CHAPTER SEVEN
Healing Family and Ancestry
One of the biggest misconceptions about healing is the idea that we should just be over things, or that memories should be altered or erased from our history. I may possibly be the first to tell you that trauma on whatever level is not okay. Growing up we should all have the opportunity to thrive in loving, healthy environments that teach us boundaries and allow us to eventually become stable, loving, and functional adults.
This does not happen as often as it should. It is not fair, and it is never right that you, or anyone else, did not receive the love and support they needed to truly thrive. What trauma does is fracture us, and we may believe that we are the only one who has experienced such things. We may intellectually know that we are not; however, the sense of separation and loss that comes from fracturing due to a family environment that did not allow someone to thrive has the effect of convincing them on emotional, mental, and spiritual levels that they are alone in their pain.
One of our primary needs is to be heard, as well as to be seen. If we are able to offer this capacity to ourselves now, we can heal in ways we never thought possible. This also means that as an adult we may have (or will hopefully have) the perspective to look at our parents, extended family, and ancestors, in a new way. This does not make what happened okay, but it heals the fracturing and returns to wholeness the parts of you that may have separated due to family trauma. It makes it possible for us to take the strengths and lessons from the experience and leave behind the frozen, fractured, and blocked energies.
Whether we have had children or not, the natural tendency of a mature, rational mind is to realize that people are often doing the best they can. This may mean that they make a terrible mess of things, resulting in lack of boundaries or the child not being “seen” because the parent had to work. It may mean outright abuse and violence, neglect, or not experiencing the sort of energetic synchronization that occurs between parent(s) and child that allows for feelings of safety and of feeling truly held and heard.
Even if we did not experience outright abuse as a child, and did feel emotionally connected and synchronized with both parents, our childhoods are always a fertile time for healing work. Our concept of who we are, how we relate to others, and our development—not just on a spiritual level but on a physical and social development level—is created largely before the age of six. Our brains create the tracks that color our world during our early childhood, and our adolescence is often full of the struggle to become independent and to consider oneself a separate being from the family unit.
One of the biggest forms of resistance in doing this work is often the resistance of an adult self. Our inner two-year-old may really want love and attention from our father; in our adult state, we may want our father to stay as far away from us as possible to preserve our safety or sanity. It is by being open to what that part of you wants, even if it differs from what you may wish to hear at your current age, that more healing can occur. It is by resolving inner conflicts and opposing forces within us that we can heal.
Our minds will naturally want to create villains, especially if we have been harmed, or we were not loved and heard to the level we needed. While in rare cases, true psychopathic behavior does exist, in most cases parents were doing the best they could—struggling against a background of trauma and overwhelm, with inadequate tools and support to properly care for their children.
It is by working with our ancestry that we can often gain the most insight about the sort of weight and patterning that has been enacted in our families. Our parents and their way of being did not simply emerge out of the ether; it came from how they grew up, and likely from patterns and beliefs and trauma that had been passed down the lineage.
As a spiritual healer, one of my first experiences doing ancestral work was with descendants of Holocaust survivors. These were middle to upper class individuals who had significant fear, anxiety, and control issues. They would find themselves hoarding food, experiencing deep grief, and would become obsessive about their jobs and the safety of their family members. It was by working with their inner children and their ancestry that these individuals began finding more peace in their lives and letting go of their fearful and obsessive behavior.
Since this time, I have worked with many ancestors and lineages, working with the ancestral effects of slavery, poverty, genocide, war, disease, and land that could not produce crops. For many of us in our modern world, it is hard to imagine the effects of losing several children, dying in childbirth, having a disease or plague wipe out a whole village, being displaced or forced to leave your land, or having the men go off to war, leaving the women and children behind. Our ancestors were more likely to be farmers, to be less protected from the seasons, to fight in battle, and to fall victim to plagues and diseases.
In many other ways, our ancestors are quite similar to us. They loved, lost, and struggled with health and providing for their families. They experienced trauma and abuse and may have received mixed messages about religion, spirituality, and money. Our capacity to handle money in a responsible or clear manner may be impacted by the financial situations of our ancestors.
