Can You Inherit the Fate of Your Ancestors?
Your family members, alive or departed, immediate and extended—as well as their emotions and experiences—create your family energy field. Repetition of events and their attendant emotions often serve as messengers from our family energy fields, calling us to heal the pain we carry.

Carol came to me to help her with the emotional challenges she was facing. In our sessions, she would talk about whatever she was grappling with and often shared news about her daughter, Marianna.

Now, as she sat across from me, she said, “Marianna has just been fired.”

I was stunned. Carol’s soft brown eyes welled up with tears, and I handed her a tissue from the box on my desk.

From what I could gather, Marianna was a bold, outside-of-the-box thinker. However, her newest project at the nonprofit where she worked was controversial, Carol said, and some of Marianna’s bosses and coworkers pushed back against her initiatives. “But she didn’t give up, and her project is going forward!” Carol had said the last time I saw her. I could sense her pride in her daughter and the determination they both carried.

Marianna and Carol were both creative women who weren’t afraid to put their ideas out there into the world and take risks professionally. Carol had headed up a department at a local hospital until her pressuring of physicians and administrators to introduce what she felt were much-needed changes led to her having been passed over for promotion. Carol had switched jobs, taking a cut in salary, because she recognized that salvaging her position would be a massive uphill battle. The stress of it all had caused her to feel very anxious and even have some panic attacks. That, in turn, had started her on a journey of healing that led her to find me.

“Do you think Marianna’s situation is similar to what happened to you at the hospital? Do you feel that she pushed too hard for change, and it put people out of their comfort zone?”

Carol thought for a moment. “I didn’t make that connection, but you’re right. She learned that from me, I guess.”

I had heard enough stories about her extended family to have spotted a pattern. Would she see it too?

“Where did you learn it from, Carol? Who in your family— your parents or grandparents—tried to change existing norms?”

Carol paused. “My father’s business partners pushed him out of the business he started because they didn’t want to take it in the direction he wanted to go. He was too forward-thinking for them. I guess that part of his personality got handed down to me and Marianna,” she said finally.

As our conversation continued, I listened to Carol explain how her father’s plans for change had been thwarted, and how his bitterness at his perceived failure colored her childhood and early years. He had carried this sadness with him to the very end until he died at a relatively young age of heart failure, or—as Carol described it—of a broken heart. Even so, his daughter and granddaughter were repeating his pattern of pressuring people too much to try to get them to change, which was causing a family pattern of suffering.

“I was just thinking about my dad the other day,” Carol said. “It was his birthday, and Marianna happened to call. I could hear in her voice that she was upset. Then she broke the bad news.”

It was his birthday. Was it a coincidence that Marianna lost her job for being too forceful about change on the birthday of her grandfather who had experienced the very same loss?

The Universe tries to get your attention in multiple ways, including through coincidences and patterns. In 1960, psychologist Carl Jung wrote in Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, that synchronicity is a “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” In other words, while they might seem to be the result of random chance, on closer examination, they have greater meaning. I’ve found that “mere coincidences” are worth paying attention to because they are one way the Universe can get its point across to us. Patterns of events repeating in your life or the lives of your family members are often subtle and might alert you to how your family energy fields are influencing you. These fields exist within the energy matrix human beings share with each other, the planet, and all life on earth, and they carry the memories and emotions of family members past and present.

Ancestral energy patterns come in many forms and play out in different ways. For instance, behavioral patterns may be easily visible. As much as you don’t like to admit this, your behaviors do mirror those of your parents and generations prior. Some of us are frugal, others get angry quickly, a few are overly suspicious. You may also have patterns of being generous or feeling passionate about issues. Sometimes, themes remain the same in relationship after relationship. And in families, the themes reappear several generations in a row. A “family curse” is real: it’s a repetition of an old energetic pattern passed down the family tree. Maybe you have known someone who vowed they would never again get involved with a certain type of romantic partner. Then you saw that, despite their falling for someone who on the surface was very different from their previous partner, the same old dynamic was at play in this person’s new relationship. Maybe you have experienced this yourself. You might say you will never again become involved with someone who is hypercritical only to end up with a partner who doesn’t openly criticize you but shows you through their actions that they disapprove of you. Or maybe you’re in a relationship with someone who respects and supports you but complains that you’re very critical of them. It’s as if you’re in the same relationship you were before, only with the roles reversed.

There is another kind of pattern that I call “experiential patterns.” These are instances where you see the same kinds of experiences recurring across generations. A grandfather was betrayed by his business partner, and the same type of thing happens again to his son and to his grandson. Or someone faces constant setbacks in their professional pursuits, and this pattern repeats itself. While it’s possible to call this a “family curse,” if there are positive patterns, you call them “family blessings.” Or more broadly, you may even call this “family karma.”

Many of us accept these patterns as karmic—something you have to accept and live with. But what if there is more to this than meets the eye? What if there is a message behind these patterns? I call this what is it that is wanting to be seen. What if you need to unlock something to release yourself and also those who may come after you from repeating these patterns?

As decades of research on the psychology of emotion has shown, each of us has a response system that is activated by a range of triggers. What if your emotional response system is a window into understanding some of these patterns you are trapped in? And what if, by developing an understanding of this system and these underlying family patterns, you can then start to unlock the cycles of behavior and experiences you may have found yourself in? Does your frugality come from honoring the earth or due to a fear of lack? Does your worry about not having enough manifest in you holding yourself back and not taking some risk, thus putting a ceiling on your professional life? Or does this emotion and behavior make its presence felt by having too many possessions that clutter your home (hoarding), or by your demanding financial control of your partner? Do you feel that you are not enough? Who else in your family has felt this way? What is the origin of this story you tell yourself? I encourage you to begin to journal some of the answers to these questions, but you will also explore them more deeply in later chapters.