12 Chapter Twelve – The Healing Power of Relating Directly with Our Ancestors

The healing power of relationship is a subject I have both studied and personally engaged with my entire adult life. I have worked as a psychotherapist for over 30 years, and there is a guiding principle in psychotherapy and attachment theory that says the wounds incurred in relationship need to be healed in relationship. The healing of relational wounds is a core function of the therapeutic relationship. But psychotherapy is not the only source of relational healing; this principle can also apply in many other kinds of relating. We find healing in good friendships, in healthy partnerships and in community, to name a few. From a more animist perspective, we can also include the healing power of coming into right relationship with our other–than–human kin, our animal kin, our plant kin, the waters, the land, and on and on it goes. Relating directly with our own wise and well ancestors is another powerful relational dimension, within which we can help bring healing both to our own wounded parts and to the intergenerational traumas of our ancestors that may also be impacting us. The potential of relationships with our wise and well ancestors is the focus of this chapter.

By way of personal background, I was born in the U.S. in the late 1960s, on the Lenapé lands also known as Queens, New York, to Irish immigrant parents. Growing up, we travelled back to Ireland every summer to be with family. Both of my parents and all my people as far back as we can trace, are from the province of Munster in the South West of Ireland. These connections and experiences meant we were fortunate to grow up with some awareness of and relationship with, our most recent ancestors and our ancestral lands. At age 22, I returned to Ireland to live and study, and have been living here in Ireland ever since.

However, only in recent years, since I have begun to engage with the healing of my lineages through the methodology of Ancestral Lineage Healing, has relating with my ancestors become the extraordinary source of healing, love, guidance, and support that it is in my life now. The shift into this direct relating with my ancestors and the lineage healing process is what has made all the difference. In many ways this expansion into ancestral lineage healing has been a natural progression of a lifetime of seeking, offering and studying how we heal in relationship. 

I have deep love and respect for the psychotherapeutic relationship and what is possible within it. I have been blessed to work with some amazing teachers and psychotherapists who helped me to heal and to change my life profoundly for the better. I have also had the privilege to work with thousands of clients in psychotherapy, therapists in training and supervisees. I have witnessed the deep healing and positive change that can happen for people in all of these settings.

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers hypothesised that the three core conditions for healing and growth in a therapeutic relationship are empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard: 

Empathy – The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. 

Congruence – The other experiences that what you say and do feel aligned with their knowledge of you, that you consistently respond in a congruent and authentic way. 

Unconditional positive regard – You believe deeply in the inherent goodness of the other. Whatever they have done or whatever choices they have made, were truly the best choice they were able to make with what they had available at the time. 

Rogers hypothesised that if the client experienced these conditions from the therapist, it was likely that a therapeutic relationship would develop and therapeutic change could then happen. This hypothesis provides us with a lot of insight into what conditions are necessary in order for relational healing to occur in therapy as well as in other areas of relating.

Intertwined with coming into healthy relationship with anyone else is coming into a healthier relationship with ourselves. Coming into a more accepting, loving relationship with ourselves can be very difficult if we have not had a sustained experience of being loved in our family of origin, in our other connections in life, in our communities or in our culture. It is very hard to internalize and deeply believe in our own inherent value when it has not been part of our lived experience in connection with others. As a result, we may not know what it feels like to be loved just as we are, or what impact that can have. Our early wounding, or the deficit of loving relational experiences, often leaves us with a reduced capacity to orient to loving connection and to receive the love of others.

It can be a big ask to reach through the layers of understandable pain people have experienced and the defenses they have constructed to survive that pain. Even when Rogers’ three conditions – empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard – are present, the question remains whether they can be experienced and received by the client, so that deep healing can happen. As the extraordinarily wise Bell Hooks once said, “Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.”

There can be a pressure and expectation in the therapeutic relationship for the client to feel accepted, understood, and honoured, and for there to be significant progress and healing movement toward wholeness and vitality. While positive progress often happens, it is also true that people work hard with good therapists for extended periods of time and certain layers of pain, trauma or longing remain unresolved, in spite of everyone’s best efforts. These unmet hopes and expectations can result in a sense of disappointment and hopelessness on the part of the client when “it doesn’t work.” In response to the client’s disappointment, the therapist, in turn, may feel overwhelmed and drained.

