13 Chapter Thirteen – The Thirst for Wholeness Beyond Repair: Healing Across Dimensions

The Call for Integrative Healing

In my years of practice, I’ve witnessed the profound power of Ancestral Lineage Healing (ALH). People come alive as they reconnect with their ancestral heritage, finding peace and renewed compassion for their living family. Ancestral Lineage Healing (ALH) focuses primarily on healing ancestral wounds, yet this chapter explores the common but unspoken challenges that arise beyond traditional lineage repair. What happens when the scars we carry are both inherited and intimately personal? What do we do when our own unhealed trauma creates a barrier between us and our well ancestors?

ALH effectively addresses material that is often overlooked in conventional therapy techniques. Through reconnecting with our well ancestors, we can repair relationships with lineage ancestors, heal unresolved intergenerational wounds, and engage with living family through renewed compassion. The transformative power of this work is undeniable. But what about when it’s not enough?

Sometimes, even as we make progress with our ancestral connections, certain things remain unresolved. When lived trauma from our upbringing remains unhealed, when lineage healing alone – or therapy alone – does not address the whole of the problem, we need to look at healing in a more complete way. Trauma lives in multiple dimensions of our being, and we may need a more comprehensive approach to achieve deep and lasting healing.

The Multidimensional Nature of Trauma

What no one tells you about trauma is that it’s not just about what happened to you, it’s about what stopped happening after. The countless moments when safety should have been restored but wasn’t, when connection should have bloomed but withered instead. Many of us know this feeling intimately, the moment when a simple trigger sends us spinning back into old patterns, our bodies responding before our minds can catch up.

When trauma occurs, your nervous system adapts, creating preprogrammed responses that evolved to keep you safe. Your amygdala floods your body with stress hormones before your rational mind can even process what is happening. More than just a psychological response, this is your body doing exactly what it learned to do to survive.

In so doing, your body is telling you something crucial: trauma lives in layers, like a complex tapestry whose threads have worn thin or gone missing across generations. Your personal trauma, family wounds, and ancestral burdens nest within each other like Russian dolls, each one containing and influencing the others. The science confirms what shamans across the world have always known: trauma leaves its signature not just in your nervous system, but in your cellular memory and gene expression. Your epigenome, the control tower of your genes, carries forward the experiences of generations, each ancestor contributing their own unique blend of triumphs and traumas, creating an inheritance that touches every aspect of your being.

This then interweaves with our ancestral inheritance, creating a tapestry where individual wounds and inherited patterns reinforce each other. These responses manifest in multiple ways. You might recognize this in your own life, as moments when your response to a situation feels bigger than the trigger itself, when old wounds seem to speak through your body’s reactions. At the physical level (beyond tension and stress), trauma reshapes our nervous system and affects how our bodies respond to stress. At the psychological level, trauma influences the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we deserve. On a physical level (beyond tension and stress), it can reshape our nervous system and affect how our bodies respond to stress. At the energetic and spiritual levels, trauma can create disconnection from our sense of purpose, belonging, and ancestral backing.

The tragedy we most pointedly suffer is not in having these responses, but in the story we tell ourselves about them. Trauma has the power to shape our personalities and influence how we view ourselves and our place in the world. The problem isn’t you – it’s that most healing approaches do not address all these layers where trauma lives. To achieve wholeness, we need healing approaches that can work with both the ancestral patterns, adverse events, and the personal adaptations that have shaped us.

Integrating Clinical and Ancestral Wisdom

If you have done extensive therapy, attended countless workshops, or sought healing after healing, you might well be weary of trying yet another approach. Perhaps therapy sessions left you drained but hopeful. Workshops promised breakthrough after breakthrough. Energy healings touched something deep within, yet somehow that sense of wholeness still feels just out of reach. This rollercoaster of excitement and defeat is all too familiar for those who seek healing.

Yet the instinct to move towards wholeness, freedom, and belonging is natural and healthy. What matters is not finding the perfect modality, but directly experiencing healing across the many aspects of your being. Over thirty years of practice has shown me that integrating different healing modalities creates the most profound transformations. Healing that includes the physical, psychological, emotional, energetic, spiritual, and transpersonal aspects is better able to hold the complex tapestry and heal the whole person.