How we relate to food and hunger, fears and emotions that seem too large considering your own experiences in this world (or without cause), and our attitudes toward work, money, security, and our loved ones, are all common patterns of fracturing, “freezing” and wounding due to the experiences of our ancestors.
We tend to more readily connect to the “victim” aspect of our ancestry. This work is crucial, and deeply healing. For those of you ready to consider such things, healing the perpetrator is also suggested. This means that we may have ancestors who owned slaves, who brutalized others during times of war, or who spread religion through domination and decimation. These things are certainly not easy to consider, and many of us could spend large amounts of fruitful time working on ancestors who experienced loss, disease, and all of the struggles that came from being human during their time in history. However, the eventual healing of the perpetrator can reveal great amounts of insight, inspire healing, as well as release familial beliefs regarding race, sex, gender, culture, and religion that we may still be enacting without consciousness.
Similar to our own experiences of trauma, our family members and ancestors experienced trauma that caused them to “freeze.” The emotions, beliefs, and experiences that were a part of the trauma become frozen, or locked in time. Ideally, our ancestors would have the skills and opportunities to heal these energies and resolve the trauma they experienced. Often near death, or as part of the dying experience, they may have had the opportunity to cast off or heal emotions and traumas.
But if the trauma of our ancestors is not resolved, it gets passed down through the lineage, or our ancestral line. We may have an unresolved trauma that has been passed down from our mother or grandmother. We may also have an unresolved trauma that is from several hundred years ago, and each generation that it has passed to has added on, shifted, or simply acted out the same trauma “loop” again and again.
To explain this further I will use two metaphors. Imagine a small snowball at the top of a hill. This snowball represents an original trauma or experience of one of our ancestors. This snowball then rolls down the hill, collecting more snow. To make things more complicated, that snowball can go straight down that hill, passing down the exact same beliefs and emotions from that original snowball; it could also veer off course due to another trauma added on top of the original one, adding additional beliefs and emotions to the snowball.
In this work, we always simply work with what arises, focusing on the closest we can get to that original snowball. If we heal the original snowball, the rest of the snow melts. To mix metaphors, this is like a series of dominoes. We do not want to just take care of one or two dominoes; we want to get as close as we can to the domino that was set up first, or has caused all of the other dominos to fall. In this way, we can truly effect the greatest amount of healing and release.
If this sounds complicated, know that whatever arises is perfect for you to know about and work with in the moment. This means that even if you work with a snowball that is midway down the hill after veering off course, it still represents a considerable amount of release and healing. Sometimes, we need to work through layers of ancestors, or we may not yet have the experience level to understand that an event from long ago is still affecting us now. Wherever you are at is perfect, and you can again look at the end of the book to the “Tying Things Together” section to see how to incorporate this work as a part of the entire protocol.
It is actually easier in some ways to work with our ancestors because we have conscious recall and have mentally constructed stories and beliefs around what we have experienced with our family as well as extended family from our childhood. Reexamining what we can consciously recall can sometimes be tricky, or we may have resistance around it for good reason. Our memories are actually more fluid than we may believe, and a new understanding from an adult or child perspective may emerge that could provide new insight as well as healing.
My suggestion is that you stay open to new beliefs and realizations from an adult perspective concerning your childhood. Some of the most shocking realizations and most insightful healing work can happen when we are courageous enough to look at our childhood with openness and readiness to see things in a new light. What may have traumatized us deeply as a child can be comforted, understood, and offered compassion as an adult. What we may have experienced as a child and hold onto as a solid, static belief and memory may look entirely different with adult information and recollection.
To be clear, I am not saying that memories are false, or that whatever you experienced as a child was less traumatic than you remembered—what emerges may, in fact, be more of a big deal than you once believed. But from an adult perspective we have more tools, understandings about ourselves and the world, and a realization that we emerged out of the situation reasonably intact. We can see those around us from that time with a more nuanced, informed perspective. That perspective makes all the difference in the inner child “unfreezing” and becoming integrated as a part of us again.
It is natural for family energies to emerge first when we do this work. Our relationship with our father, mother, as well as other family members often needs to be explored before more in-depth work with ancestors is done. We often need to explore our active, conscious trauma (that which we remember and is top of mind) before working with deeper layers, such as ancestral energies.
