Health Diaries > Dissociative Identity Disorder > Butterfly Team

August 26, 2004

This is me............

I've been sitting here for a little while staring at a blank screen. I'm not sure where to start. Do I write some background info. or do I just start where I am today? I always have a need to explain things - therefore, it wouldn't feel right without at least a very brief background update.

I'm 29. A teacher. Single. I started therapy about 5 years ago with an eating disorder therapist. Since I was a teenager, I had always suffered from severe depression. I went through 4 years of college as an anorexic. Bulimia followed after I graduated from college and I began teaching. So by the time I was 24, my body had taken a beating from years of living with eating disorders and I was struggling to find anything enjoyable about life. I worked with this eating disorder therapist for 3 years and my weight stabilized. Although, there were many ups and downs during those three years, including a suicide attempt and a week's stay in a psych ward. Then the real issues started to surface........memories of years of incest started started to come back. I decided to change therapists and began working with one in the field of incest recovery. For the past two years I have been working with Donna. The memories of incest have not been easy to deal with. It was almost a year and a half ago that my alters started making themselves known during therapy sessions. Since then, it has been a challenging journey. I have been IP in a treatment facility that specializes in trauma recovery and dissociation. It was there that I was diagnosed as having DID. It was very hard to accept myself as having DID. I have gotten a lot better at accepting it but I still have times that I go back into denial for a little while. I have worked hard at getting to know all of my alters. It has been key for my recovery that we work as a team. Some days are good and some days aren't. But we are trying. I hope that some of them will become aware of this place so they can come write about what's going on with them.

As for our name - butterflyteam:
I have become obsessed with the symbol of a butterfly to represent the changes I am going through. I am so drawn to anything with a butterfly on it. The Inpatient Program that I was in several times uses the symbol of a butterfly as well. When you leave the program, they give you a butterfly pin and encourage you to go out and spread your beautiful wings. I use the butterfly as my symbol because it represents transformation and rebirth. I added the word team because I have been focusing on connecting with my alters and finding ways for all of us to work together as a team, thus was born........butterflyteam.

The Butterfly Story
"One day a man saw a butterfly shuddering on the sidewalk. It was locked in a seemingly helpless struggle to free itself from its now useless cocoon.Feeling pity, he took a pocket knife and carefully cut away the cocoon to set the butterfly free.To his dismay, it lay on the sidewalk and convulsed weakly for a while then died.A biologist later told him, "That was the worst thing you could have done. A butterfly needs that struggle to develop the muscles to fly. By robbing him of the struggle, you made him too weak to live."

I have a plaque with this quote sitting on my desk:
"We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty." ~ Maya Angelou

I do my best to hold on tight to the fact that one day I will consider myself a beautiful person - inside and out - because of all the healing and changes I am going through.

Posted by Butterflyteam on August 26, 2004 8:14 PM

Posted by: Judy at January 30, 2005 5:07 AM

Posted by: butterflyteam at January 30, 2005 2:25 PM