Butterfly Excrement

Yesterday I encountered the first and hopefully last piece of inane self help material since my arrival at this hospital. It was the poem attached to the bottom of this post. We had to draw or paint something inspired by it; that was easy enough, and so was the talking which followed. After a little more reflection and deciding to trust my initial gut instinct I raised to the group that I felt quite offended by the poems’ use in this setting. It is quite derogatory to people with a mental illness and perhaps would be more appropriate for use with someone who is going through a general struggle, but for people who have already emerged from dozens of cocoons and have been told they face many many more, this is just offensive. About half of the group agreed with me. I’m sharing this not just because people agreed with me, but because it has stuck in my mind and I remain a little shocked that a professional therapist could look past this obvious misappropriation off the poem.

Cocoon (author unknown)
A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day he saw a small opening in the cocoon. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could go no further… so, the man decided to help the butterfly.
He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But, it had a swollen body, and small shrivelled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly, because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shrivelled wings. It was never able to fly.
What he had done in his well intentioned kindness and haste and what he did not understand, was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required to get through the tiny opening were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.
Sometimes, struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If nature allowed us to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been, and we could never fly.