Healing Ancestral Trauma

Each of us has an ancestral linage that affects the lives we are living.  A significant part of our life patterning stems from our genetic inheritance. Our ancestors affect our lives in more ways than we might even imagine.

Certain patterns, complexes and traumas can repeat themselves over and over again in an inter-generation link. Ways of being including our worries and fears often get passed on from generation to generation. The unlived life of an ancestor can even be an unconscious driving pattern in our own life motivating and moving us, albeit unconsciously, in a certain direction in which our soul isn’t even intended!

Our family story is our story and like it or not, it resides within us. What remains unresolved with our parents does not automatically disappear. It often gets played out in other relationships. The healing and empowerment journey often leads us to look backwards into our ancestral tap roots and to seek further insight and liberation from what we have inherited from those gone before us, who paved the path for our being here today.  

A wound that happens to an ancestor imprints on our DNA and wounds the family soul. Therefore, unresolved trauma imprints onto others in the family.  In over a decade of work I have seen so much linkage to a client’s present day issues tied to ancestral trauma. Perhaps a phenomena at play could be “traumatic re-enactment” or “repetition compulsion” which is an attempt of the unconscious to replay what’s unresolved so it can be integrated and healed. Everything that resides in the unconscious does not seem to be content to stay there.  It wants to come out.  It wants to be seen.  It seeks a way to come forward through different relationship dynamics, patterns, perceptions, moods, thoughts etc. It wants to be assimilated or integrated into core consciousness.  It seeks, and in its own way demands, relationship. 

Sadly, I have seen the repeat of many patterns in family histories and family karma. Estrangement, isolation, abandonment, suicide, untimely/early death, loss of children, addictions, disorders, illness, all kinds of financial, social and relational issues.  In this way we can be tangled in a web of family trauma that can bring pain and distress to our own lives. I have also seen unhealed ancestors who attempt to merge with their descendants in an attempt to heal what they were not able to heal in their physical lifetime. This is never a good thing, for either ancestor or defendant. In a lecture I attended on Ancestral trauma the data the professor was interpreting suggested that trauma more commonly skips a generation, from grandparent to grandchild.  I have certainly seen many cases where this would appear to be true. 

Trauma work now widely accepts and scientific studies validate ancestral and inherited trauma. Shamanic healing can enable us to disentangle from the wounds of our ancestors and help our ancestors in the Spirit world heal. It also gives us a way to process the inherited energies from our linage that remain stuck, unhealed, fragmented in the unconscious family soul. Often the most sensitive and receptive one in the family takes on the psychic burden of these unresolved wounds.

Children also out of their love and loyalty to parents can even take on and share their parents psychic pain, enmeshing themselves in it and suffering its consequences. Burdened by a sense of responsibility and caretaking their own needs remain unmet or they lose themselves in relationships without an appropriate boundary. 

As we move through these intense times, our core wounds, be it at a personal, ancestral, soul, karmic or planetary level are coming to the surface for healing and transcendence. What has been pushed under, will eventually rise again to be illuminated and loved back into the core of our existence. We are seeing this not only with ourselves in our own lives, but within the greater collective.

Our ancestry is often a place to look when doing deep inner transformational work of the psyche and soul. Gifts can always be found in adversity. Please reach out today if in your ancestral linage you suspect stuck, stagnant, traumatic, reoccurring patterns, shared difficulties and fates that you would like to end the cycle and break the bonds with whilst bringing healing ancestral trauma to yourself and your linage.