Ancestral Reconciliation

Ancestral Reconciliation explores and reckons with the influence of family dynamics and ancestral traumas that have been passed down through generations. We explore how your life and the lives of your loved ones have unfolded within a larger context that is often not within your or their control or choosing. Compassion and forgiveness can foster insight, acceptance and healing within your internal family, your family of origin and your ancestral lineage. This provides an opportunity to reframe your narrative to more fully embrace the blessings in your life.

Intergenerational Suffering

Have you ever felt that some of your deepest struggles - those persistent patterns of anxiety, critical self-talk, or relationship dynamics - aren’t entirely yours? Do you sense a weight that seems to have been passed down, a story written long before you were born? You are not alone, and that feeling is not your imagination. We carry within us not only our own biographical experiences but also the unresolved pain, burdens, and strengths of our ancestors.

Different aspects, or parts of you can carry burdens of wounding or take on protective roles. Families and lineages also operate as systems with different members being similarly burdened with beliefs, emotions, and traumas that have been passed down by previous generations.

Ancestral Reconciliation is the gentle, respectful process of:

  • Witnessing and honoring the struggles of your ancestors.

  • Recognizing the survival strategies they developed and that you may have inherited

  • That we are all doing the best we can with the hand that we’ve been dealt

  • Differentiating which burdens are from your life experience and which are intergenerational

  • Reclaiming the inherent strengths, resilience, and resources that also flow through your lineage.

  • Understanding your trials and tribulations as a rite of initiation

  • Embracing the gifts and super powers behind your wounding

This is not about blaming your ancestors. It is about acknowledging the reality of intergenerational trauma and, with compassion and insight, working to heal the cycle so that you, your relationships, and your descendants can be liberated from the traumatic patterns and live with greater love and agency.

Internal Family Systems

The IFS framework provides a safe, structured, and empowering path for you to understand the system dynamics of your internal family, your family of origin and your ancestors. Together we will keep you well grounded in Self awareness of curiosity, care and compassion as we explore the web of life and relationships that surrounds you. The process often involves:

Genograms
We draw out a family tree using symbols to represent attachment types, emotional bonds, conflicts, health patterns and psychological traits across generations. This helps to understand your own nature to be unfolding from ancestral patterns and can uncover family strengths and challenges.

Identifying Inherited Protectors
We then get to know the Parts of you that may be managing ancestral burdens - the anxious Part that’s always on high alert, the perfectionist Part that fears failure, or the Part that numbs out to avoid feeling a deep, old sorrow. We listen to their stories with curiosity.

Witnessing the Exiled Pain
With the permission of your Protectors, we gently uncover the younger, Exiled - the Part of you (and potentially, of your lineage) that carry the core wounds - the grief, fear, or shame that may have originated generations ago.

Connecting with Ancestral Stories
From your Self, we may invite an image or felt sense of an ancestor who carried a similar burden. To witness their story with compassion and understand the context of their lives and the survival choices they made.

Reconnecting with the Exile
Once we can fully understand and feel the grief and despair of the Exile, and understand why we or our ancestors had to abandon them, a reconciliation and reunion can take place.

Unburdening and Reconciliation
This is the heart of the healing. The Exile’s pain - whether it is part of your biography, or you are holding it for your lineage - can be released through a visualization process. This might involve allowing showing up for an ancestor to release their burden. As this happens, your own internal reflected Part is also freed.

Retrieving Legacy Gifts
Once the burdens are released, space is created to more deeply connect with the positive inheritance from your ancestors—their courage, love, creativity, and resilience. You can then consciously carry these forward.

This deep work can be transformative for:

  • Chronic anxiety, depression, or guilt that feels bigger than your own experiences.

  • Unexplained fears, phobias, or a pervasive sense of not belonging.

  • Challenging family patterns in relationships, money, or success.

  • A harsh Inner Critic that feels like an internalized voice from the past.

  • A desire to break a cycle of trauma for your own children and future generations.

  • A feeling of being disconnected from your body, your intuition, or your cultural roots.

Your journey of healing is not just for you. By courageously facing and reconciling the wounds of the past, and showing for Exiles that have been abandoned you become a vital link in the chain - the one who transforms inherited pain into legacy gifts of wholeness, compassion, and freedom for yourself, those that you love and for those who will follow.