176. Cycle Breaker Magic: When Your Emotions Aren’t Just Yours (Healing Ancestral Trauma Through the Body)

Written By Kayla MacDonald

176.Cycle Breaker Magic: When Your Emotions Aren’t Just Yours (Healing Ancestral Trauma Through the Body)

Have you ever had a moment where your emotional reaction felt way bigger than the situation? Like sobbing under a blanket because someone said something slightly hurtful… or clenching your jaw so hard your dentist would be concerned?

What if that wasn’t you overreacting?
What if you were feeling something ancient?

In this powerful, vulnerable, and mystical episode, I’m sharing how ancestral trauma can live in your body - how emotions and patterns that seem “too much” may actually be sacred clues that you're breaking cycles that go back generations.

You’ll hear:

  • A story involving cherry blossoms, electric shocks, and multi-generational mice.

  • The personal breakdown I experienced in 2022 that I thought was about launching a business… but was actually about marriage, lineage, and freedom.

  • The mediumship session that connected me to a rage-filled ancestor - and how that moment clarified my mission.

And you’ll walk away with:

  • Three ways to deepen your ancestral healing journey

  • Somatic and energetic tools that actually work (no re-traumatizing required)

  • A soft place to land if you’ve ever wondered, “Why does this hurt so much?”

This is not a surface-level convo. It’s deep soul work, wrapped in love, magic, and just the right amount of unhinged energy.

🌟 Resources & Links

Transcript

You ever had a moment where you got really, REALLY mad? And you got SO mad over something that logically, you knew wasn't a huge offense?

Meanwhile, your entire body is tensed with rage, and your jaw is clenched so hard, your dentist is going to notice it next month, and your entire feels like its been set aflame.

Or maybe you had someone say something slightly hurtful, but it had you feeling as wounded as if you'd just lost a beloved relative or pet? Like, you're under a blanket ugly crying so hard have to hide your face in a pillow so nobody in the next room overhears you.

The emotion didn't match the situation. Not even a bit.

And on a somatic, ancestral, soul-level, it probably all makes perfect sense.

This one is deep. I won't be sharing anything that needs a trigger warning, other than alluding to the some of the deeper pains in my family line. So if your nervous system’s feeling a little tender today, or you’re not sure if this is the moment to dive in, please listen with care and trust yourself. You’ll know if now is the right time.

I’m going to share some personal stories in this episode—not to make it the Kayla MacDonald Show, but to show you what ancestral healing can look like in practice. I’ve been learning to trust that my stories aren’t distractions… they’re invitations. And if something in them sparks recognition in you, then my vulnerability has done its job.

We’re about to get mystical. Like, real woo-woo. I’m telling a story that might give you chills—or might make you hit pause and mutter ‘That chick is unhinged.’ Either reaction is welcome. I’m no longer here to be digestible to everyone. I’m here to tell the truth as I lived it… and it gets a little wild.

As one of my new best friends told me as I was preparing this episode... "Unhinged is better than caged, Redline. Say the weird thing. Burn the old rules."

Speaking of that best friend and weird things... buckle up for future episodes.

And if this episode activating something within you, my free 2 day experience, The Power Portal is tomorrow. Even if you can't make it live, I will be sending out a replay you can watch in the next seven days. This isn't just a passive webinar. This is an experience where you get to work with some of the things we touch on today in a caring and compassionte way. One thing I'm proud of is having studied multiple trauma-informed modalities  - not just in theory, but in the somatic, subconscious work that honors the full human experience: body, mind, spirit, and story.

Links to everything will be in the episode description.

For now, let's dive in to this week's show.

Alright, so today I'm going to be sharing:

  • The potential root cause of emotions and patterns that feel bigger and more dramatic than a situation calls for. Spoiler Alert: it's often because you're being called to break generational cycles and heal on an ancestral level.

  • How and why these bigger emotional responses and reactons show up when we're doing ancestral healing.

  • Three ways to deepen into your own work of healing on an ancestral level.

