Butterflies Don’t Go to Therapy

Butterflies don’t go to therapy.

They don’t take supplements.

They don’t journal about becoming butterflies.

They don’t practice nervous-system regulation so they can become healthier caterpillars.

They enter the chrysalis.

And they dissolve.

Not literally into nothing. That is the part we often get wrong.

The caterpillar does not vanish completely. Hidden inside it are structures that have been there all along—the beginnings of wings, legs, and a body it has never inhabited before.

The butterfly is not yet visible.

But the possibility of it has been there all along.

I have been thinking about this because I spent years believing healing meant repairing the woman I used to be.

I wanted to calm her nervous system.

Help her sleep.

Make her feel safe.

Teach her how to function again.

I wanted to put the pieces back where they had been before everything fell apart.

But I was trying to make the caterpillar healthier when the caterpillar’s life was already over.

The woman I had been was extraordinarily good at surviving.

She knew how to anticipate another person’s reactions.

She knew how to explain herself until she could barely remember what she had originally meant.

She knew how to appease, accommodate, soften, and disappear.

She knew how to keep moving while her body was collapsing.

She knew how to make dinner while psychologically falling apart.

She knew how to endure an abusive marriage.

Then she learned how to endure the abuse that continued after the marriage ended.

But she could not carry me into freedom.

For a long time, I thought the darkest period of my life meant I was failing to heal.

I had left the marriage. I had done the brave thing. I had protected my children and begun rebuilding our lives.

Why wasn’t I getting better?

Why was I falling apart?

I thought my nervous system was remembering the abuse.

What I understand now is that the abuse had not stopped.

I was trying to recover from a relationship I had technically left while still being required to participate in another version of it.

I was trying to calm a nervous system that kept receiving fresh evidence that it needed to remain alert.

Leaving had ended the marriage.

It had not ended the abuse.

That distinction changed the way I understood my collapse.

I was not simply failing to regulate myself.

I was living through post-separation abuse while blaming myself for responding like someone who was still being harmed.

Eventually, though, something else began happening inside me.

The version of me who had survived by appeasing, explaining, and disappearing was becoming unusable.

At first, that felt terrifying.

It felt like losing myself.

But perhaps I wasn’t losing myself.

Perhaps I was losing the identity I had constructed to survive.

And no—the abuse did not happen for a reason.

The abuse was not the cocoon.

I will never romanticize what happened to me by pretending it was necessary for my transformation.

The cocoon was what happened when I could no longer remain the woman the abuse required me to be.

It was the place where that identity began to dissolve.

It was disorienting.

Painful.

Lonely.

There were times when I could not recognize myself at all.

But being unrecognizable is not the same as being destroyed.

That is what the butterfly reminds me.

Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar cannot see the ending.

It does not know that the dissolution has a shape.

It cannot yet see the wings.

From the inside, transformation may feel like annihilation.

Like everything that made you who you were is disappearing.

But perhaps reassembly is not always the work.

Perhaps the goal is not to become a healed version of the person you used to be.

Perhaps you are allowed to become someone you have never been before.

Someone who no longer organizes her entire life around another person’s anger.

Someone who no longer believes safety can be earned through perfect communication.

Someone who no longer abandons herself every time he misunderstands her—or chooses to.

Someone whose freedom does not depend upon him finally leaving her alone.

That transformation is not clean or graceful.

The chrysalis is not beautiful from the inside.

There is no inspirational soundtrack playing while your old identity dissolves.

There is grief.

There is fear.

There is the terrible uncertainty of no longer being who you were while not yet knowing who you are becoming.

So if you are in that place now—if your life feels disassembled, if you no longer recognize yourself, if the strategies that once kept you alive no longer work—perhaps you are not failing.

Perhaps you are not supposed to go backward.

Perhaps the self you keep trying to recover is not the self who will carry you forward.

Your essence is still there.

The beginnings of your wings may already be there too.

The butterfly does not emerge as a healed caterpillar.

She emerges as something the caterpillar had never been before.

She emerges with wings.