Part of what compounds the suffering people experience in these times is the pervasive pain of separation – separation from one another, from the vast web of thriving life all around us, and from our wise and well ancestors, to name a few. This separation, individually and collectively, leaves us in relational deficit and can manifest as feelings of anxiety, unhappiness, exhaustion, and mental health struggles.

Many of us did not grow up with the experience of tapping into the broader web of relational support available in a more animist framework. In an animist orientation, our relating is not exclusive to other humans. We learn to value and relate with the other–than–human world and experience our place within that larger web. The broader sense of relational connection with the stones, the waters, our beloved ancestors, and beyond, is often not part of the world view or cosmology those of us in the industrialised world were raised with. As a result, we have no experience of relating with the other–than–humans as a reciprocal and nourishing way of being. This is a profound cultural wound and a great loss. It is as if we are part of an enormously rich and multifaceted web of life, but we are only able to see and engage with one strand of the web, the living embodied human one. When that one strand cannot meet all of our needs, we struggle. When that one strand cannot provide the deep sense of belonging we long for, or accurately reflect the breadth and expanse of us and our lived experience, we suffer greatly.

What if some part of the pain people struggle to resolve in therapy is not actually resolvable in therapy because it has an intergenerational ancestral component? What if these intergenerational troubles require more than just the relational field available between the client and therapist in order to be addressed?

Since I began doing this ancestral lineage healing work myself, and subsequently facilitating others to come into more direct connection with their ancestors, I have been struck time and again by how well positioned and equipped our wise, well and loving ancestors are to offer effortlessly the core conditions of which Rogers spoke. Our wise and well ancestors operate from a vibrant collective consciousness. They are simply waiting for us to turn toward them so they can relate with us in a deeply healing and nourishing way. Quite simply, they love us. From that place of exceptional deep love, empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard flow in abundance.

Once I directly engaged with my ancestors with the ritual safety and support that this model of ancestral lineage healing helps to create, there were exponential changes to my personal sense of belonging and my ability to receive support. Over time I began to realise that it just wasn’t all up to me to heal or to fix. I also began to experience more space, hope and movement around some of the core wounds and challenges I had been working with for decades in my own life.

In hindsight I understand that the pressure of personal responsibility as I experienced it – to heal my woundedness, to get clear, to know my purpose and to live that purpose – had been exhausting me. I had been working very hard to show up and to heal my wounded parts, while also doing my best to live with integrity. I did years of therapy and training. I had a spiritual practice. I trained in different modalities, explored many healing paths and spent thousands of dollars, euros and pounds on my healing. While I am grateful for all those efforts, and I acknowledge the privilege that allowed me access to all that help, I also feel a sense of grief and deep compassion for the me who felt alone and under so much pressure to arrive at some elusive destination of healed fulfilment. I felt an unspoken but pervasive pressure to get healed or fixed enough.

I am aware that much of this pressure and isolation is not only a reflection of my personal life experiences, but is also attributable to growing up in and living inside a culture dominated by systems such as capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and racism. These dehumanising systems distort our perspectives and have a lot of negative impact on how we relate to ourselves and to one another. In my ongoing and deepening relationship with my wise and well ancestors I continue to broaden my perspective enough to see a bigger picture. This broader perspective helps liberate me and others from the underlying assumption that there was ever something wrong with me, or any of us, that needed to be fixed in some type of individual healing work.

Psychotherapy that does not include the larger perspective of cultural, systemic and intergenerational wounds, is in danger of blaming the individual for feelings and struggles that are absolutely appropriate and normal given the world in which we live. The suggestion that therapy or therapists can, or even should be able to heal and resolve systemic, intergenerational and cultural woundings is part of the problem.

When we open up to relate directly with our wise and well ancestors, we tap into these core conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard within our own lineages, from our own people. We also ask that these core conditions for healing be available not only to us, our lives and the lives of other family members, but to any of our ancestors who have not yet received the support, healing and help they need to join the realm of the wise and well ones. In this way we move toward an extension of these conditions exponentially, to any of those who have come before us who still need some help, thus creating together a deep sense of connection and healing. We ask, as the living face of these lineages, that the deficits in relational support and belonging be addressed and rectified, and any residual wounds be healed. We fully engage our wise and well ancestors and their capacity to bring healing to any of those in our lineages who may not yet have received what they need to be fully well. 

