Frequently Asked Questions About Ancestral Lineage Repair
What are the potential benefits?
While ancestral lineage repair is not an evidenced-based practice, there is literature to support the premise that relating with your ancestors in conscious ways supports your mental and physical health (See Foor, 2017 for review). Benefits of ancestral lineage repair may include:
On a personal level:
On a familial level:
On a collective and cultural level:
What are the risks and/or side effects?
What if I am adopted or want to work with non-blood lineages?
If you are adopted, we focus on repairing your blood lineages first even if you do not have information about your blood relatives living or deceased. Then we then may shift our focus to working on your non-blood family lineages (e.g. adopted family) in the repair work.
What if I want to work on non-blood lineages?
If you want to work on other non-blood lineages, (for example, your partner’s lineages, the lineages of your ex-spouse, the lineages of a friend who passed away, etc.), we focus on repairing your blood lineages first, then can focus on repair with non-blood lineages.
What if I'm interested in this work, but Dr. Fatter may not be the best fit for me or what if I want to work with someone that has similar ancestry as me?
Trust your gut in choosing a practitioner. Please see the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network to find a trained practitioner that feels right for you.
While ancestral lineage repair is not an evidenced-based practice, there is literature to support the premise that relating with your ancestors in conscious ways supports your mental and physical health (See Foor, 2017 for review). Benefits of ancestral lineage repair may include:
On a personal level:
- Greater clarity about life purpose, a sense of belonging, connectedness, and meaning in life.
- Increased awareness of legacy burdens that are transmitted trauma reactions, imprints, or adaptations to trauma that are handed down through generations that you inherited.
- Increased sense of self, self-esteem, and propensity to embody gifts handed down from one’s blood lineages.
- Development of healthy pride about your roots and culture of origin, increased comfort in you being you and an increased sense of resilience.
- Potential to shift and decrease traumatic grief reactions if you are struggling with the loss of a loved one.
- Increased insight of potential family pre-dispositions about your physical and mental health that may help influence your lifestyle choices and healthy habits for self-care.
- Increased insight about multigenerational patterns which may shift ways you relate with other living family members.
On a familial level:
- Sustained ancestral work may help shift intergenerational patterns of family dysfunction.
- May help you maintain appropriate boundaries with living family members.
On a collective and cultural level:
- Increased awareness of ways to connect to your ancestors to help shift how you connect with and honor the impact of historical trauma related to race, religion, gender, war, disconnection from land, and other types of collective and historical trauma experienced by your ancestors.
What are the risks and/or side effects?
- Part of the structure of ancestral lineage repair is to learn and practice ways to have strong and healthy energetic boundaries. I will encourage and support you in maintaining these strong boundaries throughout the work. Any interaction with any unwell deceased family members, spirits or energies during this practice is only done by the ancestral guide, not by you. That is, the ancestral guide is doing the healing work with the dead, not you.
- Sometimes opening the door to connecting with your ancestors can elicit unprocessed grief held in the lineage from unhealed pain transmitted across generations.
- Sometimes you may learn information you did not know about your lineages, which can be insightful and also may bring up upsetting feelings or feelings of loss.
- Sometimes ancestral lineage repair can unintentionally impact your beliefs about death, the afterlife, and your spirituality, religion, or faith.
What if I am adopted or want to work with non-blood lineages?
If you are adopted, we focus on repairing your blood lineages first even if you do not have information about your blood relatives living or deceased. Then we then may shift our focus to working on your non-blood family lineages (e.g. adopted family) in the repair work.
What if I want to work on non-blood lineages?
If you want to work on other non-blood lineages, (for example, your partner’s lineages, the lineages of your ex-spouse, the lineages of a friend who passed away, etc.), we focus on repairing your blood lineages first, then can focus on repair with non-blood lineages.
What if I'm interested in this work, but Dr. Fatter may not be the best fit for me or what if I want to work with someone that has similar ancestry as me?
Trust your gut in choosing a practitioner. Please see the Ancestral Medicine Practitioner Network to find a trained practitioner that feels right for you.