Healing Through Our Roots

After 20 years as a professional genealogist, 40 years researching my own family history, more recently I re-trained as a therapist following various life-changing events. Perhaps it was serendipity, but I soon realised that by re-training in this way I was simply closing a circle.

In my work with therapy clients, I see them begin to flourish before my eyes as they start to understand themselves. However, what I did not realise when I set out on this new path was that before long, I would be back looking at family history but, this time, using it as a tool to help my new clients heal! ?While we naturally started by talking about their parents and siblings, I soon found that going back further brought greater benefits and that an understanding of their deeper family history using documentary sources and oral history could help heal many people suffering with mental health and emotional troubles today.

In October I launched my new pioneering work through a 2-month course which consisted of 5 group sessions and individual 1-1 sessions using a combination of family history tuition with education about the mind and how it works. This Pioneering Group – known as Mind and Roots – steered the participants through the nuances of interpreting family history records and oral history and using it to interpret how they felt about themselves today.

While it is easy to see that our families forge us into the people we are – with good and bad points - each group member was amazed at just how much we can learn about our own emotional make-up from studying our family history in greater depth and getting to the roots of why we behave and feel as we do - and how we can begin to change things if we wish to do so once we understand why!

Documentary records can lead the way to digging deeper and oral history is also key to understanding as well. In Group 1 there were four experienced family historians on my course and one beginner.

So often experienced family historians think they know as much as they can about their family history, but my new approach showed just how much more there was to be seen and learned even for those who had previously researched their families in depth.

I asked each of my Pioneering Group to write about their experience and what they had gained from #ReframingRoots. ??

Here we hear from one student for whom my course came ?at just the right time. He tells his story below.

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“I often wrestled with a deep sense of resentment about how my father had treated me as a child. During my teenage years, I frequently felt unloved, as though I were a nuisance to him. While criticism was abundant, encouragement and advice on how to improve myself were rare. In my thirties, Dad made a noticeable effort to provide the support he hadn’t given during my childhood. Yet, even two decades later, the unresolved feelings lingered, casting a shadow over our relationship.

Despite having spent years delving into my family history, I realised that I had always focused on the older generations. I had never thought to explore my father’s childhood or his relationship with his parents – my grandparents. It never occurred to me that this might hold the key to understanding his behaviour toward me. One day, it struck me how little I actually knew about his upbringing, despite having been close to him throughout my life. This realisation sparked a desire to uncover his story, in the hope that it might provide insight into the way he had treated me as a child.

When I finally gathered the courage to ask him about his childhood, I was struck by how eager he seemed to talk. The stories he shared shocked me.

While he had a good relationship with his father, his experiences with his mother were far from positive. She could be unkind to him, sometimes threatening to send him away. As an only child, he often felt isolated when his father was at work, confused by his mother’s unpredictable behaviour and terrified by her threats. His childhood, as he described it, was marked by loneliness, fear, and a pervasive sense of being unwanted.

This revelation was difficult to process. I had always known my grandmother as a sweet, polite, and unassuming woman. Yet the picture my father painted of his childhood was starkly different, revealing a woman capable of behaviours I could never have imagined. It was painful to reconcile the loving grandparent I had known with the unkind mother my father had experienced. Yet, as I listened, I began to understand how those childhood experiences had shaped him and, in turn, influenced the way he had parented me.

Sadly, our conversations were cut short. Just two weeks after we began exploring his relationship with his parents, my father passed away.

The timing of this journey felt both cruel and strangely fortuitous. Had I not taken Celia’s course that encouraged me to ask these questions, I would never have learned these truths before he died. While his passing was devastating, I found a sense of closure I hadn’t thought possible. I could finally understand why he had parented the way he did, and with that understanding came the ability to let go of much of the resentment I had carried for so long.

After his death, I stumbled upon a collection of photographs from my childhood. Among them were images my sister and I had never seen before. Many showed my father with us as young children – laughing, playing, and looking incredibly proud. These photographs felt like a final gift, a powerful reminder of the love he had for us, even if he hadn’t always been able to show it in ways I could understand as a child. They helped to solidify the healing I had begun during those final conversations with him.

This journey taught me many things, but above all, it underscored the importance of understanding the past. It’s easy to judge someone’s actions without knowing the full story. But when we take the time to explore the experiences that shaped them, we gain a deeper empathy and insight that can transform our relationships. For me, delving into my father’s childhood provided not just answers, but a profound sense of peace.”

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Following the success of my Pioneering Group, the work will continue this Spring under the name Reframing Roots and Group 2 will run over a longer period to incorporate a greater number of group and private sessions.

Are you interested in joining me on this journey? ?

Direct message me or look out for further posts on my LinkedIn feed coming soon. You can be a complete beginner to family history research or have years of experience.

#therapy #familyhistory #reframing roots

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