Area Woman Blows Gasket (11 page)

The Five-Minute Phobia Cure

Leafing through
Psychology Today
in the allergist's office the other day, I came across an ad for a Five-Minute Phobia Cure. Apparently, a Dr. Roger Callahan
of Indian Wells, California, has pioneered a new psychological technique called Thought Field Therapy, whereby phobias and
other traumas can be fixed with a few light karate chops to your collarbone and forehead.

Phobias, Callahan has explained on such early morning shows as
Good Morning America,
are perturbances in the "energy field" of a thought. You must physically remove the perturbances in order to get on with
the business of riding in elevators without screaming or staying calm in the presence of spiders.

Well, I'm tired of getting absolutely hysterical on airplanes. So I procured a video copy of the
Five-Minute Phobia Cure
for forty dollars and gave it a try. Callahan, who looks disconcertingly like Burt Reynolds, demonstrates his theory by plucking
paper clips from an elastic band. One thought field perturbance down, four to go.
Pluck, pluck.
He must be on to something. Never mind the complex inner labyrinth of neuroses so revered by psychoanalysts. People want
their problems fixed, and they want them fixed NOW. Okay?

Okay. The therapy sequence in the video involves a guy in a red T-shirt, who must be Callahan s apprentice, posed like an
aerobics instructor at the front of a class and taking you through the following paces. First he gets you to summon a mental
picture of your phobia, which "brings up the thought field." In my case, the image of strangely elated Arab men taking control
of my airplane, which was supposed to be flying from Toronto to Cancun but instead is being steered into Mount Rushmore, comes
obediently into view. Then you must do this:

Tap four or five times under your eye, then under your arm, then on your collarbone, then your hand. Waggle your eyes, hum
a tune, and count to five.

Voila.

I wanted to test this cure, but since my plane phobia would entail driving to the airport and plunging off a roof, I enlisted
Ambrose instead.

"Can you just come down here for a second and try this phobia cure?" I asked.

"Go away," he responded, sensing trouble. "I'm reading."

"Please, just for five minutes! I want to see if it cures your horror of mayonnaise."

"No."

My husband is what Callahan calls a "skeptical stranger." Skeptics are perfect for demonstrating the efficacy of thought field
therapy, Callahan claims, because they're not suggestible. Bribed with the promise that I'd vacuum the car, Ambrose finally
agreed to watch the video. He tapped under his eye, on his arm, and at his collarbone, sighing loudly. He waggled his eyes.

I whipped out ajar of Hellmann's.
"Arrrrggghhhhhhhhr
he shouted.

On the video, the words "psychological reversal" flashed on the screen. Callahan believes that some people are subject to
psychological blocks, or reversals, that make them impervious to his treatment. Thus, he has devised a thirty-second treatment
for your treatment block.

"Tap on your hand and say three times: I accept myself even though I have these problems."

Ambrose went along, glaring at me, then repeated the phobia cure of tapping, humming, and counting.

"So, now what do you think?" I asked, approaching tentatively with my jar.

"GET AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT MAYONNAISE!"

Maybe we did it wrong. Callahan has tapped on people on all the major American network talk shows, to great effect.

If you reject the theory that phobias are random electromagnetic perturbances in the brain, you have many other theories to
choose from: early childhood trauma, instinct, atavism, and generalized anxiety, to name a few. According to William I. Miller,
author of a fascinating book called
The Anatomy of Disgust,
many phobias are really a conflation of fear and disgust, relating to our need for an ordered universe. We are horrified
by disorder and chaos, such as weeds growing pellmell in a garden, overly lush vegetation, or the body turned inside out—
oozing, slimy viscera, what Miller calls "thick, greasy life." So, people have phobias of eggs, vomit, honey, and other slippery
substances, which are really an anxiety about the corruptible boundaries of the body.

Interesting. Unlike pure fear, which invites a fight-or-flight response, the nature of the horrifying is the apprehension
that there is no escape. To fight the dandelion or sunny-side-up egg would involve touching it, which evokes terror of contamination.
To flee it would mean that it wasn't all around you, and even
in
you, which in itself is the essence of what's horrifying. Mad cow disease. Avian flu. SARS."The disgusting can possess us,"
Miller writes, and "fill us with creepy, almost eerie feelings of not being quite in control, of being haunted."

We fear being overrun, and we also fear falling apart. Try this. Nothing is quite so disgusting in the mouth as a single hair,
as proved in an experiment Miller cites in which a group of toddlers under observation, quite possibly including my own, happily
ate dog feces, grasshoppers, and a whole small dried fish but completely freaked out about hair being in their mouths or on
their tongues.

