What the dragon was really protecting
The old story is not about slaying. It is about what a man does when something he values is genuinely at stake.
There is an old story told every April in Barcelona. On Sant Jordi's day, a knight defeats a dragon, a woman is freed, and from the creature's blood, roses grow. Books are exchanged. The city fills with flowers.
Most people remember the dragon. Few ask what it was protecting.
In the original tellings, the dragon guards a treasure, or a princess, depending on the version. But in either case, the creature is not simply evil. It is possessive. It surrounds what it values with threat, with fire, with the kind of defence that destroys the very thing it claims to protect.
There is something worth sitting with there.
A man who cannot be present with a woman he cares about is not so different. Not because he is monstrous, but because the walls he builds, the performance, the deflection, the careful management of how he comes across, do exactly what the dragon's fire does. They keep the thing at a distance. They protect the treasure by making it unreachable.
The knight in the story does not win because he is stronger. He wins because he moves toward something rather than circling it. He is willing to be in the moment, at risk, without the guarantee of a good outcome.
That is not a small thing.
Most of the men I work with are not lacking courage in the conventional sense. They run businesses, make decisions, carry responsibility. What they find harder is a different kind of exposure: being genuinely present with a woman whose opinion of them matters, without retreating behind competence or control.
That gap between confidence in life and confidence in intimacy is one of the most common patterns I work with.
The dragon is not out there. It is the part of you that learned, at some point, that being seen was dangerous. That the safest move was to manage the situation rather than inhabit it.
The work I do is not about slaying anything. It is about helping a man recognise when he is circling, and giving him the tools to move toward instead.
The roses in the story grow from where the dragon fell. That detail has always stayed with me.
If any of this resonates, you might be ready to look at what you are actually circling. Get in touch. I reply to every message personally.