I recently traveled with Kelly Lyn, Wilma Pollard, and Amy Jackson to Montgomery, Alabama for the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first site in the United States dedicated to remembering the thousands of African-Americans killed by lynching between 1877-1950, and all those terrorized by the practice.  As we see in our healing work, those who are lost from the family without proper grieving and honoring leave an influence on the descendants.  Sometimes a descendant unknowingly takes on symptoms of illness or depression as an unconscious attempt to restore the one who was suddenly or traumatically taken back into the family's awareness, even several generations later.  In any system, balance and harmony is disrupted until all elements are given their place.  A family system is no different.

This trauma is held by all of us collectively in the U.S. on the systemic level, and as citizens we have an obligation to raise our awareness of how the unresolved energies of slavery, racism and lynching affect us all and keep us entangled in history.  Regardless of your family's participation in slavery, or when your ancestors migrated to the U.S., you share the same responsibility with all citizens to free us from the burden of these atrocities by acknowledging and accepting them as one part of our history, in order to help create a more perfect union for our children.  

Who has been lost from your family?  Who needs to have their place restored, even when it's painful to consider?  In the hard work of healing it often happens that initiating and taking the first steps in the process makes you feel worse before you start to feel better.  It's only through opening the wound and giving it light and air that the real depth of healing can take place.