Ancestral Healing and Why It Matters

‘What is ancestral healing?’ Someone asked me the other day. ‘And why bother?’

Here’s my perspective on this.

Let’s say, a mother experienced some sexual trauma as a child or an adult. She didn’t have the support she needed in order to process this shock and ended up suppressing the memories in order to ‘get on’ with her life.

Except that memory does not just live in her mind; it’s stuck in her body too.

So that old experience is likely to impact her intimate relationship with her partner, causing contraction in her being or avoidance of sex. It is possible that there’s a lot of tension in the household with regular conflicts.

It’s also likely to impact the baby she carries, because as women we often hide our unwanted emotions in the womb. There may be a lot of toxicity, rage, powerlessness that the baby takes on throughout the pregnancy. Furthermore, the stress caused by tension and conflict at home is likely to create an unhealthy atmosphere inside and outside of the womb.

Up until the age of 2, energetically, the baby does not feel separate from the mother. Everything the mother feels, the child feels too.

Unless the mother faces her fears head on, that unresolved trauma is in the family field, where people know that something is not quite right, but don’t know how to fix it.

There’s an unfinished business that needs tending….

What children often do is to try to resolve that trauma. They can’t do this for the mother who is not willing to look at her pain, so the children then go on to experience something similar in order to find a different ending to that situation.

Chances are that the mother who finds it too painful to deal with her own sexual trauma will overlook what’s happening to her children. Her inability to support them in processing that shock will perpetuate the pattern.

So then the pain is passed on from one generation to another.

Until someone stops and heals themselves and their ancestral line.

What’s beautiful about ancestral healing is that you heal yourself, your ancestors AND your children.

Let the pain you carry stop with you.

P.S. I used an example of sexual trauma here just to illustrate the mechanics of this process but it could be anything that caused a shock in the family line, for example, sudden death in the family, suicide, prolonged illness, depression, etc.

P.P.S. For me, THE most effective way of healing the ancestral pain is constellations. I use this process during my in-person retreats in a stunning part of Devon. The next one is on 23-26 March and I still have a couple of places left. Drop me a line, if you’re ready to change your life for your own sake, but also for the sake of those that you love.