Your Family Tree Is a Fungal Network—and You're Healing It Right Now

Think of your family not as a collection of isolated people but as an underground mycelial network—interconnected nodes passing resources, trauma, and resilience through invisible channels. That’s the framework Ashley Glowiak offers in her work on intergenerational healing, and it reframes everything we think we know about family wounds and repair.

The metaphor runs deep. When a single node in a fungal network struggles—depleted, isolated, cut off from what it needs—the network doesn’t abandon it. Instead, resources move from abundance toward deficiency with a precision no individual organism could orchestrate alone. The whole system adjusts. A family operates the same way, except we rarely recognize it. When we sever a family member through shame, silence, or judgment, we don’t simply remove them from the picture. They become what Glowiak calls distortion points—places where healthy signals scatter and the entire network’s transmission gets bent.

Here’s where it gets practical. Glowiak maps four specific movements for restoring family signal. First: seal your boundaries tight enough to become what she calls selectively permeable—letting nourishment in while filtering out toxicity. Second: acknowledge the excluded members. Speak their names. Restore their place in the story, even if you never contact them. Third: metabolize the stored activation living in your body—the inherited anxiety, rage, or despair your ancestors couