I Hate Dentistry
by
Dr. Frank Carter
Part I/6
This thread is nine years old. Nine years and people are still asking the same question and receiving the same well-intentioned answers. I would like to add some empirical information to the collective mindset of Dentaltown. The subject is, "I hate dentistry." For the record, you don't hate dentistry. You hate what you associate with the activity of performing, and the consequences you created for yourself by doing, dentistry. Yes, you did this to yourself, but you didn't have a choice.
Your choice of dentistry was deliberate and not an accident, nor a mistake. You made the decision based on the information your brain had in the form of the models and feelings at a critical time in your emotional development, such as when you were graduating high school and it was time to decide what you were going to do when you grew up. You would ask yourself, "Who are the important models of a man/woman? You might say to yourself, "Well, my father is a dentist or the richest man in town is a dentist. So, that seems like a good choice." There are many other scenarios.
This was a moment in time when you had to integrate your natural biological skills and talents with your emotional needs. While it appears to be a rational decision to become a dentist, there was more to it. People use their emotional history, which they acquired from growing up with their mother and father, to fulfill their need to provide for themselves, financially and emotionally. Their lifelong emotional requirement demands that they answer the following question: how do I get to feel, every day, the way I was made to feel as a child?
Anatomically, the brain is a biological associative computer with a very acute organizational design for all of the most memorable, wonderful and worst moments, and all the emotional moments in-between. This organizational design relies on the attributes of each memory to organize and retrieve pertinent data for decisions in the present time. These memories are broken down into attributes, organized and then retrieved according to these attribution categories: the facts (people, place, outcome etc.), the emotional memory (joy, anger, sadness, fear) and the valence of the experience that was successful (going toward or moving away from the event in order to survive).
I would like you to consider that you don't hate dentistry. What you hate is what you use dentistry for in order to avoid another feeling. The cause of this feeling is what you hate. It's the feeling that you hate, not the career choice. You hate what dentistry makes you feel or what dentistry makes you do. What you do is a feeling or a behavior pattern that brings you closer to what feels natural. In these cases, what feels natural is to avoid what feels good, because you don't deserve to feel good and therefore must feel bad. In other words, your choice of dentistry served a purpose. It fulfilled your need to feel a certain way and hide from the truth. The actual career choice was arbitrary, but the way to create this feeling and avoid another feeling was deliberate, necessary and unavoidable.
Most of our lives are spent living on autopilot. Autopilot means re-creating the way you need to feel every day, by doing the same behaviors every day, and never realizing your lack of originality. You think you're making logical conscious decisions to run your life on a moment to moment basis, when in reality, the unconscious need to feel a certain way is guiding all of your decisions.
I recently started working with a dentist who said, "I refuse to believe that my behavior is not the result of my conscious awareness." I'm sure most of you feel that way, and that is exactly the issue. He came to therapy because he was not happy despite having a very successful practice. The pursuit of science with its rules and protocols was a natural attraction for him. Dentistry created a structure that was an alternative to the chaos of growing up in a family where fear, anger and sadness were the dominant emotional experiences (chaos). What he did not know was that his conscious awareness was not controlling his behaviors as much as he wanted to believe in order to feel in control of the uncontrollable emotional environment. It is this inherent conflict that made his "hatred" necessary.
I Hate Dentistry
by
Dr. Frank Carter
Part 2/6
When I start working with a dentist, I give him/her an orientation to the perspective that is psychology. I tell him/her a story about how a patient walks in and sits for their examination. They are told that they have a cavity. Innocently, they ask, "Where do cavities come from?" The dentist wisely explains that tooth decay is the result of the simultaneous combination of bacteria, sugar and time. The patient intuitively understands that sugar is coming from the food they eat, but where does the bacteria come from, they might ask? The dentist explains that the bacteria reside in the mouth, and that there are more bacteria in their mouth than there are people on the planet to which the patient replies, "That's not true! I looked in my mouth this morning, and there was nothing there." To the patient, this makes perfect sense. In psychology, your rational conscious awareness makes perfect sense, because you cannot access your unconscious the same way this patient cannot see the millions of bacteria.
Any discussion regarding the psychological mechanisms of the brain demands an appreciation for what you can be aware of and what you cannot. You cannot be aware of the unconscious because it is "unconscious" by definition. The unconscious is, however, an anatomical and psychological reality which is due to the separate hemispheres of the brain, according to a theory of cognition. Although not directly accessible, you can appreciate the presence and influence of the unconscious by virtue of your manifested decisions and behaviors, which are supposed to lead all humans down the same life enhancing decision path, but which sometimes defy common sense and observable logic, because every human psyche is in itself universally unique.
