Darrel, in response to your post of Sept. 4... I came back to it like I said I would.

The difference between the way you express your pain and the way I do seems to be only a matter of how we give a face to it. Yours is a dragon, mine is a wounded child. You see your pain and the way you dealt with it, the dissociating from the part of you that held the pain, the things you did to ease the pain and even to overcome it as a monster, a dragon. I see my pain, etc., as me, the child that was wounded at different ages. The child that took all the abuse and misinformed parenting remained a child... from three to pre-teen. When I became a teen, I started to rebel as is natural, but I had more to rebel against. A cousin, one that had suffered the same abuse I had at the hands of the old crone, told me once that my sense of integrity was God-given and it wasn't to be thwarted. Perhaps that's why I rebelled so much and so well. However, I carried the warps and twists with me into my first marriage. I married a skitzophrenic control freak. When I could take it no longer... because of the abuse to me and my two children, I got out. It took some doing because he wasn't going to let go easily. I later found myself fighting the same fight with my memories of my mom's mother. In hypnosis, I had to shove her off the edge of a cliff, not once but twice. She still tries to haunt me from time to time. I can actually smell her!!

I'm digressing here. The main point I wanted to make was that we see our pain in different forms, but I think it's basically the same process to dispell it or disclaim it or better yet, to be free of it. Because I see it as a wounded child, I need to nurture it and give it the love and acceptance it didn't get "back when." Perhaps you need to meet your dragon face to face and your ammo would be cannon balls, or whatever suits you, of Truth and hit your mark. Forgiveness of yourself would be a key ingredient. I've picked up from your posts that maybe you feel like you inflicted some major damage yourself. I could be wrong.

In my lingo, we both need to reparent that child that screwed things up by trying to protect/heal itself.

<font color=blue>This above all: To thine own self be true. --Shakespeare</font color=blue>