Can Family Trauma Be Inherited? (Ancestral Healing Approach)

Let's talk about why you should be looking beyond your parents to heal inherited mother wounds and father wounds in your whole lineage.

Have you heard about mother wounds and father wounds? This blog is all about why you should be looking beyond your parents and your grandparents to heal inherited mother and father wounds in your whole lineage.

I'm Ash Johns. I'm a certified Psychospiritual Life Coach and Ancestral Healer.

I work with women like you who are ready and willing to unearth unseen generational patterns and heal family trauma and wounds so that you can go off and create the freedom that you are called to do in your life and in the world, whatever that might look like.

Family Wounds

When you hear "mother wound" or "father wound," most likely, you're probably thinking about your learned behavior, your inner child wounds that came about in the ways that you were raised by your parents or your grandparents or your guardians.

I've realized that a lot of these patterns and behaviors that we have learned actually go way beyond our parents and way beyond our grandparents. I want to open the aperture a little bit and bring you into the world of ancestral healing, or rather "whole lineage healing" as I have coined. It's my unique process of making sure that whatever family wounds that are showing up in your own life are being healed in your lineage, of those people who came before you, and also in your whole life. That includes living family members and also your ancestors.

I've prepared a nice little freebie that you can download at any point in time.
It is called "8 Paths to Freedom", the lay of the lands.

It gives you a nice overview of ways that you can start to explore ancestral healing, and the link will be provided at the end of this blog. The purpose of this video is to give you a nice overview of what it is and why you should explore it a little bit more. You can kind of break it into four different categories if you will. 

Get the behind the scenes of making this video on my free private podcast stream (plus all the bloopers and personal stories making it) : https://bit.ly/insidersprivatepod

Healing Wounds

I actually want to bring you into the concept of healing mother and father wounds, not just by yourself, but with your ancestors as well. But this video's going to be incredibly wonderful for you if you've been working on mother wounds, healing mother wounds, or you've been working on healing your father wounds. You've been doing coaching. You've been working with a therapist. Or you might just be going on a personal development journey, and these things are coming up. And then, you're starting to get a little bit overwhelmed or frustrated that these different patterns are continually showing up.
That's the reason why I want to introduce you to whole lineage healing and a little bit more about this concept of ancestral healing. The first thing that I want to point out is that, contrary to popular belief, mother and father wounds actually pan across or pass through both sex and gender, sexual orientation, or any of those other identifying things of how you show up in the world basically, or how you're seen in the world or how you see yourself in the world.

Mother and Father Wounds

We've definitely heard of father wounds, and people tend to talk about that through the context of women or women-identifying people, where they might have troubles with discipline or men or commitment or whatever it might be; keeping your word. All those very simple symptoms, but very serious too. Or having mother wounds of not feeling like you're worthy or not being able to have boundaries. Those things are pretty well-known.
What people forget is that you can have both of these kinds of wounds playing out in your life from both your mother's side and your father's side. Specifically, your mother's mother's lineage and your father's father's lineage, even though it could also be your mother's father's lineage and your father's mother's lineage. We always have four main bloodlines. That's a little extra tidbit for you.
The reason why this is so important, to realize that you can inherit wounds and also blessings, but wounds from both father wounds and mother wounds, maternal lineage and paternal lineage, is because those are energetics that are playing out in your own life; yes, with your parents, with your grandparents. But really they're energetics and conditions and behaviors that's been inherited even beyond them. And it keeps metabolizing into the family. And there's a dynamic that starts to happen between the mother lineage and the father lineage, within you, that starts to shake shit up.
A lot of times, people are only focusing on, "Oh, I have mother wounds," or, "Oh, I have father wounds." But you're not seeing how those particular wounds are playing out together, like a ping pong effect, if you will. This is really important because when you realize that you might be dealing with two different kinds of wounds from at least two different lineages in your own life, from two parents and their parents and their parents, one, you can let yourself off the hook a little bit and breathe.

And two, you can start to look at the dynamics that are happening within you, not just with people. These are energies within you, learned behaviors within you that go way beyond just the people who raised you or the people who raised them.

