Bridging the Seen and Unseen

Bringing Energetic and Ancestral Wisdom into Clinical Practice

There are moments in therapy when something sacred arrives in the room. A client begins to speak of their grandmother’s dreams that still shape their choices. A sensation in the body feels like it belongs to someone else. An inner voice is described with reverence, as if it is older than the person speaking. In these moments, we are no longer working solely with thoughts or behaviours. We are meeting the unseen.

Many clients bring with them a connection to something beyond what can be measured or labelled. This might include spiritual practices, ancestral memory, energetic sensitivity, or dreams that feel deeply significant. These experiences do not always fit neatly within the frameworks of conventional therapy. And yet, for many, they are central to their healing.

In my own practice, and in training clinicians, I have found that bridging the seen and unseen is not about stepping outside the bounds of ethical care. It is about expanding our capacity to hold complexity. It is about making room for the fullness of human experience, including the dimensions that cannot always be explained, but are undeniably felt.

Making Room for What Cannot Be Measured

In Western psychological traditions, healing is often approached through observable change. We measure reduction in symptoms. We assess emotional regulation. We track behavioural shifts. These are important. But they are not the whole story.

For many people, healing is also a spiritual journey. It involves reconnecting with inner guidance, reclaiming cultural practices, and remembering a sense of belonging to something greater. These aspects of healing are often felt in the body, sensed in the heart, or held in ancestral memory. They may not be visible on a standard intake form, but they are alive in the therapeutic space.

Ignoring these experiences risks pathologising or dismissing what may be deeply meaningful to a client. Making space for them, however, requires clinical humility, cultural awareness, and a deep respect for the client’s inner world.

Intergenerational Healing and the Body’s Memory

There is a growing body of research exploring the transmission of trauma across generations. Epigenetic studies, such as those by Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues, have shown that trauma can alter gene expression and affect the offspring of those who have experienced significant stress, such as Holocaust survivors or people exposed to war and violence. This scientific evidence supports what many cultures have always known—that the past lives in the present, not only in our stories, but in our cells.

Clients may not use the word epigenetics. They may simply say, “This doesn’t feel like it started with me.” In Internal Family Systems therapy, we often encounter legacy burdens. These are beliefs, emotions, or energies that have been passed down through families or communities. They are not just personal. They are collective. They are relational. They are unseen, but they are deeply felt.

Working with legacy burdens requires more than technique. It requires reverence. We are not just helping a person unburden a part. We are often helping an entire lineage remember what it feels like to be free.

Energetic Sensitivity and the Multiplicity of Mind

Some clients describe themselves as empathic, highly sensitive, or energetically attuned. They may feel overwhelmed in groups, sense other people’s emotions, or experience intuitive insights that arrive before the mind can make sense of them. These experiences are often dismissed in clinical spaces, but they are not rare. In fact, research on sensory processing sensitivity, conducted by psychologist Dr Elaine Aron, suggests that approximately 15 to 20 percent of people qualify as highly sensitive. This sensitivity includes deeper processing of stimuli, heightened emotional reactivity, and greater empathy.

When these individuals arrive in therapy, they often carry shame or confusion about their sensitivity. They may have been labelled as overreactive or too emotional. In IFS, we can work with parts of them that hold fear or self-judgment, while also honouring the parts that carry insight and wisdom. Rather than viewing these sensitivities as something to fix, we can help clients explore them as possible sources of guidance, boundaries, and connection.

The multiplicity of mind, a foundational concept in IFS, offers a natural bridge to spiritual and energetic experiences. When a client describes an inner guide, a wise elder, or a part that feels connected to the earth or the divine, we can stay curious. We do not need to name it for them. We simply need to trust their system. The goal is not to interpret or validate through our own lens, but to help the client deepen their relationship with that part, that presence, or that knowing.

Cultural Humility and Ethical Integration

Therapists are not shamans, spiritual leaders, or energy workers, unless they are trained in those roles and have consent from their clients to work in that way. However, therapists are witnesses. We are companions on a journey that often includes spiritual terrain. Our ethical responsibility is not to impose, deny, or co-opt. It is to hold space.

Cultural humility is essential when bridging the unseen. This means recognising that our training may not include the full range of human experience. It means being willing to learn, to listen, and to make space for practices that are not our own. It also means knowing when to refer, when to collaborate, and when to stay in our lane while supporting the client to explore theirs.

Creating safety around spiritual and energetic experiences includes checking in around consent, staying grounded in the present, and affirming the client’s sovereignty. We do not need to understand everything a client brings. We need to honour that it matters to them.

When the Unseen Becomes the Healing

Some of the most profound moments in therapy happen when we stop trying to solve and begin to trust. When we allow silence. When we follow the body. When we sit with what cannot be explained.

These moments are not outside of therapeutic practice. They are at the heart of it. They invite us to meet the client not just as a mind, or a diagnosis, or a collection of symptoms, but as a whole being with depth, dignity, and mystery.

Healing happens in many ways. It happens in the brain, through new neural pathways. It happens in the body, through regulation and release. It also happens in the unseen, through reconnection with soul, spirit, ancestry, and the deep knowing that we are not alone.

The therapist does not need to be the source of this wisdom. We only need to make room for it. The client's system knows the way.

In abundant love and kindness for all gentle souls, 

Angela xox 

References

Aron, E. N. (1996). The Highly Sensitive Person, How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You. Broadway Books.

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge.

Schwartz, R. C., and Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy, Second Edition. Guilford Press.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score, Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Lehrner, A., Desarnaud, F., Bader, H. N., Makotkine, I., and Bierer, L. M. (2016). Influences of maternal and paternal PTSD on epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene in Holocaust survivor offspring. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 173(8), 856 to 864.