A "Familiar" Transformation

Recently my adult daughter & I had a candid conversation about my childhood. With clarification and without judgment, she shared an astute observation that a childhood experience she has heard from her mother is distinctly different from the experience described by her aunt. She was kind enough to validate my experience without accusing me of being histrionic. Her emotional maturity inspired me to subjectively step back to consider that conflicting perspectives about a shared experience like two sisters “growing” up in the same household can be different but both equally valid.

Broadened awareness often is the biggest benefit of revisiting the “familiar” at a different place or point in time. I am always silently surprised by the magic of an “oh shit” moment after pieces of a much bigger puzzle seem to suddenly fall into place.

Despite understanding reasonable logic about the mechanics of a learning process, it is often startling in those moments where I have become profoundly aware of the fruit of my effort. There is nothing “magical” about enlightenment since it takes intentionality, effort & commitment. I must remind myself to exercise grace because evolution is organic but not efficient. I combat my internal critic by honoring that the journey has been long. Fatigue & circumstance creates voluntary & unplanned “rest stops” along the way where faith, education, career, relationships, & events shape existence.

Recently, I had one of those “oh shit” moments of clarity when watching the second season of an AMC+ made for television series based on books about witches that I first read over thirty years ago when I was a teenager. It is fascinating <to me> the way my brain recognizes patterns suddenly after squirreling away bits of information until I am ready to turn a thought into an action & apply new learning.

The summer before eighth grade, I became obsessed by Anne Rice’s gift of storytelling after reading “The Vampire Lestat”. The summer reading program prize of a personal pan from Pizza Hut was negligible compared to the quiet invitation to escape into her supernatural world. My imagination was ignited by her unique style of visual storytelling about vampires & witches. Up to that point in my life, her gift had only been paralleled by my favorite author, Stephen King. It would be ten years into the future before I would be equally inspired during grad school when I read Eli Goldratt’s business novel, “The Goal”.

I anxiously awaited Anne Rice’s book releases with the same level of excitement as the Beastie Boys follow-up to “License to Ill”. As I finished my freshman year of high school, she had crafted a new saga about generations of witches. So, I saved my money from working tables at the church bingo & rode TARC bus to Downtown Louisville where I purchased my own personal copy of “The Witching Hour” at Walden Books in the Louisville Galleria. I read the thick book in less than a weekend because I could not put it down. I would eventually return as an adult a handful of times to re-read the same stories from my three original copies.

I have been a gray goth my entire life, so it is natural for me to be attracted to creative content about “dark” characters. On the surface, a story about witches could be construed as overly focused on themes of evil & dark arts admonished by conservative church indoctrination. My rebellious punk nature is amused by the irony of an author using a personification of “evil” to illustrate a process of passing & inheriting family trauma. I find it brilliant that one of my favorite authors used a witch to shine a light on the power of permitting a “generational curse” to slow drip remnants of past family trauma into the present.

I am grateful to be a GenX’er who lives in a digital age with twenty-four by seven access to streaming content that doesn’t require forced patience I learned during my childhood. A couple of years ago, I watched the first season of AMC+ “The Mayfair Witches”, which beautifully reimagines one of my favorite stories. Winter hibernation 2026 created space to binge-watch the second season in record time. I almost beat the pace of reading her written words in print over thirty-five years ago. I was eager for the second season of “The Mayfair Witches” and it did not disappoint.

The week following my weekend binge of the second season, I had a “lightbulb” moment while cleaning. While mindlessly mopping my kitchen floor, I had a “God moment” causing me pause to celebrate my own healing journey. The irony is that religious moment was stitched together by experience, faith, belief in my higher power & the reminder of my investment in some witches many years ago.

If you are not familiar with the Mayfair story, I promise no “spoilers” in the details. I am clearly inspired to write this piece because I am eager to share the lesson I learned from “The Witching Hour”.

Growth requires a curiosity to learn. Despite my insatiable appetite for learning, it would take three decades for me to fully understand the message I first received as a teenager because the information was delivered differently. I am a visual learner so seeing the story played out was effective for me to finally see the “big picture”. It is astonishing that I would never have been able to appreciate the density of Anne Rice’s message about the power of being in control of healing until now.

