HEALING THE PAST: UNMASKING ANCESTRAL BURDENS
An Unusual Fear: The Boat Phobia
Let me start with a story. Many years ago, during my time as a psychotherapist, I had a client who was adopted. She grappled with various issues related to not knowing her biological parents (at the time, there was no way for her to trace them). Unrelatedly, she harboured an inexplicable fear of boats to the extent that even a photograph of a boat would distress her. Despite exploring her history, we couldn’t identify any specific reason for this fear.
While we were working together, there was a change in the law that allowed adopted children to trace their birth parents. She took advantage of this opportunity and discovered that her grandfather, who had been in the Navy during the war, experienced trauma when his ship was torpedoed. Since that incident, he developed an intense fear of boats and never returned to the sea.
Remarkably, she had unknowingly carried this trauma within her.
We can find similar examples from all over the world. Some research suggests that the children of Holocaust survivors show a distinct psychological profile, even when they knew nothing of their parents’ history. Similar patterns emerge in people whose ancestors endured famines.
An ancestral burden refers to the emotional, psychological, or cultural challenges and traumas that are believed to be passed down from one generation to the next within a family or community.
How Burdens Are Passed Down
How does a burden travel down the generations? I think it happens in three ways. Most of it passes culturally, through family stories, habits and the way we are treated as children. Some of it passes physically: the relatively new science of epigenetics shows that the experiences of our ancestors can switch genes on and off in us, in ways we may know nothing about. And some of it is simply more mysterious; we just pick things up. So I don’t think it can all be reduced to genes and gene switches.
In psychotherapy, these inherited burdens are sometimes referred to as ‘ancestral burdens.’ Obviously, the fear of boats is a bit specific, but it could be just various fears, such as fear of betrayal, abandonment, or fear of being hurt. It could also be a sense of injustice, extending beyond personal history to ancestral lines.
One important caution, though. Discovering that something is ancestral is not a way of handing it back. It is yours and ancestral. It is yours and bigger than you. If we use the idea to say “oh, so this isn’t really mine”, we avoid doing our part in it. And what we are not aware of, we can’t change or heal.
PERSONAL VS. COLLECTIVE ANCESTRAL BURDENS
Ancestral burdens exist on a spectrum from more personal to more collective burdens. Personal burdens stem from individual histories, whereas collective burdens are shared by larger groups, including entire cultures.
Example of a personal burden: Fort-holder strategies
When in childhood, we are confronted with recurring challenges, we often adapt by suppressing aspects of ourselves that seem dangerous or unhelpful. In some cases, these suppressed parts are sent away entirely, resulting in what shamanism calls soul loss. Meanwhile, other parts stay and develop strategies to cope—such as keeping quiet, being feisty, playing the joker, etc. These parts that stay and march on are often referred to as ‘fort-holders,’ as they were the ones that soldiered on and “manned the fort”.
If these strategies aren’t resolved in our adult lives, there’s a risk of passing them on through generations, creating what we term ancestral burdens. In my personal therapy, it became clear at times that certain issues weren’t solely from my childhood, but were burdens passed down from my parents. Choices they made, influenced by their own unresolved issues, became burdens we, as children, inherited. Examining my family, I can trace patterns shaped by choices reaching back through generations.
Example of a more generational family burden: the Border Reivers
For instance, my partner Cat and I both had challenging childhoods, but we also shouldered burdens from our families’ ancestral history in the English-Scottish border region, an area marked by centuries of instability. The English and the Scots used to enlist mercenaries, thieves, robbers, and brigands to deliberately maintain regional instability. This resulted in constant raiding across the borders, and the individuals responsible for these activities became known as the ‘Border Reivers.’ The word ‘bereaved’ (to “be reaved”), associated with loss and grief, actually originates from the experiences of these reivers. The whole area was steeped in a terrible ancestral history for hundreds of years. For my partner and me, even though the last raids took place about 300 years ago, this historical burden was something that our families were still carrying.
Example of a more cultural collective burden: Taker culture
In some ways, our entire modern-day culture, spanning the last 6,000 years of what has been a traumatic period in human history (compared to the times before it), is collectively experiencing post-traumatic stress. We are all carrying ancestral burdens that extend back hundreds and even thousands of years.
THE 7 GENERATIONS
Indigenous cultures used to consider the impact of the seven generations that came before them and acknowledged their influence on the seven generations that would follow.
Shamans often use the number seven to mean “a lot” rather than exactly seven. In practice, it means roughly the last 200 years. Interestingly, the science of epigenetics suggests that patterns of gene switching tend to weaken after around seven generations.
Indigenous cultures understood the importance of addressing and resolving their own trauma, viewing it as a personal responsibility to prevent passing it down through the generations. This awareness is a stark contrast to our current approach to how we treat the environment, completely neglecting the impact on future generations. By losing shamanism, we largely lost knowledge about how to heal ancestral burdens.
However, shamanism still offers tools and practices for healing, and this is what we will explore in the course Time Travel: Healing the Past.
THE FAMILY AS A SYSTEM
It is tempting to picture an ancestral burden travelling down a single line, from great-grandfather to grandfather to father to child. In practice, families don’t work like that. A family behaves far more like a single living body than a collection of individuals. It hands out roles (the scapegoat, the hero, the lost child, the one who looks after everybody) and, as people die, it feeds new people into them.
So we are shaped not only by our parents and grandparents, but by their brothers and sisters too. Sometimes an aunt or an uncle has as much influence on us as a parent. And it isn’t only children who inherit: the stories, scripts and trigger responses get handed on to anyone in the family’s orbit, so a burden doesn’t automatically stop with people who have no children of their own.
It isn’t only wounds that travel down the generations, either. Gifts, skills, humour and resilience do too. We are only here because our ancestors survived.
START WITH A MAP OF YOUR FAMILY
So how do you begin to see what you are carrying? Before any journeying at all, it helps to look at the whole family on paper. Family therapists call this a genogram: a simple map of your family across three or four generations.
When you draw it, patterns that are invisible within one lifetime often jump out. The losses. The repetitions: the same kind of event at the same age, generation after generation. And the silences: the people and the things nobody talks about. Seeing the pattern on paper steadies the work, and it shows you what to journey for.
We have made a free worksheet to help you draw your own map, with a simple chart, an easy key and questions to guide you. It is also the starting point for the Family as a System module of Time Travel: Healing the Past.
FREE WORKSHEET: MAP YOUR FAMILY
Draw your family across four generations and see the patterns for yourself: the losses, the repetitions, the silences, and the strengths.
WE LIVE IN A MULTIVERSE
In shamanic terms, we live in a multiverse - at any moment, there are several possible futures.
While not all physicists agree on the multiverse theory, it has gained significant acceptance in recent times. It’s intriguing to see how it resonates with ideas that shamans have known and experienced throughout history.
why we end up in a particular reality?
If the future is a multiverse, that raises the question of why we end up in a particular reality. The answer lies in unconscious decision-making, often influenced by unconscious patterns from past hurts and traumas, including the ancestral burdens that we (often unconsciously) carry.
TENTACLE OF THE PAST
Many different shamanic traditions see the past as a tendril or a tentacle, moving in a spiral motion, entering our lower back from behind, just opposite our belly button. And it just extends slightly out of our belly button, and what it’s doing is it tastes all future possibilities. Because it is a creature of habit, it does that until it finds one it’s familiar with based on its past experience, and then it hooks onto it and drags us forward into that. Until you get to grips with this tentacle, that is why we keep recreating the past.
Throughout the world, there are a lot of different shamanic practices for removing that tentacle, so we become freer to choose the future we move into. Otherwise, it’s a bit like trying to kill Japanese knotweed. We cut it down, but it keeps coming back, resilient and determined. It’s the reason people repeat the same patterns over and over again, even “against their will” – choosing the same kind of partners or keeping drinking alcohol, or whatever it is.
But the more you do the practices to get rid of the tentacle of the past, the weaker it gets, and the more you can step into being free to choose your future.
These practices are a part of what are called the recapitulation techniques, which are many and varied. They help us resolve the past, gather ourselves back from the past so we can then choose the future more consciously. The more we resolve the past stuff, the less likely it’s going to be propelling us unconsciously into the future. So the idea is to free ourselves from that tendril so you can more consciously step into the future we want.
Some recapitulation practices:
- soul retrieval
- fort-holder care
- transformation practices
- going to conversion points
- shapeshifting
- disentanglements
- extraction/de-possession
- hollowing out practices
- cultivating the aware self, who can step back and make more conscious decisions
- certain breathing techniques – breathing the past away and using particular eye movements
- severing the spiral tendril
- singing our parts back home.
We cannot change the past, but we can change the stories around it
The past cannot be changed. People sometimes fall into the trap of new-age magical wishful thinking, attempting to rewrite their entire childhood stories. The truth is, you can’t change the past. It’s what happened to you, and trying to reshape it is, in essence, a fantasy. Moreover, trying to rewrite our past can backfire because our bodies and souls can sense the lie. Our bodies crave the truth, and living a lie brings about tensions, messes with our psyche, and fuels anxieties. It’s not a healthy process.
Instead, the focus needs to be on reshaping the stories and messages we took from past events, so we resolve past trauma and free ourselves for more conscious decision-making in the future.
However, shamanically, we can do even more.
SHAMANIC JOURNEYING TO YOUR PAST SELVES
So, we live in a multiverse, where there are several potential futures, different timelines we can enter. At first, physicists thought these multiple timelines existed in complete separation from each other. Modern physics, however, is catching up with what shamans always knew – timelines that are closest to each other overlap to a degree and can influence one another.
This practice isn’t about altering the past but creating different timelines where healthier versions of yourself exist.
As you engage in this process, we become more aware that there isn’t just one “I”; there are numerous versions in slightly different universes. Creating healthier versions of ourselves helps steer us towards choosing future timelines where we can live a more authentic, soulful and happy life.
By doing a shamanic journey to the past and supporting our younger selves, we create alternative, healthier timelines where we experienced a different childhood or responded in healthier ways. This, in turn, lightens the burden of the past and allows us to make more conscious choices in the present and so, increase the likelihood of us ending up in healthier futures.
And what about the future? Because there are many possible futures, we can’t journey to “the” future, but we can work with future versions of ourselves. That is the subject of a separate article, Choosing the Future (coming soon).
READY FOR SOME TIME TRAVEL?
Discover tools to heal the past: learn to connect with your younger selves, heal family and ancestral burdens, and break the spell of the stories you inherited.
If you would like to make a start now, download the free worksheet and draw your family map. It is the first thing we will work with on the course.
Join our upcoming course, Time Travel: Healing the Past, starting on November 15th. Choosing the Future will follow as a separate course in 2027.
FURTHER-STEPS COURSE:
TIME TRAVEL: HEALING THE PAST
Healing the family and ancestral burdens we carry, and the stories we inherit
We will explore:
- Healing Family and Ancestral Burdens: Understand what family and ancestral burdens are, and learn safe and effective ways to uncover and heal them.
- The Family as a System: Map your own family across three or more generations, and see the pattern on paper before you journey for it.
- What Memory Actually Is: Why journeying back can genuinely change something, and where the honest limits of that lie.
- Stories as Spells: How the story a family tells about a child becomes the story that child tells about themselves, and how to break it.
- Personal Unburdening: Explore fort-holder strategies and experience a special family constellation approach for personal unburdening.
- Journeying to the Past: Journey back in time to provide support and healing to our younger selves.
- Collective Trauma: Trauma that is not personal or familial at all, but carried by a people, a class, or a place.
- Putting It Down: Domestication and civilisation as the largest ancestral burden of all, and how to set it down.
- … and much more