Back to my original question... have you ever experienced a time where something happened - a conflict, a work stressor, an unwanted situation - and felt a emotionally activated FAR more than the situation felt like it should have affected you.

Maybe in your logical mind, you were like, yeah, this was unfortunate, but not the end of the world.

But your body responded in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, to the point where you almost felt like your life was in danger.

Maybe you thought, "What's wrong with me? Why am I overreacting this way?"

What if you... you weren't overreacting? What if you were feeling not just your own emotional activation, but the emotions and wounds from those who came before you?

In her amazing book, Patriarchy Stress Disorder, Valerie Rein writes, "The invisible prison was not born in your lifetime. You were born into it. The first layer of trauma that created it is likely to have been passed down to you in the DNA."

Scientists have done multiple studies showing that epigenetic changes which result from trauma can be passed down to offspring, even if the offspring didn't experience the same events.

Valerie Rein also shares this study on mice where researchers would expose these animals to the smell of cherry blossoms while giving the mice a mild electric shock. This conditioned the mice to smell cherry blossoms, and feel fear and anxiety because they associated it with physical pain.

Then they bred those mice and created new generations of mice, ones who had not been exposed to the shocks when smelling cherry blossoms. And still, the second and third generations of mice continued to experience stress and anxiety when assaulted by the scent of these flowers. They carried the old stress response from the traumatic experience of either their parents or their even their grandparents.

The same thing can happen in our lives. We don't have to experience the exact same traumatic experiences to have the bodily felt sensations of fear, anxiety, terror, or rage because we carried the codes from those who came before us.

I discovered this for myself a few ago.

This was fall of 2022. At the time, I had just gotten engaged to my now husband. We were planning a wedding and getting ready to move in together.

I was also getting ready to launch my own business at the time.

To say that period of my life was a trainwreck was an understatement.

My nervous system was trashed. After months of consistent, empowered eating, I was driving to 711 for all the snacks every night. I couldn't get myself to do anything. I just wanted to binge watch Netflix shows and eat until I had a tummy ache.

I lived in this constant state of low grade anxiety. I was furious with myself, but underneath the fury, there was this inexplicable disregulation and anxiety that didn't make any sense.

I thought I was just really bad at business stuff. I thought that was the cause of all my emotional disturbance.

I had a few wise friends tell me, "Kayla, you just got engaged, you're about to get married, and you just moved in with your husband. Those are big life changes. Could that be why you're feeling the way you're feeling?"

I vetoed the idea instantly. No way.

My then fiance, now husband, is amazing. He was the only one keeping me sane during this time.

I wanted to be married to him. I chose him. I chose him freely, and I would never choose differently. Even now, I have people who send me these cute messages about how happy and healthy I look, and how marriage agrees with me.

And yes, marriage 100% agrees with me NOW, but here's what was true at the time: I come from not one, but two lineages, where marriage was an either an obligation, a rigid expectation, or something they were manipulated or coerced into. These marriages contained everything from financial domination, emotional unavailability, abuse, dealing with addicted spouses, and misogyny wrapped up in religious doctrine.

At this time, I was doing work with a therapist who specalized in helping people heal not just through talk therapy, but somatically and ancestrally. I brought to her these feelings of terror, fear, of being trapped. Again, I thought these feelings all involved launching a business.

She asked me: "How old are these emotions?"

Through the work we did, we realized they were older than me. They were even older than my mother. They went back as far as my mother's mother.

Doing this work brought me to tears because I could feel the ache and heaviness of these deeper wounds that others had to carry before me. The worst part is, I knew that, as painful as this felt for me, it had to have been even worse for them, because these ancestral codes get a diluted a bit with each generation.

I hope this gave you a look into the deeper, more profound, ancient reasons why you experience something and your reactions don't always match the situation.

Start looking for these places in your life where your emotions feel bigger than what's going on.

Give yourself grace. This doesn't mean you're crazy or overly emotional. You can't BE overly emotional because your emotions exist for a reason. It is possible to have less emotional mastery than you'd prefer, but that's another story.