So, we can disidentify on just, "Oh, my mother. Oh, my father. Oh, my grandparents. Oh, their grandparents."

And we can say, "Oh. This is an energetic behavior that is running through my whole lineage. And I am now the receiver of two of these wounds, or two kinds of wounds, that I get to start navigating, healing, transmuting, and being empowered by."

So, mother and father wounds pan across your sex or your gender. They also have a relationship with each other within you. And that could be playing up really big in your life. I'll give a quick example. And this is from, obviously, the lens of a woman because I am a woman, and I tend to work with women and femmes and women-identifying people. But a woman could have, and this is a real example, a father wound of abandoned. Being abandoned; father was not present, which shows up as lack of trust in her life.

We can talk about all these different ways that she shows that she doesn't trust in her life. Now, this is profiled as being very critical or judgmental. Always judging other people, always checking, being skeptical because she doesn't trust because she was abandoned by her father, which created this lack of trust and lack of stability. And the truth is that she really desires connection. She really desires to be able to trust that people will be there to hold her, to be a boundary, to have structure and expectation, if you will; safe expectations.

Mother Wound Healing

Now, on the other hand, she also has a mother wound. The mother wound, she feels unsupported, again, more than likely because, in the mother lineage or with her mother, her grandmother, and the women beyond that, the men were absent in some type of way. So now, we have an unsupported. And we didn't even talk about why there's an abandonment with the father. We can think of all the ways. Or why the father wasn't present or the fathers were not present. But now the mother is unsupportive; shows up as this needing to be in control in order to have support and to control the variables of life, if you will. And then, this is her turning into being profiled as an "overachiever." Always needs to go above and beyond so that she controls, so that she feels safe, so that she is supported.

There's multiple levels to this, even though her actual desire is ease. So, if you have a woman who is desiring ease and desires connection; however, she's very judgemental and having to be in control because she's lacking trust, we can see where these abandonment and unsupported wounds from mother and father lineages, maternal lineage and father lineage, starts to ping pong and create all of this dis-ease, dysfunction, anxiety, and just uncomfortability. Cycles of behavior, cycles of patterns, cycles of less than happiness in your life.

If you're already curious, because that in itself could be an entire lesson or course, you definitely want to get my ebook. It's Lay of the Lands. It gives you eight ways into ancestral healing, and it starts to break down easeful ways that you can start exploring the ways of healing in your lineage with your ancestors, so that you get to the core wound or the core root of these things in your lineage, that's showing up in your own life.

The second point I want to point out here, around healing mother and father wounds in your whole lineage as opposed to just your own life, just looking at yourself or just looking at one or two generations from you, is that when you only look at your parents around mother wounds or father wounds, it's really unfair, to be honest with you; to be harsh. Hold your heart, y'all. I promise I'm gentle and graceful and understanding. But the reason why I say that it's unfair and it's a disservice to your healing and breaking the whole generational pattern here is because again, these behaviors, these energetics, these ways of being are epigenetically passed down in a lineage.

Dissecting Where The Wound Began

If you're only blaming or looking at your parents as the root of the issue, or your grandparents at the beginning, we're missing that there are a whole bunch of links in the chain. And what I love to do is to show people how they can look across their whole lineage and see where the wound originally started and honestly, what the blessings were before that wound. When you do that, you're kind of letting your parents off the hook, but not because they are not to be accountable for the way that they treat you or what they taught you or what you witnessed as a child or what you learned from them, but because they are a product of other circumstances and situations, just as you are. And the people before them and the people before them. Some time, at some point in your lineage, it wasn't this way.

When you do whole lineage healing or ancestral healing through the method that I do, which is whole lineage healing, you're able to say, "Oh, I can see my parents or my grandparents or my family as humans who are all repeating an energetic and learned behavior pattern. All right? This isn't about giving a pass, but it is about opening the aperture, to actually see with your own spiritual eyes, and practical application because I am both woo and applied practice. You'll be able to see that this is bigger than just you and bigger than just your parents. It's bigger than just one, two, or three generations. Therefore, we can heal you and your lineage from a systems perspective, as opposed to just an individual's perspective.

