Bortscht, Dreams, and Healing History

“Here’s to the ones that we’ve lost, here’s to the ones that we’ve got,

and the (dreams) bring back all the memories…” Maroon 5

Welcome to June,

Last week I had my first flashback. Up till now I had been privileged to understand the nature of flashbacks, (whether waking ones or nightmares), only from the outside as a trauma therapist. Now I have a new sense of the visceral nature of the somata-sensory quality of them from the inside. And this wasn’t even from my own life- this one was an ancestral flashback.

It happened at a production of The Gaaga in Harvard Square. The play is based on current events and first-person interviews of survivors and correspondents from the Ukraine and is about a Ukrainian girl who dreams Vladimir Putin and his cronies into a war-crimes tribunal that puts the Russian president on trial.  It was set in a restaurant that had closed during Covid and was donated by the owner who believed in the message of the play for the production. It had been transformed into a very authentic feeling bomb shelter for the show.

Before the show started, as I walked in, I felt somewhat uneasy. As we found our seats in this restaurant-converted-into -bomb-shelter theater, I started to feel increasingly anxious and close to tears – and this was before the play even started. I had a visceral need to “get out of there” and went out into the lobby area. Luckily my good friend Paul recognized my emotions as a potential flashback to my own (and his) Ukrainian/Russian ancestry and was very comforting and supportive. As we say in the trauma field, we name it to tame it (thank you Dan Siegal), and it really did work. As soon as we named it, I calmed right down and went in to enjoy the darkly funny and haunting dream production. My anxious emotional response was in response to nothing I had personally experienced but felt true and real in the moment. It gave me real insight into flashbacks that I had previously understood only as well as an outsider to an experience can.

Bortsch is a thick beet Russian/Ukrainian soup.  I grew up with cold bortsch from a Maneschevitz jar, to which we then added sour cream or yogurt to get a lovely bright pink color, making it both sweet and sour to the taste. Later I learned that bortsch can be hot as well as cold and can include other vegetables like potatoes or cabbage and even chunks of meat. This was the peasant food of my ancestors and a prominent unusual dream theme for me lately..

If we go far enough back, almost everyone can scratch their family history and find persecution, forced emigration, enslavement of some form, or displacement. For many of us, these traumas are only a generation or two away, for others they must go back many generations to find these roots.  Henry Lewis Gates Jr. produces a fascinating show on PBS called Finding Your Roots. A wide range of diverse famous people (mostly actors and entertainers) are invited on, and their family trees are traced back many generations using the latest fancy technology and having access to resources such as old ship manifolds that most of us don’t have access to. We watch their journey of discovery through time and space as the actors frequently discover aspects of their family history that they knew nothing about but make so much sense of their lives when they learn of it. They sometimes learn that they have a history of poverty or oppression or slavery, and sometimes that their ancestors were the oppressors. Either way, the “aha” of a knowing is a powerful and frequently moving experience.

Remembering is a part of healing. When we re-member, whether through a dream or a waking experience, we are putting ourselves back together: re-membering the members (limbs) of our body. It is akin to tapping into a shamanic dismemberment and bringing the soul back home. We don’t have to know or remember everything that ever happened to us or our family to heal but having at least a good sense of their lives allows us to own previously unexplained aspects of ourselves, and also to then extend the lights of healing energies, our Guides, and the future knowledge of safety and survival to those who need it; both our ancestors and our family line to come. We can also find the places where our ancestors did the same for us, whispering toward us to their unknown futures “Survive and thrive”,  not knowing for sure if we would even exist.

Thank you.

Blessings and love,

Linda