Writing Memoir as a Channel for Ancestral Healing

I didn’t set out to write a book about ancestral healing. I set out to write stories of eccentric and oh, so funny family lore, cultural contradictions, the kind of lived memories that shimmer with mango juice and hard truths. I wanted to capture my life in scenes, to turn experience into language, and language into meaning. I assumed I was writing about resilience.

(Finding the Emotional Center of a Memoir.)

But somewhere between the first draft and the last, I discovered what many memoirists learn too late: When you write your story honestly, you don’t just narrate your life. You reveal the emotional DNA that shaped it. Once it’s revealed, miraculously, it can finally be healed!

In my book, Christmas Cactus, I write about a towering cactus that lived in the center of my grandmother’s patio—10 feet tall, lit like a Christmas tree every December. It didn’t make sense. Cactus belongs to desert landscapes, not lush coffee-growing regions. Yet there it was: thorny, radiant, strange, enduring. The older I got, the clearer the symbolism became. That cactus wasn’t decoration. It was inheritance.

Memoir, I’ve learned, is similar. It isn’t only personal history. It’s what survives through you. It’s what blooms even when it shouldn’t. It’s what you dress with lights, so no one notices the thorns.

Most of my generation, and in my culture I should say, grow up surrounded by silence we mistake for normalcy, character, or even politeness. We inherit rules like: Don’t talk about that. We don’t cry. Be strong. Keep your opinions to yourself.

I was raised in a culture where authority mattered, emotions were hidden, and “being fine” was often confused with being whole. I also grew up inside vivid storytelling, lore passed around like food, like ritual, like religion. Family stories weren’t just entertainment; they shaped identity. They taught us who belonged, who didn’t, what was acceptable, and what would never be forgiven.

Writing came into my life as an integral part of a spiritual quest not only for personal evolvement but also, for healing. First, it was journaling and then the idea of a book. As part of that quest, I started practicing a ritual to guide me: I chose a word for each year—openness, love, courage, acceptance, presence. At the time, I thought I was collecting intentions. Later, I realized I was building a map. Those words weren’t only for me, but for the women who came before me, and the children who would come after.

Eventually I understood: Storytelling is excavation. You uncover patterns. You see repetition. You notice how trauma doesn’t always arrive as drama—it can arrive as coping, as perfectionism, as shame disguised as standards. It arrives as what you refuse to name.

Writing didn’t just help me remember. It helped me recognize. Recognition is where healing begins.

One of the most startling parts of memoir is discovering that the “you” on the page isn’t only a singular person. You are also a chorus. As I revisited memories, I saw pain echo across generations. A grandmother shaped by survival. A mother shaped by restriction. A daughter shaped by expectation. A family shaped by both love and sharp-edged silence.

I began to see how culture lives inside the body and how it trains a nervous system. How it teaches you what’s safe to feel. How it hardwires guilt and shame so deeply you confuse them for personality.

In my book, Christmas Cactus, I write about my grandmother, Mamanena: cooking for armies, negotiating at the market like a general, sipping whiskey with political fire in her veins, wearing lipstick even before naps so she would wake up “decent.”

I also write about the cost. What happens when women are turned into pillars—and nobody asks what the pillar carries. Memoir as ancestral healing begins the moment you ask: What did my family survive that I was never taught to grieve?

Writers hear “be vulnerable” like it’s a simple instruction. But vulnerability without structure becomes a wound, not a story. If you want memoir to do healing work for you and your reader, you need craft. Here are the practices that helped me turn difficult truth into prose without drowning in it.

Healing lives in specificity. A single mango held in a child’s hand can carry more truth than a paragraph of reflection. When you commit to sensory truth—smell, sound, heat, texture—you stop performing your trauma and start translating your humanity.

One of the greatest compliments I’ve received is that my writing “never sensationalizes” and “never wavers from the truth.” That wasn’t accidental. It was commitment. Memoir is not therapy notes. It’s art and architecture. You don’t need to exaggerate pain to make it powerful. You need to render it clearly enough that it becomes real.

This one is crucial: You cannot write from inside the fire and expect the page to hold it. The page will burn with you. Instead, develop the voice that can look at the fire and describe it. This is how you protect yourself while still telling the truth. This is how you become both witness and writer.

Every family has mythology. Most of us are trained to maintain it. We protect the elders. We soften the facts. We tell the story in a way that makes everyone look acceptable. We pretend harm didn’t happen if nobody meant it. But memoir requires a different kind of loyalty: loyalty to what was true. Not cruel truth. Not revenge truth. But witness truth.

In my book, I write about collective trauma—Colombia’s narco violence, the normalization of terror, the way entire generations learned to live as if fear were weather.

I also write about the quieter pain: parenting with good intentions that still leaves bruises. The heartbreak of disconnection. The realization that even when you heal inherited trauma, you may have created new trauma without meaning to. That’s where ancestral healing and healing as a practice and not a goal becomes adult work: when you stop needing your family story to be pretty. When you let it be honest. When you stop editing the truth to preserve the illusion.

I used to believe healing had to be productive. If I wasn’t healing others, healing myself might be selfish. Then a friend told me something that changed everything: When you heal yourself, you contribute to collective healing even if no one else is doing the work. Suddenly, memoir became more than a book to me. It became a form of repair.

I began to see writing as a practice that could prevent pain from being passed down unconsciously. A kind of emotional translation project. A map for my children. A record that says: This is what happened. This is what it did to us. This is what I learned. This is how we can live differently.

That’s what transforming truth into art really requires: You don’t write so you can stay inside the wound. Write so the wound becomes wisdom. Silence carries trauma forward. Story told with courage interrupts it. Sometimes the most ancestral thing you can do is this: Put the truth on the page and let it bloom.

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