I was a young woman when my pop-pop pulled me aside and said something I was not expecting: many people in our family have struggled with alcohol; it’s a generational thing, and I should watch myself. His information gave me pause, not because I was in the grip of addiction, but because suddenly something I had noticed about myself made sense. I could drink and not feel drunk. My tolerance was unusually high. I had never questioned it. It was just the way I was. After that conversation, I chose to stay aware, to pay attention, to not let what ran in my family run me.
That conversation, that awareness, may have changed my life. Most people never get it.
We throw around the phrase “generational curse” like it explains something: the addiction that keeps showing up, the men who keep leaving, the rage that never gets named, the silence around grief that stretches from grandmother to mother to daughter. We say curse as though something supernatural has been placed upon us, as though we are helpless before it. But what science is now confirming, and what ancestral healing has always taught, is that there is no curse. There are choices. Made knowingly or unknowingly, across generations, written so deeply into the fabric of family life that they begin to feel like fate. They are not. And understanding the difference is one of the most liberating things a family can do.
Epigenetics, from the Greek epi, meaning “on top of” is the study of how our behaviors and environment change the way our genes are expressed, without altering the DNA sequence itself. Think of it as a dimmer switch: the genetic code stays the same, but lived experience can turn certain genes up or down. And here is the part that changes everything: those changes can be passed to the next generation, and the one after that.
According to research published in Addiction Biology, alcohol use disorder is 50 to 70 percent heritable, meaning my high tolerance was not a personality quirk. It was biology shaped by family history, passed to me through mechanisms I had no control over. Studies on addiction genetics indicate that a person’s genetic makeup contributes to roughly 40 to 60 percent of their vulnerability to addiction, but that predisposition does not guarantee that addictive behaviors will develop. Environment, awareness, and choice account for the rest.
That is the part we do not talk about enough. Predisposition is not predestination.
As researchers in the field of intergenerational trauma have emphasized, epigenetic changes influence vulnerability, not destiny. The same biological mechanisms that transmit the effects of stress are also responsive to safety, connection, and healing. In other words, what gets passed down is not a life sentence. It is a tendency, one that can be interrupted, redirected, and ultimately healed, but only if someone in the family chooses to see it clearly.
Consider the family in which the men have always had outside children. Where infidelity is so consistent across generations, it gets shrugged at: that’s just how the men in this family are. Or the family where anger is the only emotion anyone knows how to show. Where emotional unavailability gets mistaken for strength, grief never gets spoken aloud, and depression gets called laziness. These are not curses. These are learned and inherited behavioral patterns, reinforced by environment, modeled by elders who were themselves never given the tools to do differently, and now encoded, sometimes literally, epigenetically, in the children who come after.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry confirms that parents with trauma histories may demonstrate disrupted caregiving behaviors, which are associated with adverse psychological and physiological development in their children. The father, who was never shown tenderness, does not know how to offer it. The mother who survived by going numb teaches her children that feelings are dangerous. The grandparent who drank to manage pain passes both the biological susceptibility and the coping strategy to the next generation, wrapped so tightly together that the child cannot tell where biology ends and behavior begins.
This is not an excuse, it is an explanation
And explanations are where change begins. Ancestral healing is the practice of reconnecting to the traditions, wisdom, and spiritual legacies of those who came before us, and using that connection as medicine for the mind, body, and community. But it is also something more immediate than ceremony and ritual. It begins with the willingness to look clearly at what your family has passed down, not with shame, but with the eyes of someone who intends to do something.
My pop-pop gave me a gift when he named the pattern in our family. He handed me awareness. And awareness, it turns out, is not just emotionally useful; it is biologically significant. Researchers studying epigenetic healing describe what they call epigenetic plasticity: the capacity for positive experiences, loving relationships, stable environments, and therapeutic interventions to shift gene expression in a healthier direction. We may inherit wounds, but we also inherit the power to heal them.
When people say they are “breaking generational curses,” they are pointing at something real. The energy behind that phrase is exactly right. But the word curse implies something done to us, something beyond our power. What we are actually breaking are patterns, choices made under duress, without information, without support, that calcified into family culture. Naming them as choices, even choices made under impossible circumstances, gives us back our agency. It says: someone in this line made a decision, consciously or not. And I can make a different one.
True ancestral healing does not just change the individual. It changes the line. When you do the work, when you choose awareness over numbness, when you interrupt the pattern of abandonment or addiction or silence, when you build new rituals of connection and honesty in your family, you are not just healing yourself. You are sending a different signal forward in time. The epigenetic changes that healing produces can be as transmissible as the ones that trauma produces.
This means that every honest conversation you have with your child about what runs in your family is an act of ancestral healing. Every time you choose rest instead of numbing, connection instead of control, accountability instead of repetition, you are doing what the ceremony, the libation, the storytelling, and the ritual have always been designed to do: interrupt the pattern and build something new in its place.
Knowing a pattern exists does not automatically break it. There is a real risk, as some researchers have noted, that epigenetic science gets misread as a kind of biological fatalism, the idea that because trauma was transmitted through the body, it cannot be undone. This is incorrect. But neither is good enough on its own. The work of ancestral healing requires sustained practice, community support, honest reckoning, and often professional help. For patterns rooted in addiction, trauma, or mental illness, awareness is the beginning, not the cure. The predisposition is real. The choice is also real. Both things are true.
What we owe our families and ourselves
It’s the refusal to let either truth cancel the other. I did not fully understand, at the time, what my pop-pop was giving me. I know now. He was handing me a map of the terrain I was navigating. He was saying: Here is what this family carries. Here is what to watch for. Here is a choice you can make that others before you did not know they had.
That is ancestral healing in its most practical form. Not abstraction. Not incense and ceremony alone. It is the willingness to turn toward what the family has never named, to name it without flinching, and to make a different choice, not just for yourself, but for every generation that comes after you.
It was never a generational curse. It was always a choice waiting to be made.