Ghosts, Secrets, and Bloodlines

HOW A VIKING OBSESSION REWIRED MY BRAIN

digital imaging by yours truly using photos from jr-korpa-tzQkuviIuHU and photosfrompasttofuture -- Unsplash

It is so that we may uncover the secrets of ourselves, better understand the ones we love – The time and place in which we live. And that with any luck, 100 years from now, someone will know that we were here.

From the movie, Widow Clicquot

They are all gone. Dead. Except my sister. That is what remains of my family of origin. I’m not sure when the feeling of living among ghosts began. Perhaps it was when my mother died some ten years ago. It wasn’t sudden nor an immediate awareness. It was more like a mist, settling into and around me. Moisture cupping questions it would take years to find answers to.

That’s when the ground beneath me began to feel wobbly. That’s when I fully realized I didn’t know where I came from -- what stock of people’s DNA inhabited me and what secrets might exist in the outliers. I knew some of the handed down stories, spoken to me in casual moments by my mother; “Your grandfather’s family is from Germany. That’s why his name is Berlin. He is the only one of all his siblings that didn’t drink and didn’t have a nick name.” Nick name?” I asked, leaning in for clarification. “Toody, Bowg, Dink, Cooge; those are his siblings – all nick names and then there’s your grandfather, Berlin or Berl”. Little snips of stories like this was never enough though. I wanted hefty stories. Stories that would cause me to say “Holy shit! I had no idea!” Perhaps it was the residue of religious fanaticism that lay on both sides of my family; a residue I couldn’t erase by clicking delete. That’s where my mom and dad met. In church. And I suppose that’s when the transmission of family history, what was meaningful to me, stopped. My mother and my father were both black sheep of their families because they each, in their own way, went against the church in not adopting and continuing the pursuit of this particular flavor of Christianity handed down by their mother and father which was an offshoot of Quakerism. Not very glamorous, spicy, or mysterious.

By the mid 1960s, RCA Victor was promising the future of home entertainment with its Color TV sets. But my grandparents were not part of mainstream culture. They didn’t have a television set nor did they have cool stuff like a record player. They did have a radio, one radio in each household, though my sister and I weren’t allowed to touch them. Occasionally, they might turn it on for 15 minutes at lunch time to listen to the news. I remember the first time I told my children that story and finished with, “I think that’s how I got my artistic abilities. There was nothing else to do at their houses except use my imagination to entertain myself.” You would have thought I had told them there was no electricity, running water, or indoor toilets. And then I would throw in, “that wasn’t so bad, my uncle in Westport, Indiana was still plowing his fields with a horse.” Again, mouths agape.

In my seventh decade of wisdom, I now realize in looking back, there were a couple things missing that hadn’t lined up yet which probably kept family stories and traditions from being passed down; the internet wasn’t a “thing” yet and the fear was real, of transmitting “sin” within stories that might have had dicey content if they were brought out and shook in the light.

Fast forward to present day and which brings me to the subtitle of this piece; HOW A VIKING OBSESSION REWIRED MY BRAIN. My life changed dramatically by implementing two things in 2025 that I seemingly stumbled upon. I’m not a fan on giving 5 reasons to get this or that, or 3 quick fixes for anything so I say this with careful thought. 1) I became a hypnotist, finding a revolutionary way to rewire the brain within the modality and 2) Through Ancestery.com I had my DNA tested which was empowering and meaningful. I wrote about it in a piece called The Other Intelligence. I took both components 1 and 2, combined them in a systematic sequence and rewired my brain. That is hypnosis’s superpower. It helps to create new neural networks and pathways. I’ll be writing more extensively about this from Letters from the Big Sky where I write about my journey as an integrative hypnosis practitioner.

In closing, I’d like to mention that this technique that I used, often referred to in psychology as “Superhero Therapy” or the “Batman Effect”, is research backed and is fascinating. It is akin to the technique Olympic athletes use for future rehearsal – slightly different but similar in that new neural pathways are created.

You see, the brain takes what we give it, our thoughts, desires, images, feelings, stories, and creates neural networks that run our patterns and how we engage in the world. So why not give it a superhero, try that on, and see where it takes us?

I’ll leave the light on.