Listening to Our Ancestors: A Conversation on Recognizing—and Releasing—Intergenerational Trauma

Ancestral trauma is everywhere: In hit shows, web searches, and everyday conversation. But how do we tell it apart from the everyday stresses of 21-century life? Jo Kent Katz thinks she has a clue.

All tangled up in trauma? You’re not alone.

As recently as a decade ago, I’d never heard the term “ancestral trauma.” I’m pretty sure I first encountered it in what I call “Medicine World”: The network of ayahuasca circles, wilderness retreats, and other groups loosely affiliated around helping people heal their psychic wounds. (Also around getting people super high, but hey: Who am I to judge?)

Since then, ancestral trauma (and trauma more broadly) has come creeping—or roaring?—into the mainstream. The 2015 Netflix series “Bloodline,” starring Sam Shepherd and Sissy Spacek, was one of the first to examine the concept. The following year’s “Stranger Things”—while it didn’t deal specifically with ancestral trauma—did much to popularize the concept of trauma and its aftershocks through the riveting psychokinetic character of Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown.

A casual glance at historic web traffic trends seems to confirm this. Before 2017, there were statistically very few searches for “ancestral trauma.” But starting in early 2018, it began a more or less steady rise; by 2022—when the New York Times published an opinion piece entitled “The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything”—ancestral trauma was here to stay, along with a large and growing number of online resources promising to help us identify it.

Of course, recognizing that ancestral trauma exists is just the start. Even as it anchors into our thoughts and our discourse, there’s precious little guidance on how to work with it. And as someone who suspects it plays a role in my own life, it’s something I want to know more about.

That’s why I ask people with unusual takes on the subject for their opinion. One of them is Jo Kent Katz, an intuitive healer who channels ancestral guidance, stories, and rituals. I first became aware of her work when I read a piece of hers in Moment Magazine, in which she said something to the effect of: One symptom of ancestral trauma is hurrying. And I remember at the time thinking: “That's ridiculous! Everyone hurries!” But I never forgot it.

What follows are excerpts from a recent conversation with her. I’m thrilled to share it with you: In it we touch on ways to identify those ancestral transmissions, to identify their gifts as well as their burdens, and to grasp some of the mysterious ways our ancestors speak to us.

And while parts of the conversation focus on the Jewish experience—Jo’s the catalyst behind Transcending Jewish Trauma, a resource to help people unpack and heal from inherited unconscious beliefs and behaviors—it’s very much my hope that you’ll see the through lines to your own ancestry and lived experience—whatever that may be.

1. What’s the difference between present-day and ancestral trauma?

Seth: I remember a moment when I was nine years old, during the election of 1980. My father's watching the news on TV, and I'm behind him so I can't see his face or his reactions. But as the camera pans across this sea of white faces cheering on Ronald Reagan, I feel a very deep unease. And again, I can't see my father's face so I don't know how he's reacting, but when I shared this during a book talk, someone suggested: “Maybe that's an example of ancestral trauma.”

Jo: Great example, right? It means that you're looking through your nine-year-old eyes, assuming that's all you're looking through. But those lenses are literally multiple frames, right?

Seth: Absolutely. But if these wounds surface in counterintuitive or hidden ways, how do you separate the surface-level experience of: “I don't feel good” or “I feel anxious” from what we would call ancestral trauma?

Jo: I'm just gonna muse about it, but I think there's something about the context. When I can hold my internal experience—or my fluttering in my body—in the context that I'm in this moment and it lines up, there’s congruence there. Then I can imagine: Okay, at least a majority of this is just my response to this given moment.

[But when] I think “This is how in this moment of stress how things should be done,” and I look at my partner and she's doing something completely different than I am—and it seems pretty effective—that kind of juxtaposition is a cue. [Maybe] in the original context, [that strategy] worked. And so we're going to pass it down as a tool for survival. Now I can see actually this is not totally effective, that the ancestral survival mechanism is actually getting in my way.

Seth: So if recognizing that our experiences and those ancestral signals are playing a role in the present day, long after they've served us, what's a way to begin to work with these voices?

Jo: First of all, if our belief or behavior is out of context, we can start to identify that at some point it was an attuned response, and now it's actually working against me. It feels so different to imagine that the response that I've inherited comes from someone who was trying to survive on my behalf. It just softens the frustration or the agitation I can have about: “God, why do I keep doing it this way?” What if I actually knew that this way that I'm behaving right now allowed my people to be here? So what kind of tenderness or care or even gratitude can I bring to it?

As soon as I shift gears and hold it that way, something starts to soften. Something starts to actually give me a little bit more space between the inherited pattern and me in my body right now. And just that little bit of space starts to increase, every time you pay attention to it, every time you give it a little bit more care. And I think that as the space increases, there's a little bit more time where we have more agency.

Seth: There’s a phrase that my wife—who’s a coach and writes on these things, too—stumbled upon that I really love. It’s about slowing down the reel. Meaning: We're so often working off these ancient film strips, right? And if you have the presence of mind to be able to slow it down and recognize: Oh, you're just playing out this story….

Jo: Right? And I also like to think about it as: It's reaching for resolution. Where we’re compelled to justify that what we’re feeling is accurate—because look at what's happening here!—rather than: What's coming up is really strong; let's slow the reel and start to see where did it [once] make sense, and it doesn't apply here. I want more of us to have that framing so that we can support each other, not just individually, but collectively.

Seth: I recognize that some of us are reaching towards collectivism in the best possible way, and so many of us are not. They're going the opposite direction, towards isolation.

Jo: Yeah. And I think inherited trauma [suggests]: I'm part of a collective that is so angry. I'm part of a collective that feels so victimized. But it can be dangerous, because it's riding on trauma. It's viewing through that lens that's about danger and victimhood and terror.