If we are feeling hesitant to do this work, it is an indication that it is exactly the type of healing work we need to do. You can examine this resistance, and if no difficulties or needs for healing arise in relation to your mother, father, or your experiences in this world, you could ask the following question: If I could sense anything unhealed in relation to my family (mother/father/grandparents) what would I sense? It is likely that once you have moved past some resistance, a lot of patterns will emerge.
Working with Ancestral and Familial Patterns
For the patterns that you can consciously recall, you will work with the inner child protocol. To begin, you will always check in with your body deva. You may wish to ask it what you should work with today, or specifically intend to focus on an emotion or pattern that you feel may be related to your family or ancestry.
When working with the individual area of your body, you may find that the energy feels more than just yours. One of the key indicators of ancestral energies tends to be overwhelming or large emotions that do not make sense in terms of your individual timeline. For example, you will notice a huge amount of grief within you, and while you may have reasons to have some grief, the amount of grief within is much more than your own experiences of this world.
You also may be engaged in the inner child protocol and find that there is a restrictive pattern or something going on with your mother, father, or other family member that seems like it is blocking or preventing full healing for that inner child. For example, say your inner six-year-old needs to be loved and heard by his father. The father seems unwilling, unable, or resistant to the extent that it doesn’t seem right to visualize this. This would be an indication that something is going on that is either familial or ancestral.
When we are working with ancestral healing, we are always working with who started the pattern. Everyone down that line (all of the other dominoes) has taken on that pattern. We have taken on that pattern, as well as added our own beliefs and experiences to it. In this work, it is important that we relate any beliefs of our ancestors resulting from the trauma they experienced to beliefs we hold in our own lives. There may be a direct parallel, or we may have taken on this belief in a slightly different way.
It is by releasing both the initiator of the trauma as well as our relation to the energy that we can fully heal the ancestral line.
As mentioned, you will begin by asking your body deva to reveal where there may be an ancestral pattern in your body. You will do a body scan, noting areas that draw your focus or seem highlighted. You will then ask your body deva to show which area would be the most important for you to work with (if multiple areas show up). You then would sit with this area of your body, noting how it feels physically, what you sense energetically, as well as visualize the blockage (or emptiness) as a basic shape in your physical form.
You may then wish to move on to checking in with the individual body part, as well as the body deva, to find out basic information about what it may hold. Inquire if this energy is ancestral. If the answer you receive is yes, or you feel a significant shift in that area of your body in response, this will serve as confirmation.
If you are already immersed in the whole protocol (checking in with an individual body part) or are engaged with inner child work, you may wish to ask if any of the energy is ancestral or familial. If the answer is yes, or a shift in the body part occurs, you would also continue.
For the following work, you will rely on your sense of “knowing.” It is often our strongest psychic sensitivity. As noted earlier, if you feel you are making up visuals or stories, what will happen is that there will be no shift in the body map or individual part of the body after the work. If you are truly engaged in ancestral work, there often are emotions that begin arising, as well as realizations that occur about how some of what you believe may not have come from your individual experiences of this world.
If this information does not arise, you may wish to ask: If I could sense this ancestor, what would I sense?
If you have further difficulty, you may wish to either ask your body deva to relate the information to you, or picture a blank television screen. When you turn this television screen on, your ancestor will appear.
Once you have a baseline sense of what they look like and where they may be, you will want to know what is causing them overwhelm, difficulty, or harm. This work is similar to the inner child work. We do not need to create a whole story, but need to know the basics of what is causing the person to feel traumatized or overwhelmed.
- You can try asking the ancestor directly, but at first, it is often easier to ask your body deva or rely on your sense of knowing to fill in these details.
- A good indicator is always emotions (those you sense them experiencing or those that may be arising in you as you do this work).
- Another good indicator is the scene you see them in. You have seen them there for a good reason, and where they are can give a good indication about what is going on with them.
- Once you have understood the trauma or cause of overwhelm, you will ask about the beliefs created from the trauma.
° What beliefs about the self were created from this trauma?
° What beliefs about the world (or the people in it) were created from this trauma?
- Check in with these beliefs and see how you may resonate or carry similar beliefs in your own life.
° In some cases, it may be an exact parallel: “Yes, I totally feel like, no matter what I do, I am always going to suffer.”