I weave contemporary trauma-informed modalities like IFS with ancient shamanic approaches and Ancestral Medicine to create one fluid healing experience. When a practitioner can utilize both clinically proven tools for trauma healing and medicine work, they can leverage the connection between clients and their well ancestors in invaluable ways. Your most radiant ancestors, because they are your own blood and bone, know what is most useful in addressing your stuck and unfinished places. They have an uncanny ability to discern precisely what is needed, and who or what can best help your unique constitution.

This integration is not just about combining techniques, it is about honoring both a modern understanding of trauma and ancient wisdom about healing. When clinical expertise meets ancestral wisdom, we can address both the immediate manifestations of trauma and its deeper roots in our lineage, creating a more complete path to the wholeness you have sought all along.

Carla’s Story: Integrative Healing in practice

[Content Warning: This section contains references to childhood trauma, including forced commercial sexual exploitation of children.]

In our initial consultation, Carla shared that she was specifically seeking ancestral lineage healing after four decades of working with therapists and psychiatrists. As a mental health practitioner herself, Carla had explored numerous healing modalities. While each one helped in one way or another, she still carried deep wounding that left her feeling broken, as if she would always have a cross to bear. She wondered if lineage work might finally help her access the layers that conventional therapy could not touch. When we first met, Carla looked tired and depleted, like someone who had experienced many losses and was seeking consolation at her own expense.

Carla liked that I had a therapeutic background and trauma knowledge and said that was why she chose me over other practitioners. She emphasized that she had worked with therapists and psychiatrists for over 40 years and did not want to do a bunch of therapy. Even though she did not want therapy to be our primary focus, she was open to trauma work if and when needed. I said that I would respect her wishes, knowing that her well ancestors would have ways to reparent, heal, and address whatever was missing. As we spent more time together, Carla slowly began to reveal more of her history.

Carla’s childhood was deeply traumatic. From an early age, she was physically and emotionally abused. Her parents, both mentally ill, actively forced her into the child pornography industry. They subjected her to severe and repeated sexual abuse from their associates and from strangers, regularly gaslit her, denied her reality, and manipulated her perceptions. Several decades after these experiences, Carla still felt “enmeshed” with the impact from them. She had moved several times in her life and reported that she never felt at home anywhere. She loved her partner but was not happy in her relationship. She battled with a sense of powerlessness, and while she was not suicidal, she consistently felt she had no right to exist. She had done a lot of work around her dad, who died several years before, but her aged mother was an ongoing source of stress, resentment and grief. In the entirety of her childhood, Carla had never experienced healthy parenting, appropriate boundaries, ethical pleasure, or healthy emotional expression.

Although years of therapy had made her “functional” according to official DSM-IV standards, she still struggled with sleep, relationships, and depression. She felt isolated and drained most of the time. From a trauma model, Carla had at least one very young part of herself who was “stuck in time” so to speak, and held a very strong attachment to the belief that her mother and brothers would “one day” be what she needed so she could finally feel peace and fulfillment. Her attachment to this story cultivated negative self-perceptions, unproductive thoughts and feelings that essentially kept her stuck in a cycle of helplessness and hopelessness.

Having therapeutic experiences centered around clinical diagnosis had led Carla to avoid mental health practitioners. No one had looked at her healing through an integral lens. No one viewed, much less addressed, the complex layers of trauma’s impact on her whole being. Any attempt to work only from a cognitive place left her feeling more broken, like no one could help her.

Carla had a deep thirst for wholeness, belonging, and peace. There were places in her psyche that still needed trauma healing. Her psyche and her physical body were manifesting the original creative adaptations and adjustments she had used under duress – at the physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual level. I sensed Carla had a soul-level sickness and needed multidimensional, integrative healing.