We are also horrified by the uncanny: "the unsettling-ness of the effigy," explains Miller. Clowns, for instance. They confuse
our perceptions of real and unreal. Particularly, I would say, when the clowns turn out to be serial killers, as in the news
about John Wayne Gacy of Chicago, who made a point of (a) entertaining children at local hospitals as well as painting his
own self-portrait, as a clown, and then (b) murdering thirty-three boys and burying them under his house. He dedicated his
life to becoming a case in point.

Interestingly, phobias almost never arise from smell or sound, at least in humans. Disgusted by poo, yes, but phobic, no.
Appalled by the sound of Britney Spears, certainly, but no compulsion to run away in panic unless you're Avril Lavigne. It's
different for animals. My dog has a phobia of me biting into a Macintosh apple. When I do this, he streaks out of the room
as if his tail is on fire. Don't ask me why he tolerates the sound of a chewed-on carrot. I'd chalk that one up to Roger Callahan's
random perturbance. Wouldn't you?

EFFORTS AT ESCAPE

La Dentista

The other day I was in Mexico, puttering about contentedly as I shopped for market silver and fantasized about buying a villa,
when all of a sudden my tooth burst into the sensory equivalent of the helicopters roaring onto the beach in
Apocalypse Now,
with Wagner blasting from loudspeakers, the sound of gunfire, and everyone screaming on the ground.

"Don't worry about it," I muttered to my traveling companion over breakfast, chewing pan dulce on the other side of my mouth
and clutching my jaw while seeing stars every time I sipped my hot coffee. "I'll be fine."

Of course, this is what you say when you are in a small mountain village in central Mexico and you have no interest, WHATSOEVER,
in seeking out a dentist on the unpaved main street, where dengue fever is warned of in posters peeling from adobe walls and
all the dogs are three-legged.

"I'll just take some Advil," I added, holding my head very still. Twelve hours later I had run out of all the available Advil
in the town of Tepoztlan, and was crawling around a suburb in the nearby city of Cuernavaca, with an address for
la dentista
in my hand, written on the back of a hotel envelope by the hotel manager's wife. Apparently, the wife had advised the manager
that one of their patrons had been spotted with a dining room napkin wrapped around her jaw and tied at the top of her head
in a bow. The manager told the front desk clerk, and she put me in touch with the dentist by telephone.

Unfortunately, owing to my inability to speak passable Spanish and the dentist's reciprocal inability to speak English, all
I knew for certain was the time of my appointment. I was fairly sure, however, that the dentist had said, before hanging up:
"We don't use drills here. We only use powder and air."

Thus I found myself nagged forward through the dark and confusing residential streets of Cuernavaca by my curiosity as much
as my pain. "What the
hell
kind of dentistry involves the deployment of powder and air?"

At last my companion and I found the right house, walled in and barb-wired like all of the other compounds in this posh neighborhood,
suggesting that Mexico City's crime wave had lapped over the volcanic ridges that surround the capital, enclosing its outrageous
pollution, and spilled into this smaller metropolis forty-five minutes away. After a spell of anxious silence, a maid let
us through the ten-foot gate, then down a cobbled drive lined with flowering forsythia, and into a reception area on the side
of the white stone house. She flipped on the light and nodded shyly, indicating that we were to wait. We bided our time with
Latino celebrity magazines— a spread of photos of Julio Iglesias's daughters wedding; gossip about who amid Mexico's Who's
Who had taken a bribe.

Fifteen minutes elapsed in this quiet white-washed room, and then the dentist suddenly poked her head in. She was a petite
woman in glasses with a bob of chestnut hair. She apologized for her tardiness, explaining that her children were a handful
this evening because of the excitement of la Dia de los Muertes, or the Mexican Day of the Dead. I wondered why she had agreed
to see me at all, under the circumstances, but was in no mood to politely protest.

La dentista
ushered me into a dimly lit room that boasted one dental chair and an instrument table. The paint was peeling off the ceiling,
I noticed when I was made to recline. There weren't any model teeth sitting on shelves or brochures for bleaching procedures,
or framed Monet posters on the walls. Much less cupboards or an assistant. On the other hand, there was no lite rock playing
from hidden wall speakers, either. Think of that. To have your teeth drilled without the sonic accompaniment of *NSync is
a brilliant innovation in dentistry, in my view. On the other hand, the ambience was such that the torture scene from
Marathon Man
did flash through my mind as I stretched my mouth wide. (Perhaps you'll recall that film, in which Dustin Hoffman has his
teeth drilled without anesthetic, one after the other, by a mad dentist in an empty warehouse until he confesses to not flossing.)

