Hello Dreamers!
Last week, we explored how a narrative can be twisted in real time in the public realm using the example of how the NEA Grants now prohibit applications to prestigious creativity awards that speak to gender or race. Behind this is the violent push of the current administration to change narrative around the reality of racism in my country and around gender.
We know the power of changing narrative in history and in real time to rewrite history. We know how it happens in real time on the global level.
So, if we, as a species, have done this and are doing it now on larger narratives, how do we do this in our own lives?
Good question!
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Over the last several years, in different articles [for those who have been with me for all this time!], we have looked at how personal narratives change and get changed over time.
A key way we do this, that the dreams work to correct, is when we create narratives or beliefs in our own thinking without checking out the truth.
This is especially true when exploring trauma. For example, if we were hit as a child by a parent or sexually assaulted by an adult or shamed by an authority figure and nothing happens to correct this, we can tend to internalize the event/events. Meaning, we change the narrative to blame ourselves rather than blaming the grown-up. We do this, instinctively, to survive. For, if it the bad thing that happened is our fault, goes this skewed logic, then we can do something different and maybe it won’t happen again.
We can do this in big ways, like this, and also in “smaller” ways.
Let me give you an example about Irish Soda Bread and Mashed Potatoes.
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When I was in my twenties, I moved to D.C. and had several part time jobs – one of which, gloriously, was working in a bakery. I loved the pastry chef, a gruff woman who everyone was afraid of, but who I followed around like a puppy. Because I wasn’t scared of her, she loved me back and let me help her. It’s probably where I got my love of baking.
Anyway, I often opened the shop in the early morning hours with her and part of what we did was to bake the lovely pastries she created. One of her popular items was Irish Soda Bread.
I had never even heard of Irish Soda Bread and I fell in love with it immediately. She would make the breads first thing and they would be piping hot when we opened. She always made sure she had a special slice for me. The taste of that soda bread, warm from the oven and slathered in real butter – oof, I can still taste it now after all these years. [For the bakers out there, her version had caraway seeds and currants.]
So, the next time I was visiting home, I told my mom about my discovery of Irish Soda Bread at the bakery and how I was learning to make it. She then told me that, in fact, I had had soda bread because she had made soda bread when I was a kid.
She continued by saying she used to make alot of Irish things, including colcannon [which is a lovely thing – mashed potatoes with greens and scallions and so much butter].
I was utterly flabbergasted because I had no memory of soda bread or mashed potatoes with greens or any of it.
Indeed, what I remembered about mashed potatoes when I was a kid was that she made instant mashed potatoes from a box.
Because of my own trauma, my memory of being small is cloudy, so I doubted myself. A few years later, I asked one of my brothers if he remembered Mom making soda bread or colcannon. He said, “Oh, god, no, she never made soda bread or colcannon when we were kids. It’s just mom making up her stories.”
My mom told this story for years.
The based-on-a-true story part of my mom’s narrative is that when we were very small, she probably did make real mashed potatoes, but stopped when instant mashed potatoes became available. And, she had never made any kind of bread, ever. I mean – she had five kids and was a working mom.
What is most amazing about the whole story is that my mom, after telling the story so many times for so many years, really came to believe it. There was a truth – that she used to cook from scratch when we were small – but then she wove this into a story about our entire child and teenage years.
This example is somewhat benign, in one way. But in another way, it is not.
Not benign, dangerous even, because my mom needed to weave a story of how she had been a mother to us which was very different than how she actually mothered us.
The story of her making Irish foods shaped and actually changed her memory of when we were kids. It cast the narrative into her being the kind of mom who stayed home and baked for her kids and made special foods from our heritage.
She did not. She did begin as a mom making food from scratch because that was her only option, but when instant, frozen and canned foods became readily available, that is what we ate.
I remember Kraft Mac and Cheese, frozen food and dinners [those Swansen pot pies], cakes [if there were any] made from box mixes. What I remember is, actually, that after a certain age – maybe when I was 11 or 12 – my mom was rarely home at night for very long and we often made our own food. Especially when I was a teenager.
Not so benign, in the end.
It was a kind of gaslighting – she even gaslit herself.
I think it was hard for my mom to admit how she had not been there for us, for me. Hard for her to look at the truth of her own actions around her neglect and also around her rage.
So, she made a different story. And demanded I believe it with her. She would even get angry if I or any of my brothers countered her story.
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We have all done this in some ways – both little and large. We change a little bit here and a little bit there to make a narrative we can live with. I am not sure my mom could live with the reality of how she was with us, so she created a different reality by changing “insignificant” facts.
The truth is I absolutely did not care that she did not make mashed potatoes from scratch or that I did not discover soda bread until I left home. I have a great deal of compassion for my mom who had 5 children in 5.5 years starting when she was 19. I mean, of course she used instant foods and bought Wonder Bread.
It was not about the food prep. It was about the narrative.
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I have done this, too. In so many ways. So, too, probably, have you.
When we step into our dream narratives, they work sometimes gently and sometimes with brutal honesty about our mythmaking. Because mythmaking quickly can become internal gaslighting.
For my mom, her internal gaslighting kept her from facing into her own trauma around being a young mom, around being the kind of mom she was to us. It kept her from any chance of healing. Which still breaks my heart.
Fun Facts: I still love a good/bad frozen single serve chicken pot pie. With Sam, we had and still, sometimes, have mac and cheese from a box [but we go for Annie’s]. And three of my brothers have worked in the food industry for most of their lives and really know good food.
Next: How can a dream narrative work to heal our internalized narratives?