Living With Dragons Part One
I have several dragons. They show up to taunt, harass and undermine me with some predictability. They show up in a black cloud of shame, spreading lies and terror. I have a close relationship with my Unworthiness dragon and his cousin, Not-Good-Enough. These dragons have been close to me since childhood. There are a couple who have shown up later in my life, too; Meaninglessness and his buddy, Pointlessness. These guys come out to play in my head when I try something new and challenging, or when I fail at something that I am striving toward, or even when I am successful, bringing their messages of doom (“Watch out! Something terrible is going to happen! And it will be Your Fault!”)
Dragons are full of bluster. They also can be genuinely damaging. They hiss and steam and make noise before they go into full-blown fire-breathing. They also have teeth and claws, at least mine do. They bring clouds of painful feelings and waves and waves of self-loathing. It can take a long time for a dragon attack to end and even longer for the after-effects to clear.
Dragons are scary as hell. They blast in on an otherwise sunny day, creating smoke and chaos, threatening your well-being and maybe even your life. They often have the advantage of surprise; by my advanced age, you’d think I would be able to foretell or even forestall a dragon attack, but not always. I am still sometimes caught off guard.
My dragons tell me regularly that whatever it is I aspire to is probably a stupid idea and is too difficult for someone like me. Notice the inconsistency there…. either it is stupid and so presumably I should be able to excel, or it is too difficult and meaningful and so therefore I am incapable of succeeding. Dragons have never heard that you can’t have it both ways. In fact, they don’t even notice that they are contradicting themselves. Their mandate is to keep you unbalanced and upset, and a continuous barrage of negative thoughts, smoke and flames can have that effect. Reasoned argument is just not part of their repertoire.
My dragons also show up when I am feeling good. Annoyingly, they appear to remind me that I am not all that….not as smart, as cool or, particularly, as thin as I ought to be. I am not as successful as I should be and I probably will have some years of living out of dumpsters and eating cat food before I die, a long, lingering death. This is because I am lazy, have no sense of how to care for my money, and don’t work hard enough. You know: unworthy, not-good-enough, and meaningless and pointless.
There is no winning with these monsters: if you are struggling, they’ll push you down so you struggle harder. If you are making some headway, they will helpfully point out where you need to do better. If you are doing well, they will remind you that good times are all too short and with your personal limitations, you’ll be found out soon enough.
Dragons are creatures of our own making, though. This is the great paradox. These guys that make my life miserable from time to time were created by ME. I was supported in that effort by my parents’ dragons (see Living With Dragons Part Deux) but mine were created by me to protect and to serve ME. They showed up originally in the form that was dictated by my childhood experiences. That is, they were supposed to help me to overcome my shortcomings. As a kid, I tried desperately to “be good.” The parental order was always to “be good” which required a lot of inference. Sometimes being “good” meant staying clean. Sometimes it meant being quiet. Sometimes it meant being polite and engaging in minor conversation with some grown-ups. Parents obviously clearly know what they mean by “be good,” but a kid has to guess.
Beyond just being good, there were specific prohibitions that arose because of being raised Catholic. As a Catholic kid, you must be wary of your own thoughts. The devil might be manipulating your thinking, if you should happen to think something “bad” about your mother or find yourself bored during Mass. Being good included monitoring your thoughts and NOT thinking some things that might arise spontaneously. Thinking about sex was especially BAD. If thoughts about sex arose (and this included an interest in things like how did the slot in those “tighty-whiteys” work, as you looked at the neighbor’s laundry on the line) then you knew for certain that the devil was involved.
As a child I was instructed in the reality of my “conscience.” This was the internal structure that kept track of my badness. Before going to confession, I was to engage in a practice called “examination of conscience,” or reflection on how bad I had been. It was very important to recollect every incident of badness since my previous confession, because I had to come clean to the priest about each and every transgression. As an eight-year-old child who tried desperately to be good, who was regularly punished for any transgression, and who went to confession weekly, it was sometimes hard to come up with examples of badness to keep the priest happy. Then I found out that not being able to locate sin during my examination of conscience was, in itself, a sin! Pride! Aha! This was possibly my first experience of a true double bind. In this case, the bind was literal: damned if you do and damned if you don’t. However, it did solve the problem of what to say during confession.
I had an ace in the hole with those problematic thoughts, too. Even if there was no external observation of my badness, I could invariably claim the sin of bad thoughts. So I was able to generate sins to confess regardless of behaviour. This was, in some twisted and peculiar way, a win for me. I had to have found my badness and claimed it aloud for the priest during confession, so that I could be given absolution and go on my way into the next week, during which I needed to accumulate more badness. Maybe I didn’t realize that lying about my sins was, in itself, a sin?
Badness haunted me through childhood. I was told in catechism that I, along with all of my species (human) and particularly my sex (female) was bad, inherently bad, and that I needed to aspire and work desperately hard to transcend my necessary badness to get closer to God, which was going to ensure me a place in Heaven but of course only after Death. I did rather love some of the stories of the saints, though, and the visions of children, and I wished at times to have Mary appear to me or to have stigmata appear on my body, or to have some other mark of my holiness so that people would know of my deeply spiritual self. All that hard work was going nowhere, at least as far as I could tell, because despite of best effort to “be good” I was invariably bad even if I had not done any bad things.