This is part of how relating with our wise and well ancestors begins to shift our individual experience and perspective from being alone or isolated to remembering how we are part of something much bigger. When we remember who we descend from, have a conscious relationship with them and heal together, we experience our place in the larger arc of time. We remember in our bones how deeply we belong to this earth and the larger web of life.

A helpful antidote offered by ancestral lineage healing is the reminder that the healing is not all ours to do. We are invited to become more right–sized about our place in that larger web. This important premise also serves as an antidote for our wound of separation, our over emphasis on individuality, and our overly human-centric paradigm. Our cultural fixation on individual reality can be fundamentally adjusted for the better when we are in the presence of our wise and well ancestors and their wisdom, expressed as a more collective consciousness.

I had done decades of personal work and trainings by the time I came to Ancestral Lineage Healing. However, nothing prepared me for the next level of love, cherishing acceptance and belonging my ancestors offered me. They had been there all along, waiting for me to reach out to them. Meeting this depth of relational love and the embedded relational conditions Rogers talked about – empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard – from my wise and well ancestors, opened my heart in ways I had not previously experienced.

I was only able to access this wealth of loving support when I engaged with my ancestors directly in this conscious, relational, reparative way. I had done genealogical research, rituals to thank my ancestors, made offerings to them, danced in ceremony with them and honoured them many times in different ways down through the years. I believe these were all good things to do. But this new level of loving ancestral support and help was unlocked only when I went to each of my lineages in turn, asked to connect directly with the well ones there, requested their help in bringing healing on the lineage where needed, and listened to what they wanted me to offer and to know about them and all of us together.

One of the great gifts of engaging with my ancestors back into deep time is how this engagement has changed and broadened my overall worldview and in particular my perspective on therapy. My ancestors have helped shift my orientation to a deep remembering of who I am within the context of who my people are and where we come from. That has been one of the most liberating experiences of my life. The impact of this newfound sense of love and belonging that has come from establishing direct conscious connection with my wise and well ancestors has emboldened me, and given me a broader lens that extends way beyond the recent past and my own lived experience.

It is my experience and belief at this point, that to pursue a path of healing without engaging directly with our ancestral lineages is akin to flying with one wing, in terms of the pressure and expectation we place on ourselves. Our wise and well ancestors have so much help and guidance to offer us in service to our individual, ancestral, collective and cultural healing and growth. They are perfectly placed to offer us those core conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard that Carl Rogers talks about because our well ancestors exist in that state of loving presence and are only waiting to receive us. They also help us to broaden and expand our perspective on ourselves and our lives, our pain and what is possible.

Because of this shift in perspective and paradigm, I am committed to do what I can to support others to connect with their people in service of their own liberation and empowerment, as well as the liberation and empowerment of all. I have witnessed time and again how it is no longer possible to feel separate from the larger web of life once we begin to experience our own place in that bigger field of belonging in relationship with our people.

One of the biggest differences for me now is that I have a very palpable sense of co-creating. I have a newfound trust that I am being guided, that I don’t have to figure it all out on my own, that the eyes of my ancestors see a bigger picture than what is available to me. They are not only on my side and rooting for me, but they actively help and guide me in my every day life. My life is different now because of my ongoing deepening and nourishing relationship with my ancestors who repeatedly remind me that I am not alone, that I can lean in to them and their power for help.

A client of mine said recently, “How did I live before, without my ancestors helping me?” I have to say I agree. When I look back at my life before I had the relationship with my ancestors that I have now, I feel compassion for the sense of aloneness and isolation I experienced. I now see that aloneness as a cultural wound that came as a result of living in a cosmology bereft of connection with the other–than–human world, and in particular the lack of conscious connection with my ancestors.

Connecting with the ancestors and our people down through the generations enables us to feel held, and enables our pain to be held and processed in a much bigger field of love and resource. Having the support of the ancestors helps us to come into what I call a more right–sized relationship with our own pain, suffering and wounding. Their potent presence and the feeling of being part of something so much bigger than just me and this moment in time, bigger than this lifetime I am experiencing, helps shift our perspective and supports a “don’t sweat the small stuff” orientation and capacity. Without dismissing anyone’s pain, abuse or trauma in any way, I do witness again and again how the ancestors help ensure we are not getting defined by those parts of our own story.

