She offered the anaesthetic anyway — what attunement feels like

I was yet again sitting in a dentist’s chair. This time it felt diametrically opposite to my recent experience. 

I told her everything about my last experience. And she, as many others, was appalled by it. I didn’t even have to explain what I felt and how deeply traumatising it was — to be hurt by the very person you are relying on for help.

She understood. 

Photo by RDNE Stock project

And I knew she did because all my paranoid messages to her at the slightest sensation were met with care and patience. She never once complained about it. Never once rolled her eyes. Never once sighed, or anything remotely close to showing irritation.

My tiniest discomfort was met with genuine concern. I was someone she saw as a human-being, not only as a dental patient. She explained everything to me. At every step of the way, I knew what was happening and why — because she knew that would be deeply soothing. And it was. I knew I could trust her with my health and my vulnerability.

I felt anxious because of the procedure but also of being too much because I still carried the charge of my previous experience and it showed. I was afraid her patience would run out and she'd snap at me. Of course, that didn’t happen.

What happened instead was me feeling respected. Feeling my dignity uncompromised, unlike last time. So much so that to her I was a person whose peace of mind was worth an anaesthetic she knew I didn't strictly need for a tooth that had already been dead.

Yet, she offered it. And I accepted. 

I felt the warm sensation of being truly cared about. Of attunement so complete that my needs were met before I could articulate them — I didn’t even have to ask for a painkiller. 

An exhale — the bracing I didn’t know I was holding, finally allowed to release. I didn’t have to fight to be seen as a human being, not just a set of teeth to be worked on.

And then I remember thinking: ‘Wait, I matter? Not only my health but my comfort too?’

I was being seen in my complexity — a dental patient, a dental patient who cannot tolerate pain, a dental patient who had recently undergone a very traumatising dentist visit. And I was treated for all three. The healing spanned across all three. 

And I was thinking about the sharp contrast between the two dentists. They were both extremely capable in the dentistry field. Yet, the experiences could not be more different.

Years ago, a teacher of mine said that it doesn’t matter what you do, it matters who you are because who you are underpins how you do what you do.

I understood it as a concept back then. Having these experiences made me feel it and understand it viscerally too.

Funny how I felt safe in a dentist's chair — a place where grown people can easily start crying.

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