Before I get into the next topic, I just want to say, if you are wondering, really? Can I really see how many generations back these mother or father wounds go and also what it was like before that? Is that really possible? Yes, it's really possible. And I'll let you know that, on average, it's usually 10 to 15 generations back if not further, just to give you a hint on the work that I have done with my clients across the world and myself. Minimum, it's at least 10 generations.

Compounded Pain

Another point that I want to make, as it relates to healing mother wounds and father wounds in your entire lineage and in your life, is that really, when we start to widen our perspective here and decenter our own experience and the blame game, because that comes up, of, "Oh, this happened because my mom and this, or my dad and this," and the heaviness and the grief and the shame, I just want you to realize our behaviors is a result of compounded pain. Compounded pain from cultural and societal pressures. Compounded pain from the disservice and trauma of being a woman, mother, or a father. Man, right? And again, mothering and fathering are not binary experiences. So, please understand that everybody is included in this conversation. I just keep it simple, and I tend to serve women, so I'm going to speak in this language.

If all the mothers in your lineage had to fight against women, there was more women in the village or the population than there were men, of course, that brought up some strife and some cultural or societal cues on how to behave and what to believe in order to survive and get your man, so that they could hunt and gather for you. Or they could hunt, and you can gather.

If women had to have children and give to their children and nurture their children and not have any space to take care of and love on themselves, that is an energetic and behavioral pattern that's been created down a whole lineage of women, not just a few generations. These cultural and societal experiences to survive have created these energetics in your lineage. And that's why we want to look at the whole lineage and help you decipher how to untangle it, how to restore it, and how you can be supported in your life, by your ancestors, by shifting these energetics and these behaviors.
So, what goes unhealed, what goes unsaid, what goes unchanged in our lineages still lives on, even after death. 

Healing The Core Wound

The last point I want to make is that I know we all are about this personal development movement that is happening. The reclamation of self. Understanding yourself. Self-mastery, personal development, and hacking our brains and mindset and all these things, which I'm clearly a fan of. But what I know is that new mindsets, new behaviors will not stay if we do not go through a process of purification and releasing what is old and transmuting what is not serving us. And that's just not from an individual perspective. It's from, again, the whole lineage perspective.

When we do whole lineage healing, we have an opportunity to see what keeps being passed down, in the entire lineage, by looking in the entire lineage with all the ancestors. Understanding how that's created a generational pattern, see how it's manifested into symptoms and beliefs in individual people, and then start to unravel all of that so we can reclaim the blessings.

When you escalate these traumas, these wounds, or these beliefs in the whole lineage, you're able to create a whole new relationship with yourself and with the people with whom you come from and who still walk with you energetically and in the spirit realm. Our souls and spirits do not end. And that's the woo-woo part, but I'm always going to apply it to practical change in your own life, if we were to work together or if you ever take one of my courses.

At the end of the day, if we don't ever get to the core issue, the core wound; if we don't ever excavate them, heal them, transmute them, and allow them to metabolize and dissolve in the energy body of our lineages, which is a whole system of people who came before us, we will repeat the same patterns over and over and over again, even though we think that we're not. Because we put a new mindset on or a new thought pattern on. And yes, thoughts change our energy. They change our feelings. But how beautiful would it be, and this is literally whole lineage healing, where you're doing your thought-change work, and you're working on yourself in this realm, but you also have your ancestors doing their work in the spirit realm to alleviate these pains in these wounds once and for all. And you get to be the living face, the living person, a representative of your entire lineage, being the change that we want to see, breaking the patterns that need to be broken.

All of this is beyond just behaviors and thoughts. These are ways of being. These are energetic operating systems that live within us and our living parents and living grandparents. And also within our dead folks, our dead grandparents, great grandparents. Great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great. All the way down all of our lineages. And those are the folks that we call ancestors. Those are the people that we're calling in to do the healing with us.

I hope that this blog was informative and inspirational and just gave you a new perspective on how to think about mother wounds and father wounds through the lens of healing your whole lineage, as opposed to just yourself, for lasting, deep change in your life and your lineage.

with love and trust on my path,

Ash x