Just because you can talk about what you feel doesn't mean that you appreciate the extensive nature of your present feelings and the history of those feelings over a lifetime that you come to know as your personality. The personality that you are aware of is just the tip of the iceberg. Your personality is the product of mostly your genetics (80%) and your experience (20%). These percentages are the result of an extensive meta-analysis of peer-reviewed journals. The brain is a biological computer that is responsible for organizing, analyzing, and then responding to sensory data. Universally, the biological brain performs the same function for everyone in the same way.
This biological computer is designed to solve the problem of survival, and the most important and necessary program for solving the problem of survival is the program of adaptation. The brain is always adapting to the environment in order to survive. This programming is robust, especially up to the age of late adolescence, and then it slows down, crystallizes and begins to become limited but more efficient. We stop exploring unlimited options and settle on the options that allow us to feel what we need to feel as we prepare for career choices and the partnerships for creating families.
In this process, knowledge and experience, as well as successful survival solutions from childhood, become solidified into beliefs, and these beliefs become intransient. As a result, unaware of what is really driving you, internally you project your beliefs onto the environment, such as blaming dentistry for your unhappiness, and you project the feeling of being trapped in childhood onto your conscious analysis of your daily life through the daily perceptions and decisions you make which really reflect what you believe you need to feel.
Through the act of adaptation, our biological computer either organizes the facts and associated emotions from the past and current experiences and responds with an anticipated and well-practiced feeling and consequences of those facts, or the brain perceives the same facts and associated emotions and envisions a novel connection of associative patterns (neurological circuitry), which produces a behavior or decision which was not anticipated, but remarkably solves the problem at hand more efficiently. With repetition, this novel solution to survival may become a permanent part of the important and necessary repertoires of personal behaviors to be passed on to the next generation: think family traditions, sports allegiances, family reunions, alcoholism, raging angers etc. of our daily lives.
I Hate Dentistry
by
Dr. Frank Carter
Part 3/6
I would like to help you understand what the origin of this feeling "I hate dentistry" is and how you might change how you think and feel about it going forward, so that you can move on into a brighter future, instead of feeling paralyzed in the past and asking the same questions of yourself and others. This feeling of hatred for dentistry has an anatomical basis and, for that reason, should not be casually disregarded. It is important for you to answer the question and stop suffering. The anatomy lends credibility to this theory about the brain being a biological computer and the need to feel a certain way.
The brain processes the genetic accumulation of lessons and definitions from previous generations and integrates that previous information with the real-time sensory experiences of your childhood experiences. Sensory data passes into the thalamus and moves directly into the amygdala for short-term analysis as to life enhancing or life-threatening. Secondarily, the sensory data are transferred to the neocortex for its long-term retention. It is in the neocortex that emotional memories are organized according to their objective attributes. Any memory can be retrieved through its emotional significance or its objective attributes. This process of associative memory begins in childhood and evolves to a crescendo at the end of your teens. At this point, physiologically your beliefs and your solutions to your daily survival encounters become pretty much automatic and routine. Nothing much changes about us after college. The person you are re-creates how you need to feel for the remainder of their life through the decisions that you make and the behaviors that are necessary to end up feeling the way you must feel.
Genetically, everything that is life enhancing would naturally drive us to go toward that feeling of success, and genetically, everything that is life-threatening, would naturally drive us to move away from the cause and enjoy that feeling of success. The success of each maneuver is naturally rewarded with a shot of dopamine (the well-being neurotransmitter) to the brain circuits.
However, remember that the number one imperative of the brain is not to survive. It is to adapt, and this capacity to adapt causes the genetic definition, which we carry with us from centuries of previous generations, to modulate its expression according to the real-time experience of one's emotional history, which begins in the life of every child and is controlled by the behavior of their parents.
What happens when, because of dysfunctional circumstances in the family home, you do something that is instinctively wrong, but which allows you to adapt and survive the negative environment? You get a shot of dopamine, and this reward causes you to repeat the behavior for the remainder of your life. What happens when you, because of circumstances in the family home, are not allowed to do something that is instinctively right, but you must do something that feels wrong, in order to successfully adapt and survive? You get a shot of dopamine, and this reward causes you to repeat the behavior for the remainder of your life. Do you see the problem?
