Of all the episodes of The Brady Bunch I watched as a kid, the most memorable was the one where Peter Brady’s voice changed. Little did I know that forty years later it would offer me some much-needed wisdom.
If you’ve never seen the episode “Dough Re Mi,” here’s a brief synopsis: Peter’s older brother, Greg, has just written a song and booked recording time for the Brady Six. Days before their session, Peter’s voice begins to change, causing it to crack and threatening to ruin their performance. Worse yet, they risk losing their nonrefundable $150 deposit.
So, what does this have to do with me?
In May 2024, I wrote an essay about the devastating effects of emotional flashbacks. It was published last October by HuffPost. Emotional flashbacks occur when our body or nervous system reacts to a memory that resides in our body but remains inaccessible to our conscious mind. This can happen because the events occurred when we were very young, or they were extremely traumatic—or both. As I write in the essay, “The hardest part of having them is feeling the war but being unable to pinpoint the battle you’re fighting.”
In my case, the war and all its battles lived behind what I call the black curtain, a dark yet gauzy divider separating the traumas I know from the ones I can’t yet access. The space behind the black curtain used to feel extremely crowded, but over time, I have recovered and integrated most memories—except for one.
Let’s call it the Big Bad Thing.
I once tried to confront the Big Bad Thing through a form of therapy called EMDR. However, after two sessions, I had a powerful dream where I told myself to stop. So, I did. With the help of my therapist, I fully accepted that healing does not require me to remember, and then life moved on.
That plan worked until the summer of 2024 when my intuition urged me to coax the Big Bad Thing out from behind the black curtain. I spent two months working with my somatic experiencing practitioner to prepare for this process, and then I invited this memory into conscious awareness.
At first, nothing happened. Then more nothing. One day, during meditation, I said, “It’s okay if you need to stay hidden.” I once again fully accepted that the Big Bad Thing might remain hidden.
Later that morning, it said, “Hello,” and I nearly melted into a puddle on the floor.
The recovery process has been messy at times and emotionally draining. It’s required extra therapy sessions, additional interventions, and more rest than I anticipated.
While you don’t need to know what the Big Bad Thing is, suffice it to say that it was big, bad, and my nervous system had a very good reason for keeping it from me until I had the skills to process it. (Thank you, brilliant nervous system for having my back on this!)
Here’s where my life intersects with Peter Brady’s.
A churning, gnawing angst has driven me for most of my life. I felt it as a shimmering, buzzing sensation I mistook for enthusiasm. But unlike true enthusiasm, which is fueled by joy, this feeling was always tinged with a fear that one wrong step could lead to my downfall.
On the day I recovered that memory, the buzzing stopped along with the need to justify my existence.
I spent so much of the fall focused on healing that I barely touched my creative projects, despite having plenty of ideas and manuscripts to choose from. I didn’t want to write, and even when I sat my butt in the chair and said, “Just do it,” I couldn’t. At times, I felt like such an imposter. Who was I to coach others, if I was so disconnected from my own work?
One day, a wise friend called me on my faulty thinking. He said, “Maybe you can’t write because your voice is changing, and it needs time to find itself.”
It made sense, so I let go of all my projects.
The old me wants to share a redemption tale where everything is now well, and I’m leaping from the starting gates, hoping to reach the stars. But that’s not how healing works. Full integration takes time. Unlearning old habits takes time. Discovering the fullest version of yourself and your voice takes time.
As Peter’s mother said during the episode, “You just have to let nature take its course.”
When it became clear Peter’s voice wouldn’t miraculously recover, Greg wrote a new song that incorporated Peter’s cracking voice. Here’s part of the chorus: “When it’s time to change, you have to rearrange who you are to who you’re going to be.”
I’m allowing myself to rearrange into who I’m meant to be. This means giving my voice space to recalibrate as I reconnect with the joy of writing. To support this process, I’ve set a slower pace and spending time with the version of myself in the opening photo, a girl whose light shone so brightly and now shines again.
This work aligns with the themes of significant change astrologers have predicted for 2025. What that change will look like is anyone’s guess. But I know two things are true: we can weather it together, and we can use it as fuel to write on.
Warmly,
Lisa
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