Healing Ancestral Trauma
Beneath the surface of today’s global crises runs an often unseen current: the unresolved trauma of our ancestors. In the context of ancestral healing, we refer to trauma as experiences that overwhelm our ability to respond—threats to survival, safety, or belonging that remain unprocessed and become frozen in our bodies and cultures, repeating across generations.
Ancestral trauma arises from collective and historical wounds such as colonization, racialization, migration, cultural erasure, and the loss of land, language, and lineage. Unresolved trauma doesn’t disappear with time. Left unacknowledged, these patterns reproduce themselves, perpetuating cycles of oppression, scapegoating and polarization. The symptoms are also visible in our family systems—such as in dynamics of silence, mental illness or intergenerational violence.
Healing ancestral trauma is about restoring the flow of life. It invites us to face the harms our ancestors experienced and caused – as well as their strategies of survival — not with guilt or shame, but with compassion and courage. As frozen survival strategies begin to thaw, we liberate that energy which becomes available to shape new possibilities for the future.
This page invites liberatory stories, practices, and pathways that help us turn toward what we are conditioned to deny, heal ancestral wounds, and grow something life-affirming from the rich compost of our ancestral ground.
* We recognize that words like healing and trauma carry different meanings across different cultures, identities and contexts. We respect and welcome this complexity—the nuance, the messiness, and the diversity of perspective and experience—knowing that by learning, unlearning and healing together, we can get free.
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I share this story of one of my pilgrimages to Alabama to show what's possible when we seek connection with problematic ancestors. White people who are on assignment to break generational curses need to leave breadcrumbs for each other because this is hard and hidden work. The white Southern racial justice organizer Anne Braden said, "You cannot organize people you hate." My ancestral journeys are helping me build a relationship with my people that moves past the twin curses of severance and denial. By seeking out our ancestors and building relationships with them grounded in love and rigor, we are the ones who will get our people's souls back.
This story came to me during the pandemic while working on Inherited Silence and struggling to find loving ways to grieve our history, understand my Pilgrim ancestors, and heal the mind of the colonizer in myself and my lineage–all ongoing struggles in today's world. I'm grateful to Whatimiss.space, a website honoring a beautiful man who died in the AIDS epidemic, which published this story in 2020 and has given permission to republish it with several updated links. Regarding the setting of this story, I’m grateful to report that The Native Land Conservancy, a project of the Mashpee Wampanoag, has recently regained stewardship of the Cape Cod beach where my ancestors encountered and fired shots at the First People of this beautiful region.
This poem explores the manifestation of physical pain that has flared prior to Indigenous solidarity actions and my attempts to understand the root of the pain. As i sat with the restriction, i began to feel the presence of two ancestors who were part of the land theft that swept across Turtle Island. "a pain in the neck” shares a glimpse into the reckoning i had to move through so i could do the work that moves towards repair.
Silence and avoidance have led us here and unlearning that silence will take generations. Abolition begins in our hearts and in our mouths.
"Your Altar Is Not an Escape Hatch” explores how white people engaged in genealogy and ancestor work can move beyond guilt, romanticization, and spiritual bypassing toward historical honesty, compassionate accountability, grief, and material repair. At a moment when the histories and ongoing consequences of colonization and white supremacy are increasingly denied or sanitized, the essay offers practical tools for transforming ancestral reconnection into anti-racist education, solidarity, and action.
I was given a story by my grandmother when I was in my 20s about her father, the role he played in the local Rosenwald school, and Klan's terrorism. This essay explores this story, the research I pursued to learn more about my lineage, and interrogates my cultural inheritance as a descendant of the US South. It also invites the reader to imagine what's possible through a reweaving of our relationship to our ancestors and a more fulsome history.
I'm really curious in this piece how seemingly mundane moments can uncover ancestral memory and opportunities for healing, like connecting with a flower. The fear and distrust that can arise given repeated experiences of persecution, shame, and othered for maintaining practices of culture and lineage, knowing what suffering and oppression and violence can come. Simultaneously, there is a reclamation of magic, grief, and relationship. I also am interested in ways we can hold upheaval together without turning away, victimizing, or ejecting folks from community, especially as we tell truths, and shine a light of accountability and bids for repair through the mirrors and fire we hold in our heart.
This piece looks at the cultural preconditions for cruelty as one of the ancestral traits that my/our people inherited. Using story and history and reflection, the piece shares some thoughts on how to find our way to the deepest places so that we can clear away the sludge and come back into good struggle.
Many of my ancestors came from Scotland (as well as Britain, France and Germany) to ‘North America’ and were tools of colonizing the lands and Indigenous peoples of these lands. In feeling the dehumanization and violence enacted by my people, I have come to believe that a person’s ability to dehumanize others is often rooted in experiences of being dehumanized themselves. I have been learning about the ways my ancestors chose to bow their heads, keep quiet, and numb their emotions in order to survive. I am working to understand the choices of my ancestors as best I can, while also endeavouring to dismantle the systems of colonization and dehumanization that their numbness and emotional repression enabled.
"Exile" is about what gets passed down — silence, grief, flight — and what it costs to finally let it break open. Grief carried alone is exile; grief witnessed is the way back. Her body learns what her ancestors never could—the freedom to grieve is the freedom to belong. This is ancestral healing work: giving voice to what generations couldn't afford to reveal or release.
A true story of visiting an ancestor at a decommissioned Asylum with a new Jamaican-born, Harlem-raised friend. As we reckon with Vermont’s history of eugenics, the KKK, and forced assimilation, our separate lineages begin to reveal unexpected connections around our stories of harm, healing and collective liberation.
This is an excerpt from an imagined, time-traveling, ancestral healing conversation I had with two of my racist ancestors in Texas, set in Uncle Lyman's large home in Comanche, Texas in 1932. I talk to them about their involvement in "heritage" groups that celebrate the Confederacy — the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. And I engage both of them about whether their views on race and treatment of Black people is consistent with their own broader ethical values.