° In other cases, it may be strikingly similar: “I haven’t lost children, but I can relate to feeling like I will be grieving forever.”
- Ask your ancestor what they would need to heal.
° Visualize or offer this to your ancestor.
° Some may choose to visualize a specific color light flowing to their ancestor to help them feel better.
- Ask to receive the strengths that have emerged from your ancestry.
- Your ancestor will disappear when their energy is no longer “frozen.” If they are still there, it simply means they need more time (or something else) in order to heal. Continue asking what they need until you can no longer sense them.
° You can also check in with your body deva and ask it if the ancestor is healed.
- You will now go back to your own body and where the energy of your ancestor was being held.
- Let your body part know that this ancestral energy has resolved, and ask it to shift or change due to that knowledge.
- You can now move on to resolving or releasing your own experiences of this energy, either through talking to the individual body part or through doing inner child work.
This work is non-forceful. We are not forcing light or energy into these frozen ancestral energies. We are acting from a place of compassion toward anything that arises.
Occasionally, the question of ethics arises as it pertains to ancestral work. Working with the actual spirits of ancestors is something that experienced spiritual healers and shamans do quite frequently. This is not what we are doing here. We are working with how the body has taken on the beliefs and energies of trauma and healing our own consciousness and the dynamics of what has been passed down to us and is still held within. By doing this, healing is likely to reverberate out to others, such as our children and family members, but it is also always their choice to what degree they wish to engage with how they have individually taken on the patterns and traumas of their ancestors and made them their own.
Resolving how we have taken on these energies and made them our own is an important step in this process. It keeps things body-oriented, as well as allows us to take personal responsibility for how we have enacted these patterns in our own lives. Even if you do not go through the entire protocol and simply find some beliefs that were created from this trauma, simply being aware of that is immensely healing. Our subconscious mind will already be working on how to resolve the emotions and trauma energies when we are ready to explore more deeply.
It is important to ask to receive the strengths of your ancestors while doing this work. Our ancestral line may be filled with trauma, and healing that is incredibly helpful. However, it’s helpful to understand the positive traits that have been passed down to us, as our struggles often offer us beneficial strength, resiliency, and a specific way of relating to the world. Inquiring how those strengths inform us is at least as revealing as discovering and working with restrictive ancestral energies. It can allow us to more fully understand who we are and the specific culture or ancestry we emerged from.
On occasion, the ancestral energies may be resistant or unwilling to engage in a healing process. We can often move beyond this resistance by offering understanding as well as asking, If you could imagine needing anything, what would that be? Ancestral energies are large, and the change would be simply too immense if we were to shift things too quickly. Making space for healing, even if the ancestral energy doesn’t completely resolve, can allow for shifts in the held energy in the physical body, and a subsequent shift in your life.
If you really get stuck, I suggest working with a spiritual healer or shaman who specializes in ancestral lineage healing and has the spiritual capacity to intercede and work directly with spirits. People like this can be difficult to find, for despite the popularity of shamanism these days, many “shamans” do not work directly with spirits (even though that is a core requirement of the work). Look for someone with five years or more of fulltime experience, specifically as a spiritual healer with a focus on ancestral healing. It takes a long time and immersive study to become competent in spiritual work, even with a calling, so someone solely focused on spiritual or shamanic healing in their practice, rather than a range of holistic or psychotherapeutic modalities, is suggested.
Steven
Steven found himself consistently enraged by what he described as minor inconveniences. He would emerge from his rage embarrassed and unsure about why he got so upset at traffic, friends, or work colleagues. When he worked with percentages, he found that 10 percent of this rage was appropriate and that 90 percent was not.
Steven came from a loving, middle-class home. His parents were always available to him, encouraged him in football and orchestra, and supported him financially as much as they were able during college. He reported having an older brother who he got along with reasonably well during the holidays, and no particular early childhood trauma.
We asked his body deva to show him where this rage was coming from. It showed his genitals, pelvis, and left leg. The pattern felt dense and cold, and Steven said he felt like running and his body shook when we started looking at it.
We asked the body deva as well as the individual pattern (the pelvis, genitals, and left leg) if this pattern was ancestral. What came up was the sensation of cold as well as fear that caused his lower body and leg to shake.
