How Ritual Heals Trauma Stored in the Body and Passed Through Generations

Trauma in the Body, Ritual in the Bones

If you’ve ever felt a heaviness that doesn’t quite belong to you, this post might resonate.

When we work with ancestors, we are working with life expressed through generations, a lineage of time.

When we work with trauma, we are working with a mind-body that has gotten trapped in time. That stuckness gets passed down.

Trauma researcher Dr. Rob Baum writes: Trauma is an unwelcome guest lurking in the house, always present, a shadow in an open doorway, darkness at the corner of vision. There is a body that cannot be buried, because it is very much alive, but with an unendurable break, a tear in the fabric of time.

There has been much research on transgenerational trauma in the descendants of Holocaust survivors and other instances of profound cultural harm.

Through epigenetics, we know that the unresolved traumatic experiences of our forebearers impact our bodies and our DNA.

But not much has been studied about how to treat it.

What do you do with a heavy ancestral inheritance?

How do you treat sexual violence that your long-dead grandmother experienced that lives in you, negatively shaping your sexuality and relationships?

Much like the question of this recent post, “Are the ancestors real?” my work addresses a similar question:

Is this my ancestor’s trauma I experience in my body?Impacts of Ancestral Trauma on Sexuality

In terms of sexuality, I’d like to share a bit of the literature. Bear with me!

Researchers Devroede and Schutzenberger wrote about the somatic impact of unprocessed sexual abuse. They write:

The body remembers sexual abuse and keeping family secrets causes illness.

Unwittingly and unwillingly, our parents and grandparents and ancestors often leave us the legacy of their unfinished mourning, their “undigested” traumas, and the hidden shame of their secret family history.

Sexual abuse and other traumas experienced in the family’s past create insurmountable or unresolved emotional wounds that leave their mark on future generations.

If you’ve ever felt shame that doesn’t match your story, or fear around touch or intimacy that doesn’t quite make sense, it may be an ancestral inheritance.

The unresolved sexual trauma of our ancestors is a weight we may carry, in addition to our own wounds.

Sexual trauma can limit access to choice and free expression of sexuality.

When I was hearing stories in my office, listening to people name the impact of sexual trauma they experience that is not theirs—or is adjacent to theirs—I got curious. How could I help them heal?

This became my doctoral research.

I interviewed dozens of people across demographics.

I asked them how they experience transgenerational sexual trauma in their bodies and lives, and what had helped them heal.

They were quite articulate.

They named impacts like fear of sex, intimate partner violence, getting kicked out of the family home because of sexuality or pregnancy, shame, repression, and violation.

One person, a child of Holocaust survivors, said: “I do think that there is a repetition compulsion, and that kind of trauma is passed from generation to generation.”

According to therapist and sexologist Barnaby Barratt, repression of sexual expression leads to repression of our élan vital, less access to the healing resource of pleasure, and a restricted sense of who we are as erotic beings.

Barratt wrote:
The psychology of repression manifests as the inhibition of sensual and sexual expression... we see all around us people who have never danced naked in the sunlight, people who allow themselves to become severely deprived of touch, people who have never explored their genitals, people who have never laughed or cried with erotic exhilaration... repressed and inhibited, we soldier on, like the walking wounded.

Beyond Shame, Toward Gifts

Shame, repression, violence… but what’s the cure?

Something everyone I spoke with had was a relationship with their ancestors.

I wasn’t just researching the negative impacts of ancestral sexuality, but the positive blessings as well.

Many people named erotic gifts they had received through their lineages: queerness, pleasure-seeking, wildness, having healthy intimacy modeled for them, and access to embodiment.

Most of the people I spoke with were also carrying their own sexual trauma or complexities, and the ancestral piece was just one layer.

They described a range of practices: altars, singing to their ancestors, making different kinds of offerings, and invoking queer ancestors before hook-ups.

What I learned is that to heal transgenerational sexual trauma, you need transpersonal tools.

Individual tools like talk therapy aren’t enough.

Even somatics, as helpful as it is on the individual level, doesn’t fully address the symptoms we inherit from our ancestors.

Methodical, boundaried, ethical ritual—the kind that is well-held and effective—is the tool that has been used around the world, in traditional cultures, for as far back as I could find.

Photo by Greg Rakozy Ritual Heals

There are many instances across the literature, from many different cultures utilizing indigenous or shamanic healing practices, of the use of ritual for healing.

Scientific research supports that the use of transpersonal tools like ritual to address trauma is effective.

From child soldiers in Mozambique and Angola, to victims of war rape in Sierra Leone, to Australian Aboriginal people seeking to heal from forced attendance at boarding school and loss of culture, to supporting Native Americans with substance abuse issues, ritual is used to address trauma and transgenerational trauma.

Myron Eshowsky, a shamanic counselor and tender of international transgenerational trauma, wrote:

Healing transgenerational trauma requires the profound ability of symbolic ritual acts. They help to transform space, to communicate that which is invisible to our normal senses, to transform worldviews, identities and relationships.

Ritual acts can penetrate what often appears intransient and impenetrable in healing transgenerational trauma.

Ritual can overwhelm the defenses and convey complex messages, bringing a new consciousness, without saying a single word.

This is why I work with ritual.

It gives us a way to heal what words alone cannot.

It helps us stitch time back together, to integrate what happened in the past with our current lives, bodies, and relationships.

Ritual gives us a way to reclaim erotic freedom in the present.

Through ritual, we can lay down what was never ours, and inhabit fully our own sexual freedom.

Over the last ten years, I’ve noticed that many people are increasingly interested in relating with their ancestors.

I hope that in some small way, my work has contributed to that interest.

Bespoken Bones podcast was a labor of love. My book Tending the Bones, also written in deep service to personal and planetary healing.

My ritual container, also called Tending the Bones, has helped people reckon in their lineages and their bodies with sexual harm and violation, and opened doors to more erotic freedom and healthy relating.

To my knowledge, transgenerational sexual trauma has not been studied or treated this deeply in any other context.

If what I’ve written here lands for you, I’m sorry.

Perhaps it is time to address this layer of healing.

Lay down what was never yours.

Through ritual, we can stitch time back together and reclaim the freedom our ancestors could not.

Enter Tending the Bones, a container for healing and liberation.
✨ Save $200 with early bird pricing until Aug. 30.

Learn More about Tending the Bones