In season 2, the story centers around one of the “dead” Mayfair patriarchs who has bound his spirit to an inanimate object. He uses his energy as power to “pull” in two sisters who use an antique victrola to stay connected with him. They routinely take turns visiting their lost love. Eventually their secret is shared with other family members. Any family member had an ability to transport to another place & time once they learned how to move between here to there using music on a record player.

The visits were brief & subject to a critical three-step sequential process. First, a tipped hourglass kept a timebox because disconnecting from now was a fixed event…the longer you stayed, the harder it was to return. A specific record was placed on the turntable before winding the hand crank & dropping the needle to play the pre-requisite music necessary for moving between time & place. To avoid becoming stuck in the alternative required a “rope” from someone in the physical world to pull you back to reality.

Eventually, multiple family members would allow themselves to be pulled in for brief visits where the trapped patriarch exploited their personal experiences and gaslit memories with his own light.

Some visits were horrific for a son who never felt good enough despite his best efforts to please a domineering parent who fanned flames of sibling rivalry. In one of several visits, he was reminded that little by little he had lost pieces of himself in the pursuit of pleasing an overly critical father. Another family member who had never met the man when he was alive, experienced frustration because she quicky recognized the difference between his façade & reality. In a stark contrasting experience, two sisters who competed for his attention in life partnered to be each other’s “lifeline” back so they could routinely visit separately to relive nostalgic & comforting moments of intimacy with the same man.

Intelligence spans a spectrum from academic to emotional. The combination of different types & degrees of intelligence is what makes each of us uniquely human. Our individual & collective experiences in aggregate illustrate who we were before…the person we evolved into today…and a personality we could grow into & become tomorrow.

Anne Rice has beautifully created literary archetypes representing a collective human experience. The Mayfair characters highlight common use cases about different forms of generational inheritance of blessings & curses that everyone carries as shaped by their experience over a lifetime.

Therapy has become an integral tool for my own growth. My “blessings & curses” I have acquired or inherited over my lifetime of trauma eventually led me to “parts” therapy. One of the benefits of learning how to heal is recognizing the “perfectionist”. This part keeps pulling me back to an uncomfortable place with echos of regret from my negative self-talk. I am proud that I have put in the effort & work to begin stifling that negativity.

I am thankful for the gift of the written word because writing this piece is a form of therapy. By assembling my thoughts into a story, I now have a positive way to manage my own silent violence. As I wrap up writing this piece, I am grateful to finally see such a profound message from Anne Rice about the power of being empowered to not give permission to allow dysfunction to continue “pulling” me in.

The irony of confined living in a physical world fixes energy, capacity and time; therefore, my choice to accelerate my own transformation was not a difficult choice to make. Why use limited energy to get stuck resisting change by maintaining status quo? I am inspired and fully focused on moving forward. Most days, I remind myself to have grace for others who choose to remain stuck in their past.

When I started my PTSD therapy, I made a promise that I would never allow myself to be held back in order to placate anyone who chooses to live for yesterday. I am learning to establish, communicate and hold healthy boundaries without lasting regret or disappointment. The outcome of my latest growth spurt is an ability to actively honor the opportunity of choice without begrudging others. It feels much lighter to focus on my forward movement instead of getting stuck ruminating about another person’s lack of progress.

My healing journey has been intense but fruitful because my therapist is helping me to fortify my mental health & well-being with new skills. It is a high priority for me to begin reprogramming my thought process so I can redact anti-patterns like perfectionism with greater speed & ease. I do find that I am getting better at overwriting my negative self-talk, which is the outcome of holding my own boundaries.

I am impressed by the mere existence of this writing piece, which has been inspired a bunch of fictional witches (Rowan, Cortland, Dolly Jean, & Evelyn Mayfair) who personify various stage gates of my own life journey through different stages of healing.

How do I know therapy is working?

I don’t require as many “lifelines” to pull me back from the past…nor do I need the motivation of external validations in order to nudge me to continue pushing forward.