What happens when this perversion of normal, natural behavior is rewarded with a shot of dopamine, such as when you try to please or must please someone who displeases or is hurting you? The answer is you continue to perform the perverted solution forever and experience the accompanying emotion each time, but you must pay a price for this cognitive dissonance. There is an unconscious conflict that feels really bad, but it cannot be eliminated, because to eliminate it is to go against the requirement that you adapt and survive. It is this conflict that is the feeling that you hate. Rather than avoiding the interaction that doesn't feel normal, you continue to repeat that behavior due to the shot of dopamine and the best you can do is project that feeling of conflict onto the world in order to mitigate some of the pain.
I Hate Dentistry
by
Dr. Frank Carter
Part 4/6
Our personality is really an accumulation of proximate cause experiences, which evolved into rules of living. These rules are projected onto your environment as beliefs. Beliefs do not integrate your genetics with the behavioral models of your childhood. Rather, beliefs are the culmination of reinforced behaviors that generate what feels normal to you and recreated every day. We call this "your personality", but it is really the values and beliefs of your mother and father which guides all your decisions. These decisions, which are repeated religiously, become your perceptual definition of the truth. When it comes to the interaction of human beings with other human beings, there is no absolute truth.
Furthermore, these rules and beliefs are re-created every day through the sequence of decisions in the form of expectations of how we want to feel, which leads to behaviors we consistently repeat because we believe these expectations, feelings and behaviors are necessary to maintain our family, our career, our social network and how we spend our individual time. From this perspective, our lifestyle is just a sequence of cause and effect relationships that we have memorized and ritualized for the purposes of feeling a certain way and fulfilling our expectation of what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to feel. This efficient use of energy, in the form of repetitive beliefs, is the goal of adaptation and survival. How you survive is the repetitious program you complain about when you repeat to yourself, "I hate dentistry." You are just blaming something that can't talk back and makes logical sense to your "self."
Even more sinister, we memorize the consequences of these cause-and-effect experiences to re-create how we need to feel which becomes a behavioral habit. All behavioral habits are reinforced by a shot of dopamine. And how we need to feel is the result of how we were made to feel as children, by the behaviors of our parents. It is as a result of the summation of cause-and-effect experiences that leave us with the memories of the consequences of our past decisions. These memories influence our behavior by becoming a script or schema for what we believe to always be true from our perspective. Any deviation from this script is tantamount to death, in the eyes of a child. That's why political arguments can be too intense for some people: it's not really about politics. It's about the perspective. Speaking through the eyes of a child, what you need to believe in order to gain the approval of an abusive parent is tantamount to life-and-death.
What we believe to be true is typically the result of a proximate cause. I am a good boy/girl because mommy is smiling at me. We take this proximate cause that makes us feel good, and we generalize it to the world beyond our family as we move out of the home and into the world. This capacity to generalize is where we take what we learned from the family, and we project it onto the world.
What happens if you grow up in a home where you are a bad boy because mommy is yelling at you? This proximate cause makes you feel bad, and you generalize it to the world beyond your family as you move out of the home and into the world. In the world, this feeling like a bad boy is what you are supposed to feel, so you perform behaviors to make yourself feel like a bad little boy/girl.
This process of generalization is really apparent when you listen to a teenager's explanation of world events. They have limited experience of anything beyond their own home life and this limits the conclusions they can draw about the facts that they perceive from any source of information, because their truths are really an extension of the relative truths of their parents.
I Hate Dentistry
by
Dr. Frank Carter
Part 5/6
What catches most people by surprise is that, if the brain is a biological computer, then the natural perception of the "self" is the result of early childhood programming, which is generalized into the present, and therefore not the result of your "thinking." This is really a very hard concept for people who rely on rules and protocols to structure their environment so they can feel safe. The brain was programmed by previous generations that passed on a successful genetic profile, but then this profile was also refined by what it experienced in childhood. As a result, one conclusion from this reality must be that the brain can say anything, believe anything and do anything when guided by the feelings experienced in one's childhood environment.
There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to anyone's capacity to fabricate the truth, and therefore avoid believing one's personal reality as anything but the right truth. This is another reason why political discussions go nowhere. Believing that "your truth" is the "absolute truth" is just the product of a limited perspective. If anything is possible, how can your truth be the absolute truth when everyone else experiences a relative truth? What you need to believe as a result of growing up the way you grew up is what you need to believe in order to have survived the environment of your youth.