2. Giving death a place at the table

Seth: So, in 2006 nearly my entire family went on this trip to Israel. What really struck me that the first place we were taken—as is the case for many visitors—was Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust Memorial). The message is: Let's not forget, this is where it all begins. This is what everything springs from. And one thing I've theorized about—I have no way to back this up or support it—is a sense that the cultures that are better at integrating death into their daily lives, into holding it and acknowledging it, suffer less from what we would call ancestral trauma. Again, that's not provable but it's just a sense I have.

Jo: Yeah, you wrote something about that and it really got me excited about this interview! This is going to shed a little bit of light on how I'm thinking about Israel right now, and thinking about Gaza and Palestine. Which is that I think that we as Jews in the past two generations have—maybe as an attempt to actually heal the trauma of the Shoah—that rather than actually healing from [it] we’ve been like grabbing on to the place of victimhood, of not being acknowledged and not being recognized, and we're just staying there.

And you know, ritualizing those traumas does tend to the pain; it touches on the pain, it illuminates the pain. [But] I think that we've really missed the mark collectively in a pretty dangerous way, because I don't think that we’ve created a space to attend to the dead, or attend directly to the releasing of that pain because we're so stuck around “didn't get acknowledged, didn't get validated.”

That's that spot we're collectively holding there. I don't see the moving through and letting and releasing; I see the holding onto, tightening, and creating a state around it. I know that’s super simplistic, and also I think it's part of the truth. And so I do think that there's so much necessity of attending to the dead and attending to rituals of the dead that completely transforms and transmutes energy inside of us. And I want more of that.

Seth: This is a reach, and it just popped into my head. But I do think about the ways in which death has been exiled from the home over the last 100, 150 years. And I also think about the specifics of the Holocaust in which so many of the victims were literally turned to ashes and gone. And if that would have changed things in any way, if there had been….

Jo: You know, in my channeling work with people, there's a lot that comes through for Jews about the potency of the Mourner’s Kaddish, and what a spell that prayer is. It's not about us just standing up and reading the lines and then sitting down again. There's a way to embody it that has such gravity, that actually allows for that release for the souls of those who've died—for us, who are holding that pain. And I do think that getting to be with that prayer and other ritualized practices around death does start to disintegrate this grip that we have of holding on to that victimhood. To actually transmute, and not trying to just manage our way through it.

3. Ancestral trauma…or ancestral transmissions?

Seth: I recently presented at a conference at UC Berkeley, and I loved how the organizers framed the idea of inherited trauma: They described it as “ancestral transmissions,” rather than explicitly “ancestral trauma.” What transmissions might help people in their day-to-day experience?

Jo: I like to imagine that as much as we're embodying unconsciously the trauma of our people, we're also embodying so much of those gifts and curiosities. And it's been really profound for me, in doing readings with people where one particular ancestor will kind of presence themselves, and I'll start describing what I understand about them. And sometimes it's very nuanced, and the person's like: “I cannot believe you're saying these things. These are so specifically about me and no one else that I know.” That's happened so many times, Seth, it feels like an injection of life, delight and light, right?

We're not just the embodiment of the hard stuff; we're the embodiment of the curiosity that began twelve generations ago, for instance. And I have the very, very deep blessing of getting to know that the way that I access information and can channel is the exact way that my ancestors did it. And I don't know that because someone in a body told me; I know that because that's what I learned from doing it.

Seth: When I think about accessing those voices, I remember something my 18-year-old daughter recently said: “You know, I rely on [Google] maps. I rely on my phone. I'm told where to go, and I feel the loss in that.”

We're born into the world in which we're born—we can't change that. But I have to think there was a different relationship to those voices when there were fewer other voices—electronic voices, virtual voices, digital voices—screaming for our attention.

Jo: I feel a loss too. My fantasy—if I could go back to being a kid—would be that there was an adult in my family who just took one look at me and [said]: She's got it. She can feel what I can feel. Let’s support that. And I feel that about all of us. You know, like getting to be recognized without the distractions, without capitalism, without all of the electronics. What are the places where we can actually pay just a little bit more attention, feel for that more nuanced magnetism or encouragement, or feel a little bit of buoyancy in my heart? What if I find that thread?

Seth: I notice in what I call “Medicine World”—the world of underground ayahuasca work, for instance—that many people have a desire for what I call “receipt keeping.” Meaning: I want to know exactly what happened to my family in 1944, or 1919, or 1867. As a storyteller I understand that desire, and yet I'm suspicious of the need for evidence. How do you counsel people to weave between wanting proof, and being able to fall into the power of the unknown?

Jo: There's two things that come up immediately. One is that the way past lives appear to me is not that you were in another body; it's that there's a soul thread, and that the experience of someone else is kind of imprinted on your soul thread—whatever that is. And so you're carrying the ripples of that. And that's the case for everybody. Every single person is at that crossroads; that's what it means to be in a human form.

We are so thirsty in this culture, this white capitalist culture, for things that actually feel real and aligned and resonant and spiritually connected, that when get a little bit of it we end up accidentally maintaining or creating a distance that doesn't need to be there.

So we’re, like: I'm gonna have a moment with my ancestors, and I'm gonna make this elaborate ritual with all these candles, and oftentimes what comes through is: They're right there. Like, if you reach too far, you're actually reaching past and then [thinking]: There's no one there.

Seth: Something else came up in that conference at UC Berkeley: When we as individuals, and we as a culture, look back at complicated or even distasteful figures from our past—whether it’s in our family line or our national history—we tend to exile them out of shame. As if: That was then, and we’d never do that again! To my mind, we’re kind of guaranteeing those impulses will come out sideways.

Jo: Yeah, Isn't that wild? Trying to pretend like we don't have the capacity to do harm does not keep us from doing harm, turns out.