I just got home from a midday Thai massage. Nothing fancy, nothing indulgent. Just me on the table, breathing through it, asking the therapist to focus on the areas that always hold the most tension in my body — my calves, shins, and lower back. Those stubborn zones that carry things I can’t always name.
But today, something unexpected happened.
As she worked up the outside of my left leg, digging into my IT band, around my hip and knee, a wave hit me so hard it nearly sent me flying off the table.
Anger.
Grief.
Rage.
Heat.
My whole body lit up like a wildfire had been ignited in my fascia. I felt like I wanted to scream at her.
Cry.
Claw my way out.
Punch something.
And then suddenly, I was no longer in that room.
I was seven years back in time. The ending of my relationship with my ex. The one I couldn’t walk away from, until my body made sure I couldn’t walk at all.
The pain she was pressing into had a story.
It was the story of my left knee, the same one that was busted during a moment of violence I never was allowed to fully share.
The one that still aches when a storm is coming or when I’m near him, even for five minutes.
It was the side of my body that took the brunt of impact: my hip, my shoulder, my knee. The trauma was physical, emotional, spiritual. And it was swept under the rug.
He claimed I did it to myself.
The x-rays told another story.
But no one really wanted to talk about that. Not then, not now. We live in a culture that likes our healing quiet, our trauma tidy. We’re told to “just move on,” to stop making it a big deal, to keep the peace.
Even the people closest to us can struggle to hold space for the truth. They minimize, deflect, or blame.
“Well, you were always intense.”
“He didn’t mean to.”
“Maybe he just didn’t know how to handle you.”
Victim shaming isn’t always loud. It’s subtle. It’s embedded in sighs, in silence, in subject changes. In the way we’re encouraged to keep our pain in the past, as if the body understands time.
But the body doesn’t forget.
The body stores.
It holds onto the impact, the imprint, the heartbreak that never got a voice. It keeps score when the mind can’t handle the truth. It hides it in the tension in your jaw, the ache in your back, the knee that gives out when you’re stressed.
And here I was, years later, having a normal massage, and suddenly I was reliving what I’d buried.
Because I had never really let myself feel it.
Not all of it.
Because no one gave me permission to.
Because I wasn’t “allowed” to be a victim, not when I was so strong, so spiritual, so smart. I was supposed to alchemize it, rise above it, find the lesson.
But there is no rising above what you haven’t first descended into.
And in that massage room today, my body descended.
It grieved.
It screamed.
It remembered.
That trauma didn’t start with me either.
Not really.
The way he gaslit me, that didn’t start with him.
The way I froze in silence, that didn’t start with me.
The way people looked the other way.
That script has played out in families, in bloodlines, for generations.
I’ve come to believe that many of these traumas are not just our own wounds but echoes. Ancestral echoes that play out when two people with unfinished stories collide.
Spiritual contracts are real.
Two souls come together to recreate the dynamics their families never spoke of, never resolved. And so, the pain repeats itself. Until someone chooses to stop the loop.
Earlier this week, I had a call with a woman who is suffering immensely. She said she feels trapped. And she literally is, her mobility, her health, her life are in jeopardy.
As she spoke, it became clear that her current reality is an almost perfect mirror of a past relationship her husband had before her. Patterns repeating. Abuse cycles echoing. And until we brought that forward, she had no idea that what she was living was a story on repeat.
Her pain wasn’t random.
Her crisis wasn’t accidental.
Her body was remembering.
The unresolved trauma in her husband’s past came into their marriage, unspoken and unfinished. Now she’s the one carrying the weight, the consequence, the cry for healing.
This happens more often than we realize.
We don’t just inherit eye color and bone structure. We inherit wounds. We inherit silence. We inherit shame. We inherit the deep cellular coding of what was never felt, never spoken, never acknowledged.
You might be suffering with anxiety, and it turns out your grandmother never got to grieve the loss of her first love.
You might be fighting your way out of toxic relationships, not realizing your mother or her mother spent their lives doing the same, just more quietly.
You might be working on your money blocks or your autoimmune condition, and under all of it is a story of displacement, survival, persecution, or betrayal that has lived in your family for generations.
These things do not disappear with time.
They wait.
They wait in the shadows of our bodies. In our joints. In our blood. In our fear of speaking up or being too much. In the tears we choke back when someone says, “Are you really still talking about that?”
And our healing doesn’t begin by pushing through.
It begins by turning toward.
That massage table today became a ceremony of remembrance. My knee reminded me of what I still needed to witness. What I still needed to release. Not just for me, but for the generations before me who didn’t have that chance.
The body knows.
It always knows.
It will whisper. It will ache. It will rage. It will shut down.
Until we listen.
Until we stop gaslighting our own pain.
Until we honor what was never allowed to be felt out loud.
Your body is not betraying you. It is not broken. It is not weak.
It is carrying a story.
And it’s asking if you’re finally ready to hear it.
Ready to break the cycle?
Join me for a live Activation Call + a powerful in-person workshop:
Returning to the Roots — Ancestral Healing for Inner Restoration
Dallas, TX |
June 21, 2025
Drop a comment or “I’m in” if you’re ready for early access + details.
It’s time to clear what never belonged to you.
As always loving you from here,
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Rene’ Schooler(Author)