Therefore, whatever your personal perceptions about life or dentistry might be, they are going to be supported by the facts as you choose to remember them, as you choose to organize them, and as you choose to believe them. For some, this process is felt to be a matter of life and death when talking with others. It is not a matter of life and death. It just feels that way, because the program that tells you "I hate dentistry" is the limited conclusion of a child's abilities to perceive, analyze and draw conclusions about reality.
With this information, you might conclude that your perceptions are not totally within your control. Your perceptions are certainly beyond your conscious control and are, based on this theory, the product of the cumulative influences of the significant others in your life from whom you have taken on their model of reality as the truth during your most vulnerable stage of developmental growth - which was your childhood, from 0-12 years old.
I Hate Dentistry
by
Dr. Frank Carter
Part 6/6
So, this brings us to "I hate dentistry." You don't hate dentistry. You hate the associations that go with dentistry, and the associations that go with dentistry are essentially based on how you were made to feel in order to survive the interactions with your childhood environment (mother and father). Rather than blaming the environment, you could answer the following question, "What did dentistry allow me to accomplish?" With this answer, you might resolve the conflict and eliminate the need to believe, "I hate dentistry."
For some, dentistry was a way to make money, live independently, build a family with the spouse of your dreams, and write off everything as a business expense. For others, dentistry was a way to use one's natural hand-eye coordination, in small spaces, to perform a very difficult job, under very difficult conditions, in return for the satisfaction of bringing people out of pain. And finally, for some, dentistry was an opportunity to hide their deepest secrets of personal shame behind the money, the spouse, the material toys and the status that goes with the territory.
What you were hiding was your anger and rage, and all the other negative experiences you wished to forget from your painful childhood. Unable to say you were angry and disappointed at the people who were supposed to nurture and protect you, in order to release some of the tension, you learned to blame something that could not talk back: your choice of career. This is a very normal, universal and a typical defense mechanism designed to protect the psyche.
And every day, as you lash out at the world, and blame the world for your misery, you also look for sympathy from others that you could not get from the people that mattered to your brain when you were a child. Every day of your life, you have recreated those same negative feelings which you could not direct at the guilty parties, but instead directed at the inanimate dentistry or, for those who are chronically depressed or suffer anxiety attacks, yourself.
In summary, you don't hate dentistry. Dentistry has been just the focus of your perceptions to live out your life feeling a certain way. This is where the crux of the matter lies. In a life without deep childhood conflict, your decision to become a dentist reflected your talents, and your decision to become a dentist was an attempt to elevate yourself socially and financially, which is part of the normal developmental process of becoming an adult.
From a childhood filled with conflict and mistreatment, dentistry was an opportunity to hide your deepest shame, which was being undeserving of love and respect from the people who were biologically required to accept you. This solution to hide your shame reflects the limited logic of a child's brain. This child's brain with limited resources and experience leads to programming errors which have been repeated and reinforced throughout your daily adult life. An example of these programming errors would be a perpetually negative, sarcastic, belligerent and arrogant personality that you think is charming, but is quietly and politely tolerated by others who need you.
The fact remains that there is nothing wrong with dentistry. It's a great occupation, full of many self-gratifying and rewarding opportunities. There is the opportunity to work with patients and get them out of pain; there is the opportunity to manage staff and enjoy the exercising of power; there is the opportunity to make unlimited amounts of money and compare yourself to the hierarchy of other productive adults, and finally dentistry is a way to keep you safe in a very hostile and financially competitive world. Dentistry is the opportunity to enjoy the unlimited bountiful lifestyle that goes with American capitalism, and it has better hours. There's nothing to hate about dentistry.
What you should focus on is what you do hate, and what you do hate, you are probably still afraid to admit to. That's why this thread has gone on for nine years. Blaming dentistry or blaming yourself and continuing to emotionally suffer the inefficiencies of your belief system simply reveals that you're not ready to act on the truth. Rather, you continue to focus your distorted beliefs, and therefore your current feelings and behaviors, on idealogical contructs like dentistry or people who are weaker than you, such as spouses and children, rather than the people or the events that still hurt you at an unconscious level. And finally, just so you know, you can't access and heal the unconscious pain without another brain to talk to, because all cognition is a simultaneous duality. That is what consciousness is, but that's another story!
I hope this was helpful.
Sincerely, Dr. Frank Carter