[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Of Dragons

On Wednesday, two good clergypersons sat down with me and very gently held 
up a mirror so that I could see the dragon peeking over my shoulder.

It's a pattern that I've seen before: good people, even very good people, 
can have dragons looking over their shoulders. The people have invested 
heavily in being Good Folks, but they haven't properly dealt with past 
shadows, and the undealt-with shadows take on a life of their own and get 
up to things behind their owners' backs of which the owners aren't really 
properly conscious. If you'd asked me if I were capable of this phenomenon, 
I probably would have said "yes".  I wouldn't willingly do things that were 
hurtful or harmful to others -- but I might very well do such things 
without being fully conscious of them.  I might very well have a dragon 
looking over my shoulder.

There are people who choose consciously to be malicious and cruel, but I've 
only ever met (I think) three of them in my whole life. Far, far more 
damage gets done by good people who aren't looking at the dragons peeking 
over their shoulders.  We're not conscious of the patterns we engage in, 
too much of the time. Or we find good and loving reasons for behaviour that 
is, in fact, dragonish.

A loving, gentle, nurturing, caring woman writes a three-page, 
single-spaced letter to a close friend, in which (in sorrow, not in anger) 
she points out exactly how screwed-up the friend is, giving chapter and 
verse.  To bolster her argument, she says that "everyone" agrees with her 
assessment. The writer believes fully that all she's doing is giving honest 
feedback as an act of love. It doesn't occur to her, really, exactly how 
much her letter is going to hurt. It doesn't occur to her that her friend 
is going to feel betrayed by this bolt from the blue. It doesn't occur to 
her to wonder why she's so deeply angry with her friend -- because she 
doesn't "do" anger. Good people never "do" anger, and she knows she's a 
good person.

I can point the finger at this behaviour because in fact, I'd been doing 
something roughly similar (though not, thank God, nearly as awful) to one 
of the clergypeople I was talking to on Wednesday. The good thing is that 
because I'm aware of the dragon-over-the-shoulder pattern, I could take 
immediate ownership of it as soon as they held up the mirror to show it to 
me. I didn't do the old "dragon? what dragon? do you see a dragon? I don't 
see a dragon" bit. There was definitely a dragon, and that was definitely 
my face in the mirror, and the only possible right thing to do was to say 
"Oops! I'm very, very sorry" and accept responsibility for dealing with the 
beast.

It was, of course, a somewhat shattering chat, and I was walking into walls 
for a couple of hours, which was an entirely appropriate reaction. Nobody 
likes being confronted with a personal dragon; nor did I enjoy the prospect 
of going back and digging up the patch of toxic past from which the dragon 
had sprung. Not their problem, mine.

But it was also a strangely positive experience.  I had to accept 
forgiveness and understanding, and that encouraged me to look at the beast 
not with disgust and self-blame, but with a degree of compassion. Dragons 
aren't the dragons' fault either; they aren't horrible-gawdawful-evil; 
they're not even "you're totally screwed up". They're the product of deep 
unresolved hurt. Dragons arise when we're subjected to a combination of 
real injury and silencing. A vulnerable boy's elder brother bullies him 
unmercifully; his parents shrug it off and tell the boy to stop whining.  A 
boss gives her employee an hour-long dollop of harsh and unfair criticism, 
and the employee has no recourse, no one he can talk to, and no prospect of 
leaving.  A schoolgirl comes home one afternoon to find that her mother has 
once again torn the girl's bedroom apart in a fit of alcoholic rage and is 
standing there amid the mess, screaming vile things at her daughter -- but 
in this family, we don't discuss Mother's drinking. And so forth and so on.

You've got to put the anger somewhere if you aren't allowed (or won't allow 
yourself) to process it properly and get rid of it, and it may fetch up 
behind you, looking over your shoulder.  The strange thing is that people 
with dragons often are really good people; they tried very hard to 
minimize, the injury, to forgive and accept what had been done to them, to 
love those who had hurt them, and to move on -- but they hadn't dealt with 
the anger. That's what had happened to me; that's where the dragon comes from.

It's a sad pattern, but common as dirt. What's critical is what happens next.

The dragon is real; it needs to be dealt with. Dealing with it means going 
back to its origins, examining the old injury, voicing the old anger, and 
accepting healing. As in all such acts of healing, it won't be a one-time 
get-it-over-with business; it will be a spiral process of returning, over 
and over, until all the old toxic stuff is gone -- especially because I 
realized on Wednesday just how large and important this particular bit of 
damage really is. <cosmic sigh> Oh, well. I'll deal.

Come on, dragon; we'd better get at it.