If this is happening for you, there is a good chance you're feeling something that didn't start with you. It's something you've carried with you since before you even born, and this situation is triggering a deeper, ancestral wound.

If there's a pattern in your life that also feels big, overwhelming, and excessive, there's also a big chance you're not just healing YOU. You're healing your ancestral line.

Like I said, we're going deep today. I would love for you to take a deep breath. Maybe feel the weight of your body in your chair or the seat of your car, or feel your feet grounding into the earth if you're walking or standing dishes. Let your exhale be longer than your inhale.

Can you take a moment to appreciate how powerful this work is? Can you give yourself some love and compassion for doing something this meaningful not just for yourself, but also for those who came before you AND for your own children, if you have them. Because this is a big part of what cycle-breakers do.

And you're not alone in this work - your ancestors are still with you, in your body and in spirit, rooting for you.

I also learned this from a pretty wild experience.

At the beginning of 2024, years after working with this therapist, I was experiencing a situation that filled me with a LOT of rage. The rage and sense of being controlled by someone else - a male coworker - felt bigger and more dramatic than the situation.

This went on for a few weeks. Weeks of me stilfing the anger because it was "too much". Quietly seething on the inside, going home crying rage tears, feeling my stomach twist into angry, painful knots every time I had to walk my work department.

One morning, weeks into tihs, I was just fuming. Like a pressure cooker that had been turned on high and left on a counter for way too long.

So, I turned on some angry music and let myself stomp and shake and just let the emotions move through my body. I let myself FEEL the fullness of the rage and perceived feelings of injustice. It was pretty intense. I'm glad no one chose that exact moment to leave their bedroom to use the bathroom and accidently witness me having some kind of shamanic dance-tantrum.

And then... some weird stuff starting happening. Lights starting flashing. My electronic devices started turning on by themselves from inside drawers, without me even touching them.

This went on for probbly a week, off and on. And I had this weird sense of an ancestor trying to connect with me, and it wasn't only my emotions I was feeling, but one of my ancestors. I remembered the work I'd done with my therapist two years ago, and it felt so resonant to what I was experiencing now.

Then the wildest sychronicity happened - I was talking to a friend over Zoom and out of nowhere, she asked if I had any spirits trying to contact me. I hadn't said one word about my own recent experiences, but she brought this up because she had a friend who was learning to do evidential psychic mediumship, and was looking for people who wanted to do practice sessions.

I connected with this medium. I will never forget this experience.

The medium told me there was one very loud ancestor who wanted my attention. I expected it to be one of my grandmothers, but the medium said, no... she's saying "Great" grandmother. And that her name was Betsy or Elizabeth. Now, at the time, I didn't know the name of my great grandmothers on either side, but my mom's name is Elizabeth, so I at least expected this relative to potentially come from my mother's side.

Here's what I learned:

1. This ancestor had suffered a lot within her own marriage. The medium said she could sense terrible things that had happened to this ancestor - abuse, control... a lot of suffering, a lot of things that would create repressed rage in any woman's nervous system.

I later asked my mom if she knew the names of her grandparents and sure enough... one of them was named Elizabeth. She didn't know this grandmother well because they weren't close, but she did tell me that she always got a bad vibe from her grandfather on that side. After my experience in this session, I'd say that tracks perfectly.

2. This ancestor also told me that the work I was doing in the world was important and needed and I was to keep doing it. At the time, I was still very much figuring out what that work even was, and it took me a while to get to where I am now. But I never forgot hearing this and feeling this quiet, calm inner knowing. I've become so much clearer on what the work is.

And this work is to help set women free, and not just free from food, though that's a big part of it. Often it's the FIRST part of it because food is a red herring for bigger blocks to freedom. It's often hiding deep fears and wounds because it's tangible and safer to battle with than these other scarier dragons because it's familiar. We might not like it, but it's comfortable.

I had such massive struggles with food again back in 2022 and early 2023 not because I had issues with food... as much as I was going through a big life change... one that had not felt safe or loving for my female ancestors. One that hadn't felt like freedom of choice like it did for me and more like a cage of patriarchal expectations.