"Do you have dollars?"
la dentista
asked. I shook my head no. She tapped my troubled tooth experimentally and I yelped. This seemed to surprise her. "Sorry,"
she murmured. In retrospect, I realized that she had not asked me if I had dollars. She had asked me if I had pain:
dolor.
Now, she was proceeding on the assumption that I had neither dollars nor pain, which perhaps accounts for what she did next.

By listening to her queries and guessing at the meaning of her hand gestures, I soon figured out the words for "open" and
"shut," and this made matters worse, for it encouraged her to think that I understood Spanish perfectly and was on the verge
of translating the works of Cervantes. She stopped trying to speak English altogether. No need!

"La bla bla de bla bla, tonces, bla bla-ista, si?" she asked.

"Okay," I said, after a long, frog-mouthed pause.

She fired up a drill and began shaving off the tops of all my fillings, for reasons that she had probably just explained but
that eluded me entirely. In truth, they continue to elude me to this day, those reasons, but at the time, all I was thinking
was:
"Please
don't let her hit a nerve, please, please."

After ten minutes of paring down all of my teeth, she stopped and put on a pair of sunglasses. "La bla bla de bla bla. Claro
Patricia?"

I gave a noncommittal nod.

She whipped out a batonlike object, flipped on a switch, and began to pass the baton slowly back and forth along my lower
jaw. It made no sound. It never touched me. Just slowly waved back and forth. Well, I thought to myself, that's what I would
do if someone interrupted my Dia de los Muertes celebrations and had neither dollars nor pain. Remove their fillings and wave
a wand over their head. Then I had an epiphany. Aha: the powder and air. When I spoke with her on the phone, she must have
said POWER and air, which must have meant air-powered air, or . . . maybe . . . power in the air. That was it. Power in the
air.

"Laser," she explained, reading my expression. "The laser will calm your dollars for now until your
dentisto
at home can do the work necessary."

She was a LASER dentist, you see, not primitive at all. On the contrary, very cutting edge. What a first world snob I had
been. This kind of dentistry has been practiced for only ten years or so. According to the Canadian Dental Association, lasers
have a number of useful roles in dentistry, none of which relate to what the Cuernavaca dentist did to my mouth. But lasers
can be used in root surface treatment, the treatment of gingivitis, to strengthen tooth enamel, and to seal fissures or sterilize
the site of orthodontic work.

"Dentists should be properly trained in the use of this equipment," the CDA warns in its official position on laser dentistry,
"because of the inherent risk connected with its improper use. Educational requirements for the use of lasers in dental offices
and facilities should be such that proper and safe use of this equipment is assured, and should include theoretical training,
clinical training, and a meaningful examination to ensure competence."

I quote that in order to reassure readers that wand waving is not taken lightly here in Canada.

At any rate, by sheer and staggering coincidence, two days after I saw the dentist in Cuernavaca, I woke up with my face so
swollen on one side that I appeared to have elephantiasis. As a matter of fact, it was possible that I did have elephantiasis
because, why not?

At breakfast, mouthing pan dulce and slurping coffee, my travel companion and I went through the same conversation.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Just need some Advil."

The garden in which we were seated was exquisite. Lush green lawns faced the sheer cliffs of the Tepozteco volcanic range,
where one could see an ancient Aztec temple atop a ridge. Fountains burbled. Flowers bloomed. Music played, dreamy and quiet.
Alas, owing to PostTramautic Stress Disorder, I would never return.

An hour later I was in the local health clinic, which was deserted on Sunday at church time except for
la doctora, a
calm, quiet woman in jeans who led me into a clean examination room and beheld my face without alarm.
El elephan-tisio
was now differentially diagnosed as
una problema con su dentista.
My jaw was infected, she suggested, and it would take some time for the swelling to abate.

This was deeply disturbing, for a number of reasons, including the fact that I'd planned to reconnect on this holiday with
a long-lost love, who would now bring new meaning to the phrase "Why, you've
changed!'

"Things are different, now, Patricia," I could imagine him saying, "we're different. I'm married now, a father. And your left
eye has disappeared from view behind a fold of skin."

I contemplated this scenario as I bent over with my pants down and
la doctora
injected steroids into my bum. She also gave me a prescription for Cipro, arguably a more suitable antibiotic for anthrax
contamination than dental infections, but it did the trick. Particularly when combined with
cerveza,
it had the salutary effect of making me decide to rent a house in the town and move my family to Mexico for six months.

In my next dispatch from the frontiers of thoroughly ruined holidays: why, if you have two small children, a dog, and three
cats, you should not inhabit a villa that was lovingly designed, furnished, and landscaped by two gay architects from Acapulco.