Do my Ancestors Need Healing?

© Copyright 2024 Fran Carey, All Rights Reserved.

We are the sum of our ancestors. This can mean red hair, a constant fight with the bathroom scale, or hoarding as a defense against a recurrence of the Great Depression. It can also mean reactions to traumas suffered by our mums, our grandmums, or our great grandfathers. Or all of the above.

These can range from the shock and sorrow of forced relocation, such as those suffered by Native Americans forced onto reservations or of persons of Japanese ancestry interned during World War 2, through the horrors of slavery, to physical or sexual trauma suffered by our ancestors. Virtually no one has escaped some form of injury to their sense of trust, justice, identity, or self.

The goal of ancestral healing is to identify and break the unhealthy patterns we have inherited, whether they be habits, attitudes, actions and reactions, or limiting familial or cultural notions of self and/or proper conduct. This does not mean throwing the Golden Rule out the window. It means throwing out such beliefs as big girls or grown men don't cry, only the weak ask for help, or any other entrenched belief that is holding you back from connecting with your children, friends, lover(s), or emotions.

Unresolved ancestral trauma can present in many ways, some subtle and personal, some blatant and communal. It can restrict you from full enjoyment of your life by teaching you to not feel emotions, to not take chances, or to take too many, or drive you to seek respite from the pain in unhealthy ways and through habits that perpetuate the trauma throughout your life and into future generations.

Examples of subtle, personal presentations include:

• Headaches
• Stomach issues including IBS
• Muscle tension
• Anxiety or feelings of impending doom
• Lack of self-confidence
• Feeling cursed or victimized by black magic
• Hoarding
• Feeling unsafe even in safe places
• Feeling persecuted
• Feeling you can't fully heal despite intense inner work

Examples of communal presentations are:

• Child abuse, perpetrating or aiding and abetting
• Child neglect
• Domestic violence
• Alcoholism
• Drug abuse
• Distrust of persons who are of different education, race, or social standing
• Perpetuation and spreading of victim or martyr mentality into social or political groups or to descendents.

You can be the change you want to see in the world. There are many books and many methods to heal the damage and release the trauma so the hurt stops with you, and in you, in this lifetime. This may be the blockage to growth that you never knew you needed to fix. Take a good look at your actions, reactions, thought processes. What were you taught by your mother, grandmother, father, grandfather, that they learned from their ancestors? Are these habits still viable today?

The old story comes to mind. A mother, whenever she cooked a roast, cut off the ends. One day her daughter asked her why she did that. Mom replied that her mother had always done it. Daughter askes why. Mom calls Grandmom and asked. Grandmom replies, "Why, this was the Depression, honey. We had a big family, so we needed a big roast. But it wouldn't fit in the pan I had, and we couldn't afford a bigger pan, so I had to cut the ends off and put them on the sides."

We have a bigger pan now. We no longer need to cut the ends off the roast.Closely examine the emotional and mental legacies you have received. Truly horrible things happened to many of our ancestors, but we don't need to reprise the reactions. We can grow, heal, and move on. We need to do so for our descendents. They need to inherit the cast iron pans, not the trauma.

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