I find the ancestors extremely helpful in reframing our lives in a much bigger context. We are each of us part of something so much bigger than anything that has happened to us. I recently tried to explain my experience around this to a friend and found myself saying, “It’s like I can feel that simultaneously I am hugely powerful, and everything I do and every choice I make matters, and at the same time I am utterly insignificant. One doesn’t cancel out the other; it’s just taking my rightful place in the web of life.” This sense of being part of something so much bigger helps me to keep moving, to not get too caught up in my thoughts or perceptions, to find the balance between doing my best to live a life of radical responsibility and integrity, and to simultaneously not take myself too seriously.

One consequence of accessing this perspective is that I experience less despair and more hope. My earlier unconscious belief – that it’s all up to me, I have to show up, be good enough, be healed enough, be clear enough, be committed and disciplined enough to do what I came here to do – left me feeling weighed down and not good enough, or like I could always be doing so much better. While there may be some truth in those things, that attitude as a primary driver in my life was quite unsustainable. I had an underlying feeling of despair that I could ever be or do enough. I also felt quite hopeless at times about the levels of suffering, destruction, and injustices in our world. 

Relating with the ancestors is a source of real hope in my life today. I have personally experienced and witnessed in others similar radical shifts in perspective. I have also shifted in my understanding of, and belief in what is possible. I believe that with the guidance and help of our wise and well ancestors, very radical systemic change, liberation and healing is possible.

Put quite simply, people who engage in this work often report feeling much less alone in the world. In my own consistent experience, if I ask for help from my ancestors I will be helped. Similarly, if I ask them for guidance, some form of guidance will come. As this happens time and again, I and many of my clients develop and deepen our trust in the relationship we have with our wise and well loving ancestors and the help they have to offer us. This is potent healing.

My clients have these words to share about their experiences of engaging with their wise and well ancestors:

“Doing ancestral healing work has supported me to feel held by an enduring web of support. During a time when I’m grieving how far I am from my ancestral lands and culture, and feeling increasingly disconnected from family, I find hope in the felt sense that I can directly connect with and learn from those who came before me. In a day-to-day sense, it’s been a powerful source of support as I continue to differentiate. I trust that there’s a greater power holding me, my family members, and all of our processes. Feeling that the ancestors are invested in our generational healing supports me to embrace my path – and I find solace in knowing I’m never alone as I walk it.” ~ B.

“Meeting and connecting with my ancestors brought me into a deeper connection with myself, my personality traits, my resources and my internal wisdom. It showed me the guiding light that I had known was there but helped me develop a relationship with those guiding wise ones close by. They weren’t as I imagined but greater, far more eccentric and idiosyncratic. I respond to them with reverence and a familiarity that allows me to feel seen and witnessed; they are a daily blessing that brings wise counsel in the storms that life can bring. They are the voices in my head that steady me, still me, alchemising calm from the chaos.” ~ S.

Turning up to engage with our ancestral lineages can be so much more than just a way to get more help in our day to day lives. Although I am grateful for that help, what gives me even more sustenance is the sense of what is possible together when we start to see the world differently, including the wisdom of our ancestors in our world view. I have a palpable sense of excitement around what could be possible when we collectively feel deeply less alone. What might happen if we were all able to trust there is guidance we can lean into and trust, available and just waiting to be engaged? This sense of us engaging together is what motivates me to deepen in connection with my own people, and to support others to deepen in connection with theirs. In Irish “Le Chéile” means all together and I call my work Le Chéile Healing, because I truly believe in the power of us all healing together and in the potent role our ancestors have to play in that healing.

It’s fair to say that our beloved human race is on a worrying trajectory. For us to broaden our perspective, to come into a more life affirming relationship not just with one another, but with all the other-than-humans inhabiting this planet, and the beloved planet herself, something needs to change. I used to often feel hopeless about where we were headed. Now, however, largely as a result of relating directly with my ancestors, and supporting others in connecting with their ancestors, a whole new world of much bigger possibilities and perspectives has opened up. Certainly not everything is easy and simply fixed, but deeply relating with my ancestors has been empowering, connective and such a relief! Where before I felt despair, instead I now feel that real positive change is possible.

I believe Carl Rogers was right that empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard are relational conditions conducive to great healing. I also recognise that we living humans need to tap into more than what we can offer one another for the healing task at hand. My wish and my prayer is that we can engage the healing potential and the potent love of our ancestors to help us to open our hearts wide to heal and find life giving ways forward, together.

May you and your ancestors find the connection that is most healing, liberating and life serving to you and yours and all of life.