When he asked an ancestor to emerge, Steven remarked that he looked male, young, and that it looked like he was running from something and completely terrified. Based on the scene he viewed, he had the sense that this may be connected to his Haitian lineage.
With his sense of knowing, Steven felt that this came from the Haitian revolution and that this man was part of the slave revolt. He had given his life so that his people could be freed. When he realized this, his body began feeling warmer and some of the sensation of wanting to run away lessened.
He asked this man what he needed, and he replied that he wanted to be known for what he did. Steven said that he would be proud to honor him, and his body deva said that he died without being honored (more on what a “good death” involves can be found in the Past Lives chapter). Steven imagined a funeral for him with a well-tended gravesite.
Steven visualized a funeral for this man, and asked what beliefs were created from this situation. The man had no reply. He then asked his body deva, and it replied that there was not a specific belief, but a pervasive feeling of being lost or not at home that came about due to this man and his experiences. Steven related to this feeling and how it had a place in his own life.
The scene disappeared, and Steven returned to his own body, letting the pattern in the pelvis, genitals, and leg know that it no longer needed to hold this traumatized energy. The energy released quickly, revealing other ancestral patterns for Steven to work on. Even though there was more to work on in this area, he felt more vibrant and present in his daily life, and became interested in his family history. He had not mentioned lower back pain, but said that he no longer experienced back pain or headaches after this ancestral energy resolved.
Madison
Madison felt like she was a little girl trapped in an adult body. Her voice, affect, and the way she related to me practically screamed that she was “frozen” in a younger child state (around four or five years old).
Madison had done enough therapy and self-exploration to know that she had an uncle who had abused her at that age, as well as a family friend and neighbor who had abused her between the ages of five and ten. Despite the healing work she had done, she felt not quite ready to immerse herself in such trauma (and she doesn’t need to for this form of work), so she pictured a television screen in which a young girl appeared to her in a completely dark room. It was her bedroom at night, and there were monsters and shadows on the wall, but she was too frightened to get out of bed. This little girl had the belief that drawing attention to herself would get her harmed, and as her uncle was over, she remembers urinating in her bed because she was too afraid to get up to go to the bathroom.
When her mother came in the room to clean her up, she noticed a sense of apathy and stoicism from her mother. Her inner child wanted love and to be told that everything was going to be okay from her mother, but her mother seemed like a zombie, unable to offer such things.
Madison asked her body deva where her relationship to her mother was held, and it showed her heart area. The area felt tight and like there were pins being shoved into her heart from the outside in. Madison asked if this energy was from ancestral or family sources, and her body deva said yes. Madison asked for clarity about whether this energy came from beyond her mother, and the answer was again yes, that it came from her grandmother.
Madison asked her grandmother to step forward, and she saw a scene of her grandmother fixing old socks and hemming clothes to make ends meet for the family. Her fingers were numb, and she was working by very little light. Madison asked the body deva to tell her what was overwhelming or created trauma, and she was shown that poverty and not being shown love from her spouse over time caused her grandmother to retreat within and to develop a hard shell around her so that nobody could see her pain. Her belief was, This is what life is, and resulted in her deciding to become numb and detached from life and her body. This energy was transmitted to her child, Madison’s mother, and Madison saw how she herself used this energetic shell and numbness as a way to protect herself when she was experiencing abuse.
Madison asked her body deva what her grandmother needed, and the reply was to be at peace. Madison visualized her outside with her sister, simply drinking a cup of tea. She had no idea how or why she came up with that visual, but it seemed to work, and the energetic shell began to fade and a smile came over her grand-mother’s face. Her grandmother began to see the beauty in the world and slowly faded from awareness.
Madison asked her heart to release this ancestral pattern, telling it that she was willing to see the world as more than a place of struggle and pain. It released the needles and revealed a wound and scar underneath. She went back, but her mother was still not able to show her compassion for wetting the bed.
Madison has had a difficult life, and this one piece of work did not solve all of the trauma and abuse she has experienced. But she was willing to work daily to make herself more functional, healthier, and more open. This session, in particular, allowed her to stop feeling as if she was coming up against a brick wall with all she did, and to let others see more of her true self without the fear she once had.