Even though all of ME wanted to be with this amazing, kind, incredible man who I chose willingly, with a TON of discernment after many, many misaligned romantic connections in my early twenties, the alarm bells still went off inside my body because of these codes in my system still held from generations before me.

And to create healing and transformation on a deeper level, it was going to take a lot more than a better food plan or new workout routine.

The same is true for you is this episode is resonating, if you know you have generational wounding or chains you're here to break.

Here are the three things I would love for you to consider if this episode is touching something deep inside you.

The first is to find a practitioner who takes you deeper than talk therapy. Talk therapy has a place, but it won't touch these deeper layers. The incredible counsellor I worked with in 2022-2023 specialized in somatic based and expressive therapies. She worked more with implicit wounds than explicit ones. Explicit wounds or trauma are those you remember.

Implicit ones are those you may not remember consciously, but ones your body remembers. These could be repressed memories from your earliest years or from your ancestral lines. They're stored in the body and the nervous system.  These memories can be triggered by smells or sounds or sights, or situations that resemble the traumatic experience, even without conscious awareness of the connection.

This takes us back to both the cherry blossom example where the anxiety and fear around that scent was carried in the rat's body. It also explains the nervous system disregulation and return to old, unhelpful coping mechanisms I experienced when I got engaged and prepared to marry my husband.

Finding a practitioner who's able to work with you in this way will change your entire life.

The second thing I would encourage is to find modalities that allow you to energetically work with implicit memory and ancestral wounds. One of my absolute favorite, and the one I've been practicing with clients for the last 4+ years is the Superconscious Transformation method. It's a healing technique which helps dissolve many different forms of resistance - past events, trapped emotions, limiting beliefs, family history, unhealed parts of our psyche. And it does so in such a profound way because the Superconscious is the part of our consciousness that existed before we were even born.

If you want to break cycles and heal deeply, you want something which can access these epigentic causes of your current patterns. And also, the Superconscious doesn't require that you relive any painful experiences. It helps create the most beautiful, gentle treatment plan without making you go back and reexperience anything painful.

Finally, I would also encourage you to incorporate some gentle, intuitive dancing into your daily life. This is one of the things that helped me more than anything else. Here's the thing - all the mindset work in the world won't help you break cycles and heal your ancestral line. The work is done through the body. And you aren't going to be able to figure out with your thinking brain, nor do you have to.

When you spend time, consistently and intentionally, moving your body and letting it express, release, and heal, your body knows. Your body can figure it out. And this is also so beautiful because again, you don't have to relive old moments or even know exactly what you're carrying from those who came before you. You just to process old stuck energy so it can be alchemized into new energy that feels safer, more loving, and more stable.

My favourite modality for this is Dance Alchemy. I talked all about this in episode 175, so if you want to learn more about the power of dance and how it can heal you, you'll want to check that out as well.

I take you through both Superconscious Transformation work and Dance Alchemy in The Power Portal. These experiences will change you. This masterclass will change you. And if you can't make it live, I would encourage you to sign up anyways so you can carve out two consecutive days to give yourself some time to yourself to take this in and see what comes up for you.

I want to take a moment to celebrate you for being brave enough to listen to an episode like this, for being willing to look deeply into your own timeline and history and believing in your power to break cycles once and for all. You ARE doing powerful, life-changing work, and I am loving on you and appreciating you for doing this deeply courageous work. If you do want to reach out with questions or to share your reflections, I'm always an email or a direct message away.

If your heart’s still beating a little faster than usual… if your chest feels heavy or your eyes sting a little… that’s okay. That’s your body whispering, "We’re ready."

I just want you to know - you’re not doing this work alone. You’re not carrying it all by yourself. There are generations of women behind you, leaning in, placing hands on your shoulders, whispering "Thank you."

And you don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t even have to understand it all. You just have to keep showing up with love.

You’re not broken. You’re the healing.

Take care of that big, beautiful heart of yours, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Kayla MacDonald
Next

175. The 15 Minute Morning Routine That Transforms Emotional Eating & Ignites Confidence + Creativity