We talk a lot about intergenerational trauma—the wounds that pass from your grandmother to your mother to you, showing up like ghosts in patterns you can't quite name. And yes, that's real. And, something many of us are working through.
But we talk far less about intergenerational courage and intergenerational resilience. Everyone who came before you gave you different skills, different abilities, different strengths that you can build on, refine, and grow from. They're still with you—supporting you, holding you. The courage your great-grandmother summoned to survive? It lives in your bones. The resilience your grandfather built through hardship? It's part of your inheritance too.
What if we started claiming that lineage as loudly as we name the wounds?
Healing That Moves in All Directions
Here's something we don't talk about enough: the healing you do in your lifetime heals backwards and forwards.
Yes, your healing is important for you—it helps you grow, transform, become a new version of yourself. But think about what that healing does collectively. How it changes the relationships in your life. How it shifts the ingredients in your family, your partnerships, your friendships, the groups you're part of.
When one ingredient in a recipe changes, the whole dish changes flavor. It's the same with families and groups. When one person does their healing and starts navigating everyone else differently, it influences and impacts everyone. It doesn't mean everyone chooses to heal. It doesn't mean everyone shifts in ways that feel comfortable. But it catalyzes change. It allows for new possibilities.
We're often terrified of change and convince ourselves we will lose love and connection, so we hide the parts of ourselves that are healing. We do it in secret, individualistically. But here's the thing: we aren't separate. We heal ourselves to heal each other. We heal each other to heal ourselves. Influence goes backwards and forwards and all around.
The Blend: Self-Care and Collective Care
There's the Western, individualist approach: take care of yourself first, then others. Put on your own oxygen mask. And there's the more collectivist approach: if there's a drop in the tank, give it away. The community comes first.
The healing blend is bridging these two—taking care of yourself and taking care of the whole. Moving back and forth between caring for yourself and caring for another. This requires discernment. It sometimes requires boundaries. And it sometimes requires love and connection.
What's your default? Is it connection at all costs—losing yourself to tend to others? Or is it structure and boundaries at all costs—protecting yourself at the expense of intimacy? The work is developing the muscles that aren’t at strong. The ones you don't use as a default or on autopilot. Stretching into new possibilities with sustainable baby steps. Micro-adjustments to habits and patterns that allow you to live in new ways—and invite your children, your parents, and the generations around you to do the same.
Why Community Organizing Across Generations Matters, too
Since healing moves backwards and forwards through generations, then so does change. And that's why community organizing across generations isn't just strategic—it's essential.
Every generation is working out different things—different generational gaps, different challenges. When we organize across generations, we access different kinds of wisdom. Elders carry institutional memory, long-view perspective, and often a patience that comes from having seen cycles repeat. Younger generations bring innovation, urgency, fresh eyes, and an unwillingness to accept "that's just how it is." What if organizing focused on how to bridge generations together as the foundational focus towards building new pathways forward?
When we organize across generations, we're not just sharing perspectives. We're healing the fractures between us. We're building the kind of intergenerational trust that trauma has broken. We're practicing what it looks like to be in community where all ages are valued, where wisdom flows in multiple directions, where the young aren't dismissed and the old aren't discarded.
This is how we create the world we want—not by leaving it for the next generation to fix it, and not by expecting elders to have already figured it out. We do it together, in relationships across the generational lines in defiance and rebellion of the growing separation in our society.
Three micro-practices for Intergenerational Healing
If we look at intergenerational healing from three perspectives—the physical, the emotional, and the energetic—there are some basic practices to try. The approach here is that we push away nothing and acknowledge everything. This way we are not creating bigger blindspots by sneakily avoiding things, especially the discomfort of stepping outside of our comfort zone.
Physical: Develop a daily habit or micro adjust a habit that is not working for you. Eat well, sleep well, move your body. You've heard this before. But here's the key: find the stretch, not the leap. If you leap, you'll crash and return to your autopilot default. If you stretch—in a micro-change just at the edge of discomfort, that is a stepping stone for more change. For example, maybe it’s take 5 minutes in the evening to clean the dishes and 5 minutes in the morning to put the dishes away. This small habit gives you a clean kitchen, allowing the space for you to make healthier food or take an exhale in the morning to enjoy your coffee. With consistency, you build capacity and more new habits build on top of themselves. What's the physical habit you're going to pick up, or refine, to support your well-being this month?
Emotional: Feel your feelings. Woo wee, is this a tough one. We push out the "negative" feelings and pull in the "good" ones. We measure our lives by happiness. But happiness doesn't allow for wholeness—because we can't be happy all the time. What emotions have you exiled? Maybe you don't feel anger because it was scary when you were a kid. Maybe you don't cry because you weren't allowed to. How can you have a feeling practice every day, especially for the hard emotions? If you easily feel sadness, let it help you access anger. If you easily feel anger, let it help you access grief. Anger needs something to push against—give it reverberation. For example, listen to a sad song or scream in the car. What can you do to practice feeling your feelings for 5 minutes a day?
Energetic: Sweep your field. This is for those of you who are sponges—whose nervous systems are super sensitive, who pick up the feelings and fears of everyone around you. You have to tend to your energetic well-being. When someone in your house is angry or grumpy and you start wearing it, make a conscious choice to not take it on and instead let them have that important emotion to work through. This is great for kids too. For example, try shaking or wiggling your whole body after reading the news. Dogs do this, why can’t we. Or take your hands and sweep your whole body as if the other person’s stress or feelings puffed flour dust all over you and you need to sweep it off. What are you going to do to let go of the feeling or stress or fear you accidentally take on from others?
What's Contagious?
We know from science that trauma is contagious. Fear spreads. Nervous system activation ripples through families, organizations, communities.
But courage is contagious too. A regulated nervous system is contagious too. When you do your healing work, when you hold your own wholeness, when you stay gentle with yourself and present in the face of activation—you become the regulating force. People around you can make different choices because their nervous system activation isn't the only thing in the room.
This doesn't mean putting yourself in danger. It means allowing yourself to be what others can regulate to. It's especially important for those working with vulnerable populations, but it's true for all of us—in our families, our workplaces, our communities.
Let's share the nervous system agility we have and are creating, so we can heal backwards and forwards for generations.