastes and whitening strips. Not only that, mouths have a ticklish tongue, that makes people gag when something strange touches it. "

"Why on Earth would anyone ever want to look in there?!"

As your inner conversation gets louder...

"And it's not like dentists have a quick look and send you on your way. Visiting the dentist means I must be laying flat, with a bright light pointing to my face and this stranger is going to take some spiky metals and clink them around my teeth, stab them in my gums, judge my ability to clean and the snacks I eat (even the secret chocolate bar I hide in the top cupboard), just so they can tell me off for not doing such a great job. To top this off, they even expose me to radiation every so often and speak to me in jibber jabber alien words, to tell me I need to come back for a filling that I didn't even ask for, or can't afford.

Do you relate? Well, for a lot of us, this is the conversation our brain prepares us for, before we sit in that dreadful room.

Because when you really think about it, a dental appointment asks a lot of us.

We’re asked to lie back, open up, and hand over control of one of the most sensitive, protected parts of our body… to someone we’ve often only just met.

And we’re expected to stay still. Stay calm. Stay cooperative.

Even when every instinct in us is saying, “This feels strange. This feels exposed. This feels unsafe.”

This is exhausting and overwhelming for most of us. So, it's no wonder we all hate the dentist!

Or maybe we just hate how it feels to be there.

And this isn’t something we learn as adults.

It starts much earlier than that.

This brings me back to when my children were babies. When babies learn to sit, their world expands a little beyond their mummy, daddy or main caregiver. They finally start to reach for things. If you pay close attention to what they are doing, you might notice they reach whatever is around them, be it a toy or a stick (in my daughter's case it was mostly ants and wiggly worms in the garden, yuk!), or even your car keys. Everything goes in, right?

Well, have you tried to feed that baby some carrot pure? Not happening, is it? So, what happened then? Weren't they supposed to be exploring with their mouth? Shouldn't they be eager to taste this too?

That happens because alongside that curiosity, something else is developing: control.

The ability to decide what goes in, when, and whether it stays there.

Their sudden refusal to cooperate isn't because they’ve stopped exploring — but because they’ve started choosing.

Their mouth is no longer just a way to experience the world. It’s something they protect. What we swallow can save us or make us ill. So, of course, our brain was instructed to protect this vulnerable place at all costs.

And that instinct never really leaves us.

So when we sit in a dental chair as adults, being asked to open our mouths, stay still, and give up that control… It goes against something deeply wired within us.

A dental visit asks us to do something quite unnatural:

To lie back.

To open up.

To stay still.

While someone, we don’t quite know, works in a space we’ve spent a lifetime learning to protect.

Our mouth isn’t just another part of the body. It’s how we taste, speak, express, connect. It’s where we hold tension, where we hide insecurity, where we carry quiet bits of shame about how things look, or what we’ve avoided.

And in that chair, all of it is suddenly…

Visible.

Not just physically, but emotionally too.

So the discomfort isn’t irrational. The vulnerability isn’t weakness.

That feeling doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong… or that something bad is about to happen.

It may simply be your mind and body doing what they were designed to do—trying to protect you in a situation that feels unfamiliar, exposed, and out of your control.

And sometimes, just naming that can soften it.

Not by forcing yourself to suddenly like the experience…but by shifting the story slightly.

From: “I hate the dentist.”

To something a little more honest, and maybe a little kinder—“I find this difficult… but I can get through it.”

We may never completely remove the discomfort that comes with sitting in a dental chair.

But perhaps we can change the way we arrive there.

With a little more awareness of what we’re feeling…and a little more compassion for why we feel it.

Instead, it becomes what it was always meant to be: a small, human moment of honesty.

“This is hard for me.”

And from there, perhaps, something softer can begin.

A different kind of interaction.

One built not on assumption… but on understanding.

Sometimes, the most powerful shift isn’t in the treatment itself— but in the story we tell ourselves before it even begins.

Because your smile is more than teeth.

It’s your story.

And it deserves to feel safe here.

Until the next one :)