What if the dragon you’re fighting is inside you?

The younger of my two sons and I have been having a tiresome and repetitive argument about his habit of parking in front of our neighbour’s ground-floor apartment. More specifically, his obstinate and defiant habit of leaving his car right in front of the No Parking sign that said neighbour has ostentatiously duct-taped to his front wall.

My son’s take on this is that the contested street parking space isn’t actually a parking space at all; but if the neighbour is going to park his car there, then it de facto becomes fair game for everyone. ?

There is a certain logic to this. However, I’m someone who generally likes to keep on good terms with people in my periphery, particularly those with whom I cross paths daily and especially those who live about 5 metres away from my front door.

Do I think the neighbour is entitled to stake a claim to the space? No.

Does it inconvenience me sufficiently to warrant a confrontation? Again, no, because if anything, my needing to park a little farther away is more exercise.

And who doesn’t need more of that, right?

My son, on the other hand, is up in high dudgeon about the whole thing.

And our argument goes something like this.

Me: “I asked you to not park there anymore. I even asked nicely.”

(Pulse hastens, blood pressure begins to rise, mobilisation of a titanic effort of emotional self-regulation in the face of epic teenage désinvolture ).

Him: (mouth full of Milka, shrugs shoulders indicating a form of pseudo-acknowledgment but not the desired acquiescence), “The neighbor's not even at home, so what does it matter anyway?”

Me: (face flushed, stores of emotional self-regulation rapidly depleting), “It matters because I asked you again and again to stop … and you said you would.”

Him: (clearly not in the mood to placate the matriarch, goes for the jugular and presses every single one of my buttons in the process), “Why do you care so much anyway? Why do you always back away from standing up to people?”

Now, anyone who knows me well will know that I don’t back away from taking on injustice or addressing anything inappropriate in nature. I used to. My younger self definitely avoided it. But not anymore. If an argument needs to be had, I’ll have it and I will argue constructively in the name of either strengthening a relationship, establishing a boundary and/or arriving at a new status quo that works better than the previous one.

Do I always get it right? No, I don’t. But I am a whole lot more self-aware than I used to be, more adept in managing interpersonal dynamics and I like to think, at least a little bit wiser.

What this means in practice is that I don’t waste my time and energy fighting over things that aren’t worth the effort. I have learned to choose my battles much more judiciously than in the past.

And in my book, this thing with the neighbour is not something worth fighting about.

However, somewhat paradoxically, my son’s refusal to comply with my polite request (that was in truth more an injunction than an option) had me teetering on the precipice of rage. And manifestly, my son also had similarly strong feelings about his side of it.

His comment about me backing away from standing up to people got properly under my skin and raised an ugly waft of self-righteous indignation. But after the initial sting of his jibe subsided, I found myself feeling more curious than angry.

Because he’s not a mean, unreasonable kid. On the contrary.

So instead of clinging to rage and righteousness, I released my grip on the toxic burn of those unhelpful feelings and let myself wonder instead.

I wondered about where his comment had come from. I wondered about the thoughts and the feelings that had fed it, and the narrative that underpinned it.

I wondered what was going on beneath the surface.

“... What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.” – Rabih Alameddine

Once a semblance of domestic calm had been restored, I ventured upstairs to his bedroom and asked him what he meant.

I could see the moment of hesitation, the micro-second decision he needed to make: “Do I say what I really had on my mind, or do I just fudge an answer and hope she goes away?”

These are the crucible moments when relationships either get stronger, or they begin to unravel. These are the micro-moments where the courage to communicate needs to take precedence over the immediate discomfort and jeopardy of revealing the truth of one’s thoughts and feelings.

It turns out that the genesis of my son’s comment dates back to his last year of secondary school where he got himself into a vicious circle of constant reprimand and reproach with two teachers. Part of it was warranted but there were instances where it didn’t matter what he did, he was always assumed to be in the wrong.

With about 6 weeks to go before the end of school forever, my son’s dad and I were both of the mind that he should just put his head down and get through to the other side where university beckoned.

It turns out that my son held onto that as a terrible miscarriage of justice and an abject incidence of parental laissez-faire.

In his mind, we didn’t fight his corner. We didn’t take on his perceived ‘aggressor”. We didn’t stand up to their wrongful accusations and their aura of self-satisfied superiority.

It’s a narrative that took root inside him.

Wrongly or rightly, the fact was it was there. And it re-appeared 2 years later in the context of an argument about a neighbourhood parking space with a shared meta-theme: a perception of unfairness and an assertion of ill-placed authority.

"Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." - Buddhist Tradition

In a much more mature and constructive exchange than our earlier altercation would have predicted, my son and I spoke about what he would have wanted his dad and me to do back when he was still in school. We spoke about why we had adopted the posture we had. While he still didn’t agree that our approach was the right one - and I admit, he had a point - the jagged edges of his resentment were somewhat softened by the balm of my explanation.

Exhausted by the toll of 'adulting', he rolled over on his bed for a snooze and I went back downstairs to cook dinner. As I stirred the bolognese sauce, I got to wondering how many of our daily fights and recurring patterns of conflict actually belong in the past.

When we’re triggered and irate about something in the present – like my son was about my neighbour’s No Parking sign - are we certain we’re engaged with the right sparring partner on the right battleground? Or are we vicariously exchanging blows with a historical foe: people long since gone belonging to a situation long since passed that we never got to resolve to our satisfaction?

It can be a brave and noble thing to slay dragons.

We just need to be sure that the dragons we're fighting are not actually inside us, manifesting as ghosts from days gone by; because if they are, we're engaged in a futile and destructive inner conflict where there is no winner and we can only lose.

When our emotional battleground inside is strewn with past resentment, hurt, and disappointed expectations, it can only ever be brought to closure through compassionate curiosity and the courage to broach a better understanding of ourselves and the true nature of the unresolved injustice we believe we endured.

What about you my friend, what dragons are you fighting?

Might it be time to put down your arms on at least some of the terrain?

It's the work of all our lifetimes: the delicate art of discerning between the battles that make us stronger, the ones worth waging, and the fights that take away our capacity for joy, inner tranquility, and equanimity.

Choose wisely, my friend. Choose wisely.

The reward of your choice is peace.

?AJ