How to Heal Ancestral Wounds Step-by-Step

Healing Ancestral Wounds

Baby Christening

By Gena Barnhill @BarnhillGena

One way the enemy gains access in our family lines is through negative ancestral influences. Each blog post in the updated A-B-C Series on Ancestral Influences focuses on a specific negative influence and how to heal ancestral wounds step-by-step.

Some negative ancestral influences are supernatural forces or spirits that enter family lines. They wreak havoc until they are recognized and removed. We can repent of these negative influences and break their power over our lives, so they no longer harm us and our descendants. The key is recognizing and removing them.

The Basics

My husband, Press, likes to describe ancestral influences by visualizing strings running through the family lineage. Those strings represent the connections that the spirits use to pull us toward unhealthy behaviors. If you consider yourself and your parents and their parents back to great-grandparents, you are looking at a minimum of thirty people connected by these invisible strings. Also, multiple marriages within families add more connections.

Negative spirits could have been attached to any one of these relatives and then passed down the family line. The odds none of these ancestors made mistakes or did not make agreements with the lies of the enemy are slim. Every person we have prayed with had some destructive patterns in their lineage, which opened the door for the enemy.

Our ancestors may have deliberately or unintentionally fallen into sin patterns, behaviors, habits, and attitudes that can influence us today. These generational influences do not necessarily make us sin, but they can cause us to lean toward destructive patterns. When we repeat these damaging behaviors, they can become entrenched in our lives and pass on to future generations.

Inherited Tendencies

The concept of inherited tendencies is not new. Medical professionals are familiar with the idea of inheritance. They ask for a history of physical and mental illnesses in your relatives during initial patient interviews because they know these conditions can impact your current health.

Many people are unaware that we receive spiritual inheritances, both positive and negative, through our bloodlines. Examples of negative ancestral influences include shame, fear, control, abandonment, anger, violence, abuse, addiction, sexual sin, and victimization. Fear frequently collaborates with other negative influences to work against us.

The Need for Awareness

We need to understand these are negative influences that have impacted people. To clarify, they are not the person’s identity. Recognizing these negative patterns provides insight into where a door to the enemy may have opened. We do not use this knowledge to blame our ancestors or others. Instead, we ask the Lord to close the door. 

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God-given Authority to Heal Ancestral Wounds

The good news is we can take authority over these negative influences. Jesus said in Luke 10:19, “Behold, I have given authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.” 

When we acknowledge destructive patterns exist in our ancestry and ask for forgiveness, we affirm we want it to stop right now and not impact our future generations. We choose blessings over curses for ourselves and our families.1

Before I share a prayer, I’d love for you to have the opportunity to chime in. What negative ancestral influences have you recognized? Be sure to leave your thoughts on our Facebook Group at Healing Prayer Discussion.

Blessings,
Gena

Prayer to Heal Ancestral Wounds Step-by-Step

Consider praying the bolded words aloud:

  1. I confess the sins of my ancestors, my parents, and my sins associated with (the negative ancestral influence), and I forgive each person for how these influences have hurt me (under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, name the people aloud). I choose to forgive _________, _________, _________, _________.
  2. Lord, I ask You to forgive me for yielding to these negative influences. I receive Your forgiveness, and I choose to forgive myself for entering into these sins.
  3. I renounce these negative influences and break their power over my life, my family, and all future family in Jesus’s holy name.
  4. I receive God’s blessings and replace (the negative ancestral influence) with _____________, ________________, ____________ (ask the Holy Spirit what He wants to fill you with to replace what was renounced).2

1Content in this blog is adapted from: Gena Barnhill, Freedom from Brokenness-Lessons Learned through Inner Healing Prayer (Birmingham, AL: Brookstone Publishing Group, 2022), 23–27. 

2This is an excerpt from: Gena and Press Barnhill, Simple Effective Prayer: A Model for Inner Healing (Birmingham, AL: Brookstone Publishing Group, 2022), 25–26.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on June 6, 2022, and was revamped for comprehensiveness on June 15, 2024.