Communing With the Ancestors: Using Ritual to Find Your Place

No family is perfect. There will be times in our life where we come into conflict with our families, whether that’s a personal disagreement between family members or a difference in philosophy from one generation to the next.  Family conflict is one of the most stressful conflicts we can experience because there is no complete severing of the family tie; no matter how bad things get, you are still brothers, sisters, parents, or children to one another, even if you’re no longer talking.

It is that unspoken connection to our families that we’ll be drawing upon today. You come from a long line of individuals (some kind, and others not) who built and grew the culture of your family into what it is today. Connecting with your ancestors is a safe way to access that sense of belonging and family regardless of what’s going on with your family of origin. Although we’ve never had the opportunity to meet them, our ancestors are responsible for who we are and they are more like us than we think.

How To Feel Connected To Your Ancestors

If connecting with the ancestors is so great, why doesn’t everybody do it? Well, in my opinion, everybody does, but it might not look how you expect it to look. When we talk about connecting to our ancestors, I think what we picture looks less like reality and more like The Lion King. 

We don’t need to see our father’s smiling face in a cloud formation to feel closer to the people who came before. There are tangible honest connections between us and the past. There are rituals, idiosyncrasies, and skin conditions that have lived in our families beyond the realm of living memory. When we knowingly cherish these connections, we are connecting with our ancestors in an authentic way.

• Go To The Places They Lived. Organisms evolve to suit the circumstances of their environment, and the family unit is no exception. There is power in seeing the places that shaped our families, and there is healing in understanding how time and place impacted the history of your family.

• Think About Your Shared Experiences. Your ancestors were not just your grandparents and great grandparents. You are the culmination of a vast network of experience, trial, and error. Our ancestors were just as anxious, depressed, traumatized, queer, and autistic as we are, even if they couldn’t show it. No matter how obscure the activity, if you follow your family line up far enough, you will find an ancestor who shares it with you.

• Notice What Has Continued In You. Everybody wants to talk about how a baby has their father’s eyes or their mother’s smile, but what’s sometimes harder to notice is how we carry our ancestors with us through our behavior. Traditions like the lullabies we sing to our children, the recipes we cook, or the hospitalities we offer to guests and strangers connect us to the past and keep us in close touch with our ancestors.

Connecting With Your Ancestors As Trauma Therapy

Connecting with those who came before you can be a profound form of trauma healing. It allows you to see your struggles within a larger story, reduce self-blame, and reclaim the strengths that have always been part of your family line. Ancestral work can help you rewrite what gets passed forward, so the generations after you inherit more healing than pain.

• Reparenting To Help You Understand The Family Story. Sometimes, the story you were handed growing up was incomplete or distorted by trauma. Reparenting is the process of giving yourself the emotional nurturing, guidance, and support you may not have received. When we re-parent ourselves, we heal our inner child and change the family story for when we pass it forward.

• Acknowledge Your Family’s Generational Trauma. Generational trauma is the proverbial mud that’s been stuck on the family shoe so long we’ve begun to think it was always that color. When you recognize that some of your pain didn’t start with you, you can stop internalizing it and start releasing it.
• Tell New Family Stories. Healing doesn’t mean erasing the past—it means transforming it. Once you’ve acknowledged what has been carried through generations, you gain the power to choose a different narrative. You can honor the resilience, creativity, and strength in your family line while consciously letting unhealthy patterns end with you. 

How To Change Your Relationship With Your Family

Family relationships come with history—your own lived experiences and the experiences of those who came before you. Many of the patterns we struggle with today didn’t start in our generation; they were inherited, modeled, or silently absorbed. Changing your relationship with your family isn’t about blame—it’s about awareness, healing, and consciously choosing a new way forward. When you understand the generational stories and wounds that shaped your family, you gain the power to transform them rather than repeat them.

• Set Healthy Boundaries. Boundaries are there to keep you emotionally safe and comfortable. Although it can be hard to uphold these boundaries with our families, when you protect your emotional well-being, you interrupt the cycles of self-abandonment, people-pleasing, and conflict that have been passed down in the family tradition. By holding your limits with clarity and consistency, you send a quiet message through the family line: the pattern stops here.

• Learn When And What To Forgive. Forgiveness becomes more nuanced when viewed through the lens of generational trauma. Many family members were shaped by their own wounds, cultural expectations, or unhealed pain. While this context can cultivate empathy, it does not excuse harm or mean reconciliation is always safe. Instead, forgiveness can be a private release—an act of freeing your heart from resentment so you don’t carry the weight forward. You can honor the suffering in your lineage, acknowledge the harm, and still choose not to repeat it.
• Be Authentic. We all have personas that we put on for our families, but sometimes that mask can start to feel like a cage.  After all, the roles we play for our families are often rooted in generational survival, not authenticity. Perhaps a grandparent needed to be stoic to get through hardship, and that silence became the family norm. Authenticity is a rebellion against inherited emotional suppression. Being authentic with your family might not move the needle for your stoic grandfather, but it could make all the difference in the world to your siblings, nieces, nephews, and children. Give your descendents the inspiration to be wholly themselves, and one day they will look back at you with empathy, gratitude, and pride for all that you passed down.

Healing generational wounds takes courage, compassion, and the right support. Alli Cravener, counseling intern, offers a space to help you reconnect with your inner child and create healthier patterns for yourself and future generations. When you learn to release old patterns and be more authentic, you open the door to healing, self-compassion, and more genuine relationships with the people you love.

Click here to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.

Sunny Ebsary is an educator, multi-modal artist, and writer specializing in the intersection of myth and mental health. Sunny’s writing walks the line between poetic and logical, giving readers a chance to interface with the mind and imagination. Sunny’s been putting pen to paper since he was a child, writing everything from albums, novels, and plays, to essays, interactive games, and of course, many articles! While studying both psychology and writing, he realized his real passion in life was helping others unlock their creative spark. Whether he’s leading a D&D game, directing a production, or diving deep into the brain, you can be sure Sunny will be ushering you toward finding meaning in your life.