I read a story the other day about a woman who’d had a terrible experience and was struggling to work past it. She said she read a story about trading memories for butterflies and although this was simply a metaphor, it intrigued me enough to do a little digging and figure out what she was talking about. I found the story and wanted to share it with you to see if it resonated with you in any way. Here’s the story if you want to read the whole thing.

“I will trade you one terrible memory for a memory I have of a young pine tree covered in butterflies.

A hundred monarchs resting on their long flight have lit here, on these green needles. You reach out. The tired creatures crawl onto your arms, wings slowly parting and closing, parting and closing, as they breathe. They rest, covering you in magic. You spin in the sunlight, laughing. You are very small, and they glow like candles behind colored glass.

I will trade you one awful, inescapable thing for this one golden moment in time, this moment of honeycomb light and a warm autumn day tapering to endless evening.

Look, you have made the trade. You can take your memory back anytime, but you do not need to bear it always. Now I will hold it for you so that for a while it can be smaller and further away.

Look at the butterflies.”

After reading this, is there a memory that comes up for you that you’d want to trade for butterflies? Is there someone in your life who you wish you could take an awful memory from them and replace it with butterflies? How did this story play out in your feelings and what did it make you think about?

I have been working with people who have experienced trauma in my private practice for many years now and one thing I’ve said more times than I can count (and you may have even experienced me saying this yourself if you’ve seen me for therapy) is that you don’t have to tell me what happened to you. I have no interest in re-traumatizing people by making them share their worst experiences with me, who in almost every way, is an anonymous stranger to you. What I do often ask people to share is how their traumas make them feel in the here and now. How are you experiencing the event today? What is happening in your body and in your mind today based on what happened to you then? What did those experiences do to you and how do they frame your thoughts now and during previous moments in your life, whether those were positive or negative moments.

That being said, I love what Ernest Hemingway said when he said “Write hard and clear about what hurts”. Journaling is an amazing way to get some of those thoughts out of your head so that you can physically and emotionally “put them down” for a bit now and then. Carrying everything around all day everyday is heavy. Therapy is a way to put down the weight for a bit, journaling helps you put down the weight indefinitely.

Regardless of whether you feel you experienced a traumatic experience in your life, we all have moments in our past during which we struggled. Things happen to all of us, none of us come out of this life completely unscathed. Choose a moment in the past, keeping that moment in mind, and taking your current mood into account, complete the following statement. “I find myself repeating this thought over and over in my head today…”

Write about the thoughts that circle through your mind over and over and how they may in some part be in reaction to a trauma or to something we struggled with. Can you find a connection between what you focus on now and what happened to you then? And then write about how these thoughts may not even be true or based in reality, in the sense that they don’t align with who we may be today, they simply align with the concept of pain we previously experienced. Be thoughtful and mindful with yourself and if this journaling prompt is too much, then maybe leave it for another day.

Also, journaling can be done by writing in a journal. But it can also be typed in your notes app, texted to yourself, drawn, bullet points and phrases rather than full sentences. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s version of a journal, do whatever works for you.