By Kelly Ann Street, MS, LPC, author of Embrace The Dark: Heal & Find Balance in Life’s Deepest Shadows,
Ancestral burdens are the invisible inheritance. Through our genetics, we inherit eye color, temperament, and body type, but we also inherit emotional responses, survival strategies, and unspoken rules about how life works and how we should behave in it. These invisible inheritances are passed down through generations, shaping grandchildren and great-grandchildren in ways both known and unknown.
We understand some of this through epigenetics; the study of how behaviors and environment (such as diet, stress, and exposure to toxins) can create changes that affect how our genes work, without altering the underlying DNA sequence. These chemical modifications act as switches, turning genes on or off and impacting health and development across generations. [Fridman, A., et al. (2025). “From trauma to resilience: psychological and epigenetic adaptations in the third generation of Holocaust survivors.” Scientific Reports, 15. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-12085-5]
Epigenetics is just one reason we see mental health diagnoses running through families. Another thread connects back to attachment theory: how our ancestors did or did not bond with their children, generation over generation. I’ve heard stories from clients about great-grandparents who were sent to live with distant relatives during the Great Depression because their parents simply couldn’t feed every mouth. One broken bond became a ripple. A child who never learned connection couldn’t teach it to their own children, who then passed that same wound forward.
As part of my research for my book, Embrace The Dark: Heal & Find Balance in Life’s Deepest Shadows, which focuses on navigating a dark night of the soul, I went through a box of family history. I was trying to trace where some of my earliest messages about staying small and flying under the radar might have come from. Part of the answer arrived in an old newspaper clipping; an article about my great-grandmother’s lifelong sewing career. The writer noted that she’d been very resistant to having her photo taken. My great-grandmother’s explanation: “I don’t want anyone who reads this to think that I think I’m special, or have a big head about this.”
Her message, that being seen is dangerous, that pride is something to be ashamed of, became an ancestral burden passed quietly through my family line. Ancestral burdens are the messages, traumas, or memories that are either transmitted or hidden from one generation to the next. They can be secrets or open wounds, but the common thread is that they carry a warning, a lesson, or a rule to live by.
In my husband’s family, the burden was a secret. There was a legacy of men who had taken their own lives; deaths that had been covered up or recorded as accidental. He only discovered this through genealogy research, which led him to military death certificates and an unmarked grave. The silence itself had become part of the inheritance.
In my therapy and coaching practice, part of the work I do with people is to uncover the history and mystery surrounding the deeply ingrained messages that get passed down through families, often through small sayings, family lore, or the telling silence around one particular relative.
How to Recognize What You’re Carrying
Each of us carries patterns that may not have originated with us. They might show up as fears that feel ancient; fears you have no origin point for in your own life. They might appear as emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to what just happened, or as deep-seated beliefs about money, worthiness, love, or safety that you absorbed before you had words for them. Some came through direct observation of parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Others arrived in more invisible ways.
Here are some patterns worth investigating in your lineage:
- Reactions that feel bigger than the current moment: Something akin to a trauma response, like dissolving into tears in a grocery store when you witness a child having a tantrum.
- Rules you live by that you never consciously chose: Buying extra food until your shelves and freezers overflow, even when you know you don’t need it.
- Emotions that feel inherited rather than personal: Anger that surfaces from nowhere, or that you can trace directly to the way a parent or grandparent responded to the world.
- Family “sayings” that shaped how you see yourself: “Don’t get a big head about it” was a refrain in my own family, a quiet warning against the dangers of confidence or pride.
The Shadow Side of Family Loyalty
Because we don’t always carry awareness of these burdens, we rarely think to question the thoughts and behaviors that were handed to us. But sometimes, carrying forward the pain of a lineage isn’t unconscious negligence; it’s an act of love. We hold what our parents couldn’t process. We repeat what was never resolved. Bearing the wound can feel like loyalty.
Some children worry that questioning their parent’s way of life is a form of betrayal. We also do this collectively when we refuse to “speak ill of the dead.” Once someone leaves this earth, we often pretend only the good remains, reminiscing on their best qualities while quietly burying the pain they may have caused, even if unintentionally. When we do this, we give that person a half-life. We deny ourselves, and others, the full truth of who they were. And when we bury that pain, it doesn’t heal. It festers, hidden beneath shame and silence, waiting for the next generation to carry it forward.
3 Practices for Beginning to Untangle the Inheritance
If you’re ready to start working with your own ancestral burdens, here are three practices to try:
1. The Family Saying Inventory
Write down the messages you absorbed about emotion, worthiness, survival, and safety. Then ask: whose voice is this, really? When did you first hear it? What was it protecting?
2. The Lineage Letter
Write a letter to an ancestor, or to the wound itself. Acknowledge what was carried. Name what you’ve been holding on their behalf. Then, in your own words, describe what you’re choosing to set down.
3. Somatic Noticing
Where in your body do you feel the weight of what was passed to you? Tightness in the chest when someone compliments you? A clenched jaw when you think about money? Connect the inherited wound to the physical sensation. The body often knows what the mind hasn’t yet named.
You Don’t Have to Carry It Forward
There is no prize for holding the burdens of generations past. We don’t become stronger by keeping ourselves small, or by teaching our children to grip tightly to what little they have out of fear there won’t be enough. Naming the burden is the first act of liberation not only for yourself, but in some traditions of thought, for those who came seven generations before you and seven generations after.
What comes next is examining how the burden has played out in your life. From there, you can begin to unwind the threads that bind you to it, slowly, or all at once. You can honor your lineage without being bound by its unfinished business.
Becoming the One Who Breaks the Pattern
This work is hard and it is sacred. Choosing to look honestly at the patterns and beliefs that were handed down to you is one of the most courageous things a person can do. You can be the one who stops repeating the damaging saying, who chooses a different response to conflict, who steps into abundance where scarcity used to live.
One way forward is to find a therapist, shaman, or coach who specializes in releasing ancestral or lineage burdens. Another is to research your ancestry. Go through old photos, newspaper clippings, and census records. Ask your oldest living relatives what they remember about their own childhoods, their parents, their grandparents. The pieces of your story are out there. When you begin to put the puzzle together, you stop reacting from the wound and start healing from it; growing into who you were always meant to become.
About the Author
Kelly Ann Street, MS, LPC is a licensed professional counselor, author, and host of the Embrace The Dark & The Light podcast. Her debut book, Embrace the Dark: Heal & Find Balance in Life’s Deepest Shadows (Llewellyn Publications, 2026), guides readers through the transformative work of turning toward, rather than away from, life’s most difficult experiences. Drawing on her background in somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems, and Jungian depth psychology, as well as her own lived experience, Kelly helps people integrate their shadow selves and heal the wounds they’ve been quietly carrying. She received her Masters in Clinical Psychology from Capella University and is certified in IFS Level 1 through the IFS Institute, as well as the Psychedelic Somatic Institute training.
Learn more and explore her work at EmbraceTheDarkAndTheLight.com. Follow Kelly on Instagram @embracethedarkandthelight, on Facebook at /embracethedarkandthelight, and @kellyannstreet on YouTube.