As much as I'm learning from this thread, I don't see any reason why we need to push it along. It will develop as anyone has things to add. It takes lots of brain cells to digest this stuff and to think of contributions, and I don't know about the rest of you but I don't have that many brain cells available every day.

There is a lot we could go back and add to our answers to the questions. We could also make generalizations from the answers - see what we have in common and how it might apply to people in general.

Questions 1 and 2 will have a lot in common. (How did the dragon come to be and how did the dragon grow) Abuse, neglect, and invalidation are going to be big factors there for most of us. Whatever damage was inflicted upon us by other people as well as by ourselves. That's a key point for me, since I never really thought about damage I might have done to myself, and that probably is important. Even when I wrote about feeling bad about making my mother embarassed because I bit myself, I didn't recognize physically hurting myself as meaning anything until Darrel picked up on that. Another thing trying to come into focus for me currently is how I never had many friends near my own age. I was more likely to have friends who were adults when I was a child or teenager. I didn't trust people who were near my own age, even when I thought of them as friends. That's probably likely to be a result of the bully experiences.

I printed out my post where I had originally answered the questions, so I have it for reference because I know that as I think about this I will have more to add to it and my perceptions will probably change. Now I'm making more notes on that paper as I go on with this.

One thing to consider is how we dealt with things that happened when we were children the best way that we could. We had enough strength to get through all that stuff, and whatever we did worked for us at the time. You can see how people with dissociative identity disorders developed alternate personalities to handle things that were too much for them. If we have developed a screen to hide our emotions or suppressed some feelings or developed anxiety symptoms, or just generally dissociate, or whatever, it is all for the same reason and it was functional for us at the time. Now those things cause problems for us because we are no longer in the same situations, but that was the way we learned to be and it is hard to change. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here since that goes into the third question (what is the dragon about), but it connects, doesn't it? (Do we want to explore the questions in more depth and not all at once?)

If you would like to try role playing that would be interesting too. I'm not good at role playing - have tried it in therapy a few times and always gave up because it was too hard. But a lot of things that are too hard for me in real life, I can handle in writing, so maybe this would be a good way to learn. That is something I need to learn. How would that work though? Maybe we ought to set a time and meet in the chat room? I don't know. ideas?????

Wendy

<font color=purple>"The real problem of mental life is not why some people become insane, but rather why most avoid insanity." -Erich Fromm</font color=purple>