When Carla came to me for Ancestral Medicine, I saw an opportunity for a gentle introduction to this multilevel healing through Ancestral Lineage Repair. I hoped for three things: That the first line we worked on would be strategically beneficial towards healing the greater system, while giving Carla a spiritual “win.” Second, that the ancestors who could most impact her path to wholeness would come forward and assist with the careful dissection of the different components to her healing. Third, I hoped that in time Carla would allow me to engage my skill set for the multi-level healing she needed.

The Journey to Healing

In the beginning, we focused on healing Carla’s maternal grandfather’s line. The ancient Grandfather Guide provided Carla with an immediate emotional and energetic attunement, and demonstrative reparenting. For the first time in her life, Carla viscerally felt what healthy fathering and healthy masculine leadership was like, noting that they were “wholly redefining these roles” in ways that promoted harmony, mutual respect and regard for all beings. In each session that followed, Carla experienced healthy responsiveness, exemplary boundaries, and trustable, illustrative leadership.

Carla and I continued to complete the healing and repairs for two of her lineages. During each session, she gained new insight and compassion for family members she had known. She also experienced body level, energetic, and psychological healing every time she connected with her Ancestral Guides. She began to feel hope again and reported more happiness, better sleep, and feeling less triggered in general day to day.

After healing two ancestral lines, Carla seemed wary as she began to wonder which lineage she would address next. At some level she must have known she was about to zero in on the source of much of her trauma. As if tentatively wading into water, unsure of its depth, Carla slowly began to share bits and pieces of unresolved trauma she could still feel in her system. I sensed her ambivalence and was reminded of our initial consultation in which she said how much trauma work she had already done without resolution or growth. I let Carla know that I would be present for her when she was ready to “go there.” In the meantime we would continue to cultivate trust, and practice receiving support from her established ancestral Guides. When someone is committed to their healing, an unrushed organic unfolding allows the client to move forward at their most natural and self-regulated pace. This often means much less backlash and complexity to contend with than in a shorter-term or practitioner-paced framework.

In almost every session, even when the focus was on healing the lineage, Carla’s well ancestors facilitated the release and clearing of many “little traumas” (as Carla put it) in her body and psyche, simply by helping her attune and co-regulate with their energetic body of collective wellness. In this work, clients can often connect with the essence of their ancestors’ love, strength, resilience, wisdom and vital energies. This attunement instantly regulates the client’s nervous system to a more calm, clear, and nourished state. While the ancestors worked their magic, I simply highlighted those moments in which Carla’s own affect completely settled after calibrating to the wise guidance of her loving ancestors.

One fateful day while connecting and conversing with her healed lines, Carla told me her Guides collectively said, “It’s time to heal the maternal lineage of women.” Carla felt ambivalent and scared, but at this point she trusted her established Guides. They had proved to be consistently gentle, encouraging, available and supportive every step of the way.

Before guiding Carla into this deeper work, I needed to help her understand how we would approach it. We had been integrating Internal Family Systems (IFS) into her healing work, but I explained that trauma often leaves energetic imprints. Energetic imprints are like specific ‘vibrations’ a person can feel, like a residue from swimming in oil-contaminated water. Just as the vibration of love feels distinctly different from disgust, a perpetrator’s vibration differs markedly from that of a trusted person. Often, people remain stuck because they are still ‘energetically matched’ to the vibration of their trauma. But by attuning to the vibration of radiant wellness with one’s well ancestors, we can shift these old patterns. This attunement would help Carla stay within her window of tolerance, that zone where healing can happen even while facing difficult material. There she could gain perspective outside her old imprints and beliefs, finding steady ground from which to face her deepest wounds.

Carla tentatively approached healing her maternal line. Her established Guides performed a unique ritual wherein Carla felt uniformly supported, protected, and connected to the radiant ancestral wellness. She emerged with a calm courage, “clear that everything was going to be okay, even if things felt hard.”

To Carla’s surprise, when it was time to meet a vibrant Ancestral Guide on her maternal lineage, her established Guides from the other healed lines led her to encounter a collective of ancient and compassionate grandmothers, all willing and able to guide her right away. To have trusted elders guide, usher, and assist in introducing her to more trusted ones was a new and welcome experience for Carla. She exclaimed, “Wow, who knew that a lifetime of not having parents could be totally reversed! …People do psychoanalysis for 50 years and never get this!”

