Most conversations about inherited pain stay inside the language of clinical psychology or wellness. Generational trauma. Nervous system regulation. Family of origin patterns. The terminology and practices are useful, but without knowing the full story, there is a potential to keep something at arm’s length. There is another way to engage with what we carry from the generations before us, and Isabella Skrypczak, founder of Iza Clara Healing, has built her work around it. She calls it ancestral storytelling, and she treats it not just as a personal exercise but as a form of advocacy.

For Isabella, who goes by Iza, the conviction comes from her own family. Her grandmother, Babcia Ida Kinalska-Pietruska, was six years old when Soviet soldiers forced her and her mother onto a train bound for Siberia in 1940. Ida spent years foraging in subhuman conditions, surviving typhoid fever, and adapting to political shifts that decided whether her family lived or starved. Decades later, Iza translated Ida’s memoir from Polish into English and watched her own body unwind a grief she did not know she had been holding. Stories, when honored, can do more than inform. They can liberate.

Why Storytelling Belongs In The Same Conversation As Healing

The book Iza published through Disruption Books, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile, has been compared to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. Kirkus Reviews called it “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.” Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews called it “an inspiring story of resilience against all odds.”

What Iza wants people to understand is that the book is not just a literary act. It is an act of advocacy on behalf of the generations before her whose stories were silenced, displaced, or rendered invisible. Ancestral storytelling, in her framing, is the deliberate work of making ancestral pain legible. Of moving it from the vague pressure of inherited memory into language a descendant can name, witness, and consciously heal.

Pain we cannot name tends to act on us from underneath. Pain we can name becomes something we can work with.

What Happens When You Link Ancestral Pain To Its Roots

The center of Iza’s perspective is straightforward. When we trace what we are carrying back to its origin in a parent, a grandparent, or further, two things shift:  We can identify the roots of our inherited pain, and verbalize what happened.

Verbalizing is where the work begins. Iza talks about this in terms of her own experience. For years, she carried a tension in her body she could not explain. As she translated her grandmother’s memoir sentence by sentence, the tension started to make sense. The story she had heard in fragments her whole life took on weight when she translated the full memoir as an adult. What she had absorbed in pieces during summer visits as a child finally became a connected narrative. The naming of it was its own release. For Iza, this is the heart of ancestral storytelling. Not to wallow in the past. Not to make trauma the protagonist. But to give shape and language to what previous generations could not afford to say out loud, so what was carried silently for decades can finally be acknowledged and released.

The Miracle Of Honoring The Past

Here is where Iza’s work moves into territory most conversations about trauma do not reach. She believes that when we honor what our ancestors lived, we do not just heal ourselves. We liberate them.

She means this practically. So many of the generations before us moved through experiences they could not process at the time. They survived, but they did not get to feel what happened. They did not get to be witnessed. They did not get to have their humanity acknowledged inside the conditions that stripped them of it. When a descendant finally turns toward that history, names it, sits with it, and lets it move, something shifts both directions in time. The ancestor stops being a frozen figure of suffering. They become a full person again, with a story that has finally landed.

That, in Iza’s view, is the miracle. The honoring of the past humanizes it. 

What This Looks Like Beyond One Family

The reason Iza considers this work advocacy is that the principle does not stop with her grandmother. Every family carries silenced stories. Every lineage holds a chapter someone could not afford to tell. When one descendant in one family turns toward what was buried, the practice ripples outward. Other people begin to recognize the same thread inside their own histories.

And here is the part that surprises people most. When you sit with what your ancestors actually lived, with the conditions that stripped them of their humanity and the moments where humanity returned anyway, you start to see other people differently. The labels that usually separate us begin to feel thinner. As Iza writes, “How many of us speak about tolerance and love for others, yet haven’t done the inner work of actually feeling the unprocessed ancestral pain we still carry?” Her grandmother survived Siberia in part because of strangers who themselves were starving, sick, and forced to work, who kept giving anyway. They did not necessarily share Ida’s language, religion, or background. They chose to remain human in conditions designed to take their humanity away. Sitting with that, Iza says, makes it harder to look at any group of people through the filter of labels.

Why It Matters Now

This is the case Iza is building through her writing, her speaking, and her work at Iza Clara Healing. Ancestral storytelling is not a private indulgence. It is a contribution to a larger collective project. When one person identifies the roots of their inherited pain and gives them a voice, they do something on behalf of everyone whose ancestors remained unheard. .

Iza puts it plainly. Honoring the past liberates the ancestors. It liberates us. And it lets us see that every human being we encounter is part of the same long, complicated, painfully shared story.