The Weight She Carried Wasn’t Hers – Exploring Ancestral Fatigue
- Brainz Magazine
- Nov 25
- 5 min read
Kate Moody is a Somatic Counsellor, Nervous System Guide, Human Design Coach, and Yoga Teacher specialising in emotional healing, burnout recovery, and intuitive realignment. Her work bridges therapeutic depth with embodied wisdom to support restorative transformation.
Have you ever felt a deep tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix? A sadness that doesn’t seem to belong to you? Or a sense of emotional burden that has no clear origin? You may not be able to name it, but you feel it, the tension, the silence, the grief that lingers beneath the surface of your family story. You’ve tried to talk about it, to heal it, to understand it.
And yet, the cycle repeats. You are not alone. Because this isn’t just about you, it’s ancestral. It’s patterned. It’s inherited. Sometimes, the exhaustion we carry didn’t begin with us. It echoes through generations, passed quietly from mother to daughter, from family system to nervous system.
1. What is ancestral fatigue?
Ancestral fatigue is the quiet toll of carrying unresolved emotional burdens, roles, and responsibilities passed down through family lines. It often shows up as chronic exhaustion, hyper-responsibility, persistent guilt, or a sense of entanglement with others' pain.
It’s not just poetic, it's biological. Research in the field of epigenetics shows that unhealed trauma can alter gene expression and nervous system sensitivity across generations (Yehuda et al., 2016). This means your body might be responding to pain, fear, or loss that didn’t originate in your own life experience.
What is an entanglement in the family system?
In every family system, there is a deep, invisible web of belonging that binds us to one another, across generations, across time. Sometimes, when a person is excluded, shamed, forgotten, or denied their rightful place, whether through trauma, conflict, death, or silence, the family system unconsciously rearranges itself to compensate for the loss. This is what we call an entanglement.
Entanglements are unconscious bonds we form, often out of love and loyalty, to carry what hasn’t been seen, resolved, or grieved. We may unknowingly take on another’s pain, fate, guilt, or emotional burden, in an attempt to bring balance back to the system.
As Bertold Ulsamer expresses:
“When someone is pushed out or excluded from the system, other members, or the whole group, have to rearrange themselves to make up for the exclusion. This puts the system out of order. Once the excluded person is brought back into the system, it frees those who were entangled with that disturbance.”
In my experience, these entanglements often show up as deep emotional pain that doesn’t seem to have a clear origin, as repeating life patterns, or as a persistent feeling of “carrying too much.”
Family Constellations helps us gently uncover these hidden loyalties, not to blame or fix, but to see them, to honour what happened, and to allow each soul to return to their rightful place. And when that happens, something profound unfolds. The system begins to reorganise itself, not around pain or exclusion, but around truth, love, and wholeness.
In that moment, healing doesn’t just ripple through you, it touches generations past and generations yet to come. It’s moved silently through generations, in loyalty, in control, in the belief that love must be earned, not freely given. And yet, here you are, awake, aware, and stepping into the sacred space between the old story and something new.
2. The nervous system and inherited survival
Our nervous systems adapt to the emotional tone of the family systems we grow up in. If grief is suppressed, you may feel discomfort expressing your own sorrow. If your ancestors survived war, migration, or persecution, your body may carry a deep impulse to stay hidden, stay small, or stay prepared.
As Deb Dana teaches, we come into the world wired for connection. But when that connection was ruptured in past generations, our system often learns to survive by fawning, freezing, or over-functioning. Ancestral fatigue is the embodied echo of these inherited strategies.
3. My journey with family constellations
In my own healing, I discovered Family Constellations as a profound modality for gently untangling these hidden loyalties. Through extensive training and deep immersion in this work, I witnessed how much of my own burnout wasn’t just from doing too much, it was from carrying what wasn’t mine to carry.
Family Constellations creates a sacred space to reveal invisible entanglements, the way we may carry our mother’s grief, our grandmother’s silence, or our father’s burdens. It brings to light the unconscious dynamics that shape how we relate, give, and hold space for others.
4. Releasing the inherited weight
Healing ancestral fatigue is not about blame or cutting ties. It’s about recognition, reverence, and release.
In my 1:1 sessions, we gently bring light to the hidden patterns and inherited stories living beneath your lived experience. Using somatic, systemic, and intuitive processes, we not only explore the family system, but also how your body and nervous system hold these patterns. We create a space where your nervous system can safely regulate, feel held, and integrate shifts.
In my work with women, I weave Family Constellations with nervous system repair and somatic support. Together we explore:
Where are you holding what isn’t yours?
Which patterns feel older than your own story?
What does your system need to feel safe enough to put it down?
As we begin to acknowledge the origin of these inherited patterns, the system can begin to relax. We step out of unconscious loyalty and into loving differentiation.
5. A new way forward
When the burden isn’t ours, neither is the shame, the urgency, or the silence. Through this work, we begin to return inherited grief to its rightful place and reclaim our own vitality. You don’t have to carry it all. You never did.
Closing invitation
If something in this speaks to your story, you’re not alone. I offer gentle 1:1 sessions and online circles that integrate Family Constellations and nervous system healing, and intuitive coaching.
Let this be your invitation to put down what was never yours to carry.
Read more from Kate Moody
Kate Moody, Somatic Counsellor & Nervous System Guide
Kate Moody is a Somatic Counsellor, Nervous System Guide, Human Design Coach, and Yoga Teacher with over a decade of experience supporting intuitive, heart-led women. She helps clients uncover the root causes of burnout by identifying where they are out of alignment with their unique Human Design and layering this awareness with nervous system education and embodiment practices. Drawing on her training in counselling, Family Constellations, and yoga philosophy, Kate guides women in restoring union between their body, mind, soul, and spirit. Her approach is both deeply intuitive and therapeutically grounded, creating restorative spaces for healing, clarity, and a return to wholeness.
Sources & suggested reading:
Yehuda, R. et al. (2016). Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation. Biological Psychiatry.
Deb Dana. Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory
Bert Hellinger. Acknowledging What Is: Conversations with Bert Hellinger
Bertold Ulsamer. The Healing Power of the Past
Thomas Hübl. Healing Collective Trauma
Mark Wolynn. It Didn’t Start With You
Somatic Experiencing and Polyvagal resources for inherited trauma
