- WELCOME -

My name is Jeff Morris and I am an executive life coach and I also practiced law for over 20 years. Now, I practice conflict resolution and also help others succeed in my coaching career.

While the book you are about to read is fictional, it is based on real life experiences that I have had in my life. My childhood and teenage years were turmultous, having grown up in a family home besieged with family members struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction - and bouts with depression and suicide attempts. Fortunately, I stayed healthy and learned how to cope with their struggles. Now, I want to share what I have learned.

I've discovered some of the most important lessons in life and am excited to bring them to you in "The Dragon In Me". You will learn:

Watch Jeff's Television Book Interview (6 mins.)

If You Grew Up in A Dysfunctional Home

It's normal to feel isolated, and uneasy with other people, especially authority figures. There sometimes a sense of impending trouble or danger as we make our way through life. To protect ourselves, we often live life satisfying other people's needs, rather than our own. Sometimes, we feel like we have lost our own identities in the process. Often, we feel like we are living life as an imposter, afraid that our true nature or faults, or flaws will be discovered by our boss, our colleagues or family.

We have a higher risk of becoming dependent on alcohol, drugs, gambling or other habits, or we found ourself in relationships with people who had those issues, or both. Failing that, we lost ourselves in our work or other pastimes, fulfilling our own destiny of remaining lonely or detached from the world, and our own feelings of pain.

Sometimes we feel like we are a victim, and live life as such. Having an over developed sense of responsibility, we preferred to be concerned with others rather than satisfying our own needs and wants. As a result, we developed dependent personalities, sometimes afraid of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship, even if it was not serving our needs. We keep choosing insecure relationships because they matched our childhood relationship with our dysfunctional parents or family.

These symptoms made us 'co-victims', those who take on the characteristics of the family dysfunction without necessarily ever engaging in the destructive behavior. We learned that to survive as children, we had to keep our feelings down and keep them buried as adults.