The sessions with the maternal Grandmother Guides moved at an appropriately slow pace, were meditative, and often had silent pauses between what was shared. They were intentional in their purpose, and allowed Carla to deepen her trust with them in ways that did not bypass her wounding. As she got more acquainted with these Guides, Carla said, “These grandmothers are deep healers…I’ve never felt more calm and peace…And in their presence I feel more power than I’ve ever known.” The Ancestral Grandmothers cleared the smaller wounds and carefully tracked what needed the most healing. They ‘separated the wheat from the chaff’ so when it was time to do deeper trauma healing, that process could be as clean as possible.

The day came when the Grandmothers told Carla that it was time to help heal the line, but first they must heal some deep-seated wounds in her. Carla was afraid. She did not want to revisit the painful memories. She feared she would have to relive them as she so often had in therapy sessions. Working in tandem with the wise and compassionate Guides, I assisted Carla with therapeutic resourcing and reminded her of what she had learned about pace and boundaries. The Grandmother Guides reassured her she would not relive anything as long as she stayed attuned with them.

In Carla’s words: “When I told them I was ready, they took me into the ocean….We’re like floating on waves…slow ocean waves…There’s a vast ocean… That ocean…no [bad] vibration can reach me…I feel so safe….and it also feels like they’re buffing me from the inside…It’s like being buffed by light…lightness on the inside and it’s very cleansing…like they’re giving me a blessing.”

The Grandmothers then guided her down into the deepest depths of the ocean to a cave where she saw a part of herself that was trapped in a cage. Carla held on strongly to her Grandmother Guides. She was beyond any stories she had told herself about the women of this line or her own wounding; she was in a deep state of trust and resource. From here, Carla allowed the Guides to drive the process: “I could hear part of myself screaming, ‘please get her out of here’!’…it was a half-skeleton, half desecrated being, laying back with her mouth wide open….The Grandmother picked her up and got her out of the cage and I said, ‘I can’t deal with that’ and she’s like “no no, we’ll take care of her.”

Carla was deeply moved by this session. She seemed to be actively rearranging her mind to make room for what happened. She had experienced something profound and big for her and, though her brain was still catching up to the rest of herself, her state of being reflected sovereign quietude. When she spoke, she said that while it was difficult to see the severity of the wounding, she was able to do so because of the strength and steadiness of the Guides. She “never thought [she] could face what happened, but the way they did it felt like [the only way she] could.”

After such a powerful healing, we both sat in silence and reverence over the profound love and transformation. We allowed time for Carla to assimilate and metabolize this healing, much like time in savasana pose settles a yoga practice into the fullness of completion. We both gave a deep bow to the powerful and radiant Grandmothers, in awe of their very way of being and how everything they did was exactly the needed antidote to Carla’s traumas.

This profound healing session marked a turning point for Carla. I encouraged her to do some things that support this kind of healing work, and be gentle with herself in the coming days. She agreed and spoke briefly of how things already felt so different in her but that she didn’t yet know what to make of it. When I checked in with her a few days later, Carla said, “I feel like it’s shifting….I feel peaceful…contained…very still. I feel like they’re resetting my nervous system.”

Post-Traumatic Growth

In their work with Carla, the radiant Ancestral Grandmothers displayed a mastery that transcended ordinary healing approaches. Like the most skilled therapists, they understood exactly how to help her face her deepest wounds without retraumatizing her. They also brought something more – a tremendous kindness and patience, balanced with steady leadership and unflinching truth-telling about what needed to be healed. If she really wanted to heal, Carla could no longer bypass the hard stuff; she had to level-up to help rescue herself. Thanks to their guidance, which honored both her need for safety and her longing for wholeness, they could skillfully navigate the depths of her trauma like a long lost key fits into a lock.

The impact of this profound healing approach emerged in waves. Three months into our work with her Grandmothers, Carla shared a revelation that captured her transformation: “There’s an essence to me that they’re showing me…I don’t know how to describe it [but I] feel it…it’s a sturdiness, this way that I show up…Very engaged, energetic…present, very present, and generous…It’s a vastness but contained in a way that’s beautiful.”

