Have you ever felt like you’re carrying something that doesn’t quite belong to you? A heaviness that doesn’t match your own life circumstances. A fear that has no clear origin in your personal history. A pattern that keeps repeating in your family, generation after generation, despite everyone’s best efforts to break it.
You might be experiencing what’s increasingly being recognised by both scientists and healers as generational or ancestral trauma — the inheritance of unresolved wounds from those who came before us.
This isn’t mysticism or new age speculation. It’s supported by cutting-edge research in epigenetics. And it offers both a profound explanation for patterns that otherwise seem inexplicable, and a pathway to healing that can benefit not just ourselves, but past and future generations alike.
The Science of Inherited Trauma: What Epigenetics Reveals
For most of the 20th century, the scientific consensus was clear: acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. What happened to your grandparents might have shaped their psychology, but it couldn’t be passed down to you biologically. Your DNA was your DNA, fixed at conception and unchanged by experience.
Then came the revolution of epigenetics.
Epigenetics is the study of how genes are expressed — which ones are turned on or off, and to what degree. While your DNA sequence itself remains relatively stable, the epigenetic markers that regulate gene expression can be profoundly influenced by environmental factors. And crucially, these changes can be transmitted to offspring.
One of the most striking studies in this field examined Holocaust survivors and their children. Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York found that adult children of Holocaust survivors showed distinct patterns in the gene associated with cortisol regulation — the same gene affected in their parents. The trauma had left a biological imprint that crossed generations.
Similar findings have emerged from studies of other traumatised populations: descendants of famine survivors, children of war veterans, and communities that experienced historical persecution. The evidence is mounting: trauma doesn’t just affect the person who experiences it. It echoes forward through the family line.
But here’s the hopeful part of this research: if trauma can be inherited, so can resilience. The capacity to survive, to adapt, to overcome — this too lives in our DNA. Every one of your ancestors, going back thousands of generations, survived long enough to have children. Their resourcefulness, their strength, their will to live is also your inheritance.
Family Constellation Therapy: Mapping the Ancestral Field
While science has only recently begun to validate the transmission of trauma across generations, healing traditions around the world have worked with this understanding for millennia. One of the most powerful modern approaches to ancestral healing is Family Constellation therapy, developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger.
Family Constellation work is based on the principle that families operate as systems — interconnected webs where what affects one member ripples out to affect others, even across generations and even if those members never met. Hellinger called this the “family soul” or “knowing field.”
Within this field, certain dynamics tend to create disturbance. When someone in the family system is excluded, forgotten, or their fate is not acknowledged, it creates a kind of imbalance. And often, without any conscious awareness, a later family member will attempt to “represent” this excluded person — taking on their emotions, their burdens, or even aspects of their fate.
This might manifest as inexplicable depression that doesn’t respond to treatment, patterns of failure or self-sabotage, relationship dynamics that repeat across generations, or physical symptoms without clear medical cause.
What Are You Carrying That Isn’t Yours?
In Family Constellation work, we talk about “entanglements” — places where we’ve unconsciously taken on the emotions, beliefs, or destinies of our ancestors. These entanglements are usually born from love. A child’s psyche, sensing unprocessed pain in the family system, instinctively moves to help carry it.
“I’ll carry this grief so you don’t have to.” “I won’t succeed because you couldn’t.” “I’ll stay loyal to your suffering by suffering too.”
These aren’t conscious decisions. They happen at a level below awareness, driven by the deep human need to belong to our family system. But while the intention is love, the outcome often creates more suffering rather than less.
Signs that you might be carrying ancestral material include repeating patterns that seem to run in your family regardless of individual circumstances, emotions that feel larger than your own life can account for, inexplicable fears or aversions that don’t connect to your personal history, a sense of guilt about succeeding, thriving, or being happy, feeling drawn to or repelled by certain places, time periods, or even names without knowing why, and physical symptoms that seem to “run in the family” without clear genetic cause.
The Dynamics of Ancestral Healing
What happens when we consciously engage with our ancestral field? Several healing movements become possible.
First is acknowledgment. So much ancestral pain comes from being unseen, unspoken, excluded from the family story. When we turn toward our ancestors — even those whose names we don’t know — and acknowledge what they experienced, something shifts. “I see you. I see what happened to you. Your fate is witnessed.”
Second is returning what doesn’t belong to us. We can lovingly give back the burdens we’ve been carrying on behalf of our ancestors. Not throwing it at them — offering it with respect. “This is your grief, your fear, your fate. I’ve been carrying it, but it belongs to you. I honour it by placing it back in your hands.”
Third is receiving what is rightfully ours. When we’re entangled in ancestral pain, we often can’t access ancestral gifts. Our energy is bound up in the difficult material. As entanglements release, blessings can flow — strength, resilience, wisdom, love that has been waiting for us.
Finally, there is blessing and release. Our ancestors don’t want us to carry their pain. They want their struggles to mean something. They want their line to continue in joy, not just in survival. When we live fully, freely, and happily, we honour them. “Please, dear ancestor, bless my life. And please, be at peace.”
Why Write a Letter to Your Ancestors?
One powerful practice in ancestral healing work is writing a letter to an ancestor. This might sound strange — they’re not here to receive it, after all. But the act of writing creates something concrete from what might otherwise remain vague and undefined.
When you write to an ancestor, you direct your intention, your energy, your heart toward them specifically. You create a ritual of connection. And often, in the process of writing, things emerge that your conscious mind wouldn’t have accessed otherwise. People discover feelings they didn’t know they had. They find themselves saying things they didn’t plan.
You don’t need to know your ancestor’s name or story for this to work. You don’t need detailed family history or old photographs. The connection exists in your cells — in the very DNA that their lives made possible. All you need is willingness to reach back through time with an open heart.
Guided Practice: Letters to Your Ancestors
I’ve created a guided meditation that will take you on a journey to connect with your ancestral lineage. In this practice, you’ll be guided to a sacred space where you can meet an ancestor who has something for you, and symbolically write them a letter.
This is powerful, sacred work. Approach it with openness and respect. What you give to your ancestors, and what they give to you, may surprise you.
Healing Backward and Forward Through Time
One of the most beautiful aspects of ancestral healing work is its reach. When you do this work, you’re not just healing yourself. You’re contributing to the healing of your entire lineage — backward to your ancestors and forward to your descendants.
The patterns that have repeated for generations can stop with you. The burdens that have been passed down can finally be put to rest. The blessings that have been blocked can begin to flow.
And your ancestors — those who struggled and survived so that you could exist — can find a different kind of peace knowing that their pain has finally been witnessed, honoured, and transformed.
You are not alone in this life. Behind you stands a great lineage. Some of them suffered terribly. Some of them caused suffering. All of them loved and were loved, struggled and survived, hoped and feared — just like you.
Their stories live in you. And now, you get to decide how the story continues.
Carry their gifts. Release their burdens. And live.