This morning I opened a book of poetry.
Lucille Clifton. The Book of Light. A poem called june 20th — her vision of the day she was born, written from before her own arrival.
She sees her mother. She sees her father — a man whose fingers will itch to enter me. She sees what is already in motion before she takes her first breath.
And she writes: none of us know that we will not smile again for years.
I sat with that for a long time.
Because what Clifton is doing in that poem is something the wellness industry, the healing industry, the therapy industry almost never does.
She goes back before the beginning.
She says: this story did not start with me.
The Problem With Personal Pathology
Most approaches to healing — even the most compassionate ones — begin with the individual.
You are struggling. Let’s find out why. Let’s heal what’s wounded in you. Let’s help you become stronger, more regulated, more whole.
There is real love in that. I mean that. I have spent forty years sitting with people and I know the genuine care that lives in that approach.
And — something is missing from it.
It’s this: the story didn’t start with you.
The anxiety that visits you in the night. The difficulty speaking up in rooms where you feel you don’t belong. The way your body holds itself smaller than it might. The hunger that you’ve been told is too much, the anger you’ve been told is inappropriate, the need for rest that you’ve been told is laziness.
These are not personal failures. They are not signs that you haven’t worked hard enough on yourself. They are not even, in many cases, primarily about you.
They are inherited. They moved through your family line the way water moves through rock — slowly, invisibly, shaping everything it touches. They were formed by forces much larger than any one family: by gender, by race, by class, by the history of what was done to the people who came before you and what they had to do to survive it. Even the history of what they did to others, to injure, harm, murder.
When the wellness industry tells you that your health is your responsibility, it is not entirely wrong. You have agency. Your choices matter. Your work on yourself matters.
But it is telling you an incomplete story. And the incompleteness is harmful.
It’s SHAMING.
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Ask to Use the Bathroom
A woman came to see me for years. She drove quite a distance to get there. The sessions were long.
One day I asked her: do you ever need to use the bathroom during our time together?
She said — and I could hear the hesitation in it — no, not really.
Which meant yes.
I asked her: what would it take to say — just stop, give me a moment, I need to use the bathroom?
We talked about it for a while. And what emerged was not a small thing. It was a whole story. A story about not wanting to interrupt. Not wanting to miss time she’d been given. Not wanting to inconvenience a man. Not wanting to risk that I would be irritated, or withdraw something, or think less of her for having a body with needs.
Someone might say: that’s a small thing. Just encourage her to speak up. Maybe she needs a little more confidence.
But that misses the weight of it.
What she was carrying in that moment — the difficulty of saying I need a minute to use the bathroom in a safe room with a therapist who would never punish her for it — that difficulty did not originate with her. It goes back at least to her grandmother. It goes back through generations of women who learned, very practically, that having needs created danger. That speaking up cost something. That the body’s requirements were best kept quiet, managed privately, never allowed to inconvenience the people whose good will you depended on.
She wasn’t weak. She was carrying something old and heavy that had been handed to her without her consent.
And when she finally stood up and walked to the bathroom — that was not a small healing. That was a woman taking one step in a story that her granddaughter might finish. A revolution.
What the Transgenerational View Does
When I work with someone and I ask — for how many generations do you think this story has been going on? — something shifts in the room.
The shame grip loosens.
Because shame requires the story to be personal. Shame says: this is yours. This is your failure. This is your pathology. Fix yourself or suffer the consequences.
But when you go back a generation — when you say I wonder if your mother carried something like this, and her mother before her — suddenly the person is not alone with it anymore. Suddenly they are part of something. A member of a long line of people doing what they could with what they were given.
That is not an excuse. It is not a reason to stop working. It is a context that makes the working make sense.
Of course this is hard. Look at what you’re carrying. Look at how long it’s been in motion. Look at how many people before you tried and couldn’t finish.
You are not weak. You are the latest person to take up something heavy that has been passed through hands for generations.
And you get to do something with it that those before you couldn’t.
The Social Forces That Don’t Get Named
Lucille Clifton was abused by her father. That is a story about a father and a daughter.
But it is not only that story.
It is also a story about a Black woman in America. About the particular vulnerabilities that race and gender create. About the systems that make certain bodies more available to harm. About a mother with a frown on her forehead who could not protect her child — not only because of her own wounding but because of the forces that had diminished her long before her daughter arrived.
When I work with a woman and something in her is telling her to be smaller, quieter, less visible — I sometimes ask: can you add the words ‘as a woman’ to that instruction? Does it fit?
Almost every time: oh. Yes. Of course.
But the therapist didn’t name it. The healer didn’t name it. The wellness program didn’t name it. And so it remained invisible — a personal quirk, a personal limitation, something she needed to personally overcome — rather than a force with a name and a history and millions of other people who know exactly what she’s describing.
The naming does something. It doesn’t remove the difficulty. But it removes the isolation. And the isolation — the sense that this is only happening to me, that I am uniquely broken — is often where the deepest shame lives.
Healing Is Not Subtraction
The wellness industry tends to imagine healing as subtraction.
Remove the anxiety. Release the trauma. Let go of the old story. Get rid of what’s holding you back.
But what I have found, in forty years of sitting with people, is that healing is more often addition.
You add witness — someone who finally sees what has been invisible.
You add generation — the understanding that this didn’t start with you and won’t end with you.
You add community — the recognition that you are not alone with this, that millions of others know exactly what you’re carrying.
You add perspective — the long view, the transgenerational arc, the sense that what you’re working on matters beyond your own life.
And then something shifts. Not because the difficulty disappears. But because you are no longer carrying it as a sign of your personal failure. You are carrying it as your portion of a longer story. And your work on it — even the partial, imperfect, incomplete work — contributes something to the people who come after you.
Clifton didn’t heal everything. She couldn’t. The story that was in motion before she was born was too large, too old, too deeply woven into the fabric of the world she lived in.
But she made something from it that her readers carry now. She finished something her mother couldn’t. She handed something forward. She writes of her parents:
They will do for each other all they can but it will not be enough.
And Clifton did what she could. And she handed it to us. And we do what we can.
Struggling “hand over hungry hand.”
The rope knotted with our years.
What This Means for the Work
If you are a therapist, a coach, a healer — I want to offer you this invitation:
Go back before the beginning.
When someone brings you their struggle — the anxiety, the difficulty speaking up, the body that won’t cooperate, the relationship that keeps going wrong — ask the question that opens the story wider:
How long do you think this has been in your family?
What do you know about your mother’s/father’s relationship to this? Their parents?
What were the forces in the world your grandparents lived in that might have shaped this?
You are not dismissing the personal. You are contextualizing it. You are saying: you didn’t invent this. You inherited it. And that changes what healing means — from fixing what’s wrong with you to contributing your part to a much longer arc of transformation.
That is not a small thing.
That is, in fact, everything.
This is the work of unshaming — not fixing what’s broken, but finding what’s been buried across generations, and recognizing it as the medicine we are here to alchemize.
David Bedrick is the author of five books including The Unshaming Way (North Atlantic Books, 2024). This June he is teaching in London and Haarlem. Details at davidbedrick.com