Dragons showed up to help me navigate the good-bad thing. There was a fair amount of smoke and fire in my childhood home, but I was also able to generate some internally when I could locate my badness. By age twelve or so I had graduated to middle-of-the-night dragon fire. I had made an off-hand comment to my teen-age catechism teacher about my mother having had a pregnancy loss…this was a part of our family story, including the magical baby brother who sat at the right hand of God the Father (watching over me to see if I was bad, of course). Anyway, this teenage girl took a great deal of interest in what I was saying about my mother’s reproductive life, and that clued me in that perhaps I was speaking out of turn, sharing something that might shame our family. That brief moment on a Saturday morning in the sanctuary turned into a nightly haunting for years; if ever I didn’t fall asleep right away, I was beset by the dragon berating me for having told a family secret. Mind you, there were plenty of family secrets that would have blown up the family if made public, but this was not one of them. The dragon paid that no mind, though, and operated to torture me for being a terrible person, a bad daughter, and an inveterate sinner for having said something that piqued some fifteen-year-old’s prurient interests.
It was years before I had the courage to mention to my mother that I had told someone about her pregnancy loss and she was casual, not at all dismayed. Just like that, the dragon was vanquished. That should have given me a clue that the dragons shared my mother’s DNA, but at that moment, the relief I felt was extreme. Years later, like forty years later, in therapy, I recounted these nightly episodes of self-torture to my therapist, and for the first time I realized that maybe this possession by dragons was not necessarily normal. And it made me think about my other dragons, the ones who have kept me company for many years.
It probably isn’t very encouraging to have me telling you about my dragons, given that I am old (relatively) and a psychologist who has been trying to help other people with their dragons for years (more than I probably should admit). I kind of think that our dragons are part of ourselves that we are probably going to have forever, like our first pets, maybe, that stay in memory even after we no longer have to clean up after them or feed and water them. Since we apparently have to live with our dragons, how can we make that work for us?
Rumi tells us to open the door of the guest house to all of our feelings: to welcome them in as special visitors. It can very difficult to open the door to a dragon. For one thing, we are not always certain that there is a dragon out there. There may be a lot of smoke and heat obscuring reality. That smoke and heat generate feelings in us, often very uncomfortable ones, and it sure can be compelling to look outside for a fire when that happens. So we project and blame and notice that someone else in our lives has done something “to” us to cause this messiness. If you hadn’t questioned me about my new idea, I would not be feeling this way. If you hadn’t ignored my text, I wouldn’t be feeling this way. If you only ever picked up your damn dishes, I wouldn’t be feeling this way!
But maybe it isn’t really about whatever the other person has done; maybe they did whatever but we had a thought, a feeling in response, a reaction, an igniting of a fuse that allows that spark to travel down a length of wire, fast fast fast, and creating an explosion that woke the dragon who startled into reaction mode. So you didn’t respond to my text: it was my mind that said things like “well, he isn’t interested in what you have to say,” and then “you’re pretty boring anyway” and “are you MAD? What kind of idiot gets mad about that?” and “He’s a moron” but really “You’re a moron.” Et cetera. See how that works? Every one of those thoughts has an emotional thrust that is attached to it.
So my personal dragons: I made a spreadsheet of my dragons, trying to get a grip on what has a hold on me. There are four things that discriminate these dragons from each other. First is activation. They are activated by different things. As I said, sometime it is failure that gets them going but sometimes it is success. It can be happiness or a little trickle of shame. Next are the consequential thoughts that seem to flow out of the dragon’s breath. What kinds of distorted things is this dragon saying? How familiar are those thoughts? Third are the emotions: we can look at what emotions get stirred up by this dragon….we sometimes think that the dragon IS the emotion but generally, no, emotion is our body’s response to the dragon. Fourth is the behaviour: what does this dragon make us DO? What behaviours show up in us when the dragon is activated?
I will acknowledge that it is super-nerdy to make a spreadsheet to detail my dragons. But it was a way to try to keep track of what’s going on in the lower levels of my psyche. I can reliably expect dragon activation when I am doing particularly well, or feeling particularly good, or if I have accomplished something that is meaningful to me. One of my dragons will start to stretch and yawn and let off a little steam, and I’ll notice because I question myself about something that’s going on, second-guess a decision, or feel a tweak of anxiety in my belly. If things get more heated up, my thoughts might start flowing faster, I’ll feel more tense, and I might start cleaning something or tidying up. This cleaning is not because things are dirty, but because I have nervous energy to discharge and in my early life, I learned that one way to keep out of trouble was to be clean and quiet. Obviously this is my pattern: your mileage is likely to vary.
Rather than just cope, and more effective than obsessive cleaning, is to take some time to dialogue with the dragon. What is really happening inside? What is this paradoxical response to a presumably happy event? When I sit with my experience, really noticing the steam, the heat, the distorted thoughts and the resulting body sensation, then I can own what is going on. I don’t have to understand it, and I don’t have to make it go away. I just have to be with it. Being with dragons is a learned skill. Being with strong emotions, painful thoughts, chronic tensions in the body takes patience, curiosity, and a willingness to stay with discomfort. Framing this inner experience as dragons whose original purpose was protection can help create a distance that supports a patient, welcoming presence. That is, if I can see my distress as dragon-induced, then I can be curious, friendly and avoid shame and self-loathing.
Getting to know my dragons has been a lifelong process. It was hard to stop projecting and blaming. Sometimes other people really DO engage in behaviours that harm us and it’s okay to name that and ask for a change. But most of the time, the people in our lives are not willfully trying to harm us. When we stop blaming them for how we feel, we can begin to acknowledge our dragons, the legacy of our personal history. That’s when we can choose to take real responsibility for ourselves. These dragons are ours: we had help to create them, but we have kept them in the dark, turned away from them and avoided facing them, and they have grown in strength and belligerence without our guidance. Our kind patience can go a long way toward helping our dragons to return to their original purpose.
