Community as the Ultimate Healer for the Ancestrally Homeless

The feeling of being ancestrally homeless, of not belonging to any people or place, is a wound that can only be healed in community.

You're not going to heal your wound of not belonging anywhere by sitting in a therapist's office.

Too often I see this ancestral wound being misdiagnosed as a personal neurosis, as "childhood trauma".

This is not a personal problem. If you carry this feeling in your heart, it didn't come from your alcoholic parents or your sexual abuse history or your experience of being bullied in high school.

It came from your ancestors, and if you're feeling it, then they're still feeling it too, on the other side. It was passed on to you so that you might heal it for yourself and for all of your people. So that you might restore the kinship that was lost, the birthright that you and your people were robbed of.

This is the wound of the outsider, of the unworthy one, the one with no tribe.

Only community can heal that.

My sense is that this knowledge would put a lot of psychiatrists and "mental health professionals" out of business. The self help industry thrives on ancestral wounds being mistaken for personal failings and frailties. What does job security look like in the mental health field? It looks like a lot of things, one of which is this:

The mistaken belief that your shame, your loneliness, your insatiable hunger for comfort is all about you.

The news that community brings is that none of it is about you.

There is a profound freedom in that. Let your ancestors take some of that weight off your shoulders. When you feel shame, share some of it with them. When you feel alienated from others, send that feeling back to your dead kin. It is they who need the healing most. You're just a vessel. Don't forget it.