When we checked in with the Ancestral Guides about this emerging sense of self, they began celebrating, dancing, and exclaiming, “Yes! Yes!” They were showing Carla an aspect of her True Self, one that had been buried beneath layers of trauma but never lost. In a subsequent session, she said, “I’ve felt a sense of belonging and magic in my body unlike anything I’ve experienced before.”

This was not just a spiritual insight, but rather what clinicians call post-traumatic growth, manifesting in tangible changes across every level of her being. At 68 years old, for the first time in her life, Carla began to deeply value herself and own her right to exist. She found the confidence to leave an exhausting job and create a new position that honored her skills and values. Instead of sacrificing herself for others, she built a team to share responsibilities, allowing her to step back and ultimately retire. With her newfound energy, she reclaimed parts of herself that had long been dormant – writing poetry, painting, taking nature walks, and living more authentically with her partner. These were not just new activities; they were expressions of a woman who had finally found her way home to her Essential Self.

Most importantly, Carla was no longer broken in her own eyes. She had rediscovered her wholeness through a healing journey that honored all dimensions of her being – physical, psychological, emotional, energetic, and spiritual. Her transformation reminds us that when we approach trauma healing with both clinical expertise and ancestral wisdom, we create possibilities for profound healing that neither approach could achieve alone.

The Transformative Power of Integrative Healing

Carla’s journey illustrates the power of working with trauma at multiple levels simultaneously. Had she worked only with an ancestral practitioner untrained in psychology, she might have received profound spiritual insights but struggled to integrate them into her daily life. Similarly, conventional therapy alone had not provided the deep soul retrieval and thought-form unraveling Carla needed. Only the weaving together of clinical understanding with ancestral wisdom could allow for such comprehensive healing.

Sharing Carla’s story also illustrates how the pace and sequence of healing matters, how each ancestral line that comes forward arrives in perfect order and timing for the person’s overall healing. This mirrors the careful groundwork we lay in therapy: building resources, recalibrating responses to life, and establishing healthy boundaries.

When someone seeks to heal wounding from the same lineage that caused that trauma, the reparations are unlike any I have witnessed. Through their steady and loving nature, Carla’s ancestral Grandmothers diligently removed energetic imprints of the perpetrators, the environment of Carla’s upbringing, and the multi-layered impact of her harmful experiences.

Conclusion

Carla is a case in point for an integrative/multilevel healing approach. Had she chosen an ancestral practitioner with no background or training in psychology, I believe Carla would have received some beautiful gifts of healing, but would not have been able to metabolize or integrate those gifts into her life, leaving her with that all-too-familiar feeling of getting some of the trouble handled but not all. Just as therapy alone did not help Carla with all the layers of trauma, Ancestral Lineage Healing alone would have missed all that she was holding in her own psyche, system and spirit.

If you are seeking a way to heal from trauma, ancestral lineage repair may be a powerful approach to try. With the guidance of experienced practitioners, you can connect with your ancestral lineage, heal intergenerational burdens that no longer serve you, receive wise counsel and guidance, and begin your journey towards whole being health. If you choose to engage in lineage repair with a practitioner, remember to bring the wellness forward into your life, into your day-to-day world. From my perspective, you have not fully initiated yourself into the wellness of the lineage until you have integrated the healing with how you live your life now.

That said, if you are familiar with Ancestral Medicine and it has not been all that you needed or hoped for, that’s okay. Get to know what has worked for you in the lineage healing process, and what seems to be missing. Then connect with a practitioner who uses multiple healing modalities to hold the bigger picture – a practitioner who, with skill and care, can help you address any obstacles or blocks to transformative wellness.

Carla’s story illustrates how profound healing can occur when we approach that healing with an integrative lens. It reminds us of the transformative power of spiritual experiences and the immense potential for growth and restoration when applied to the whole person. To all practitioners out there I say this: If we are truly in it for our client’s freedom, wholeness, love and peace, we do our clients a great disservice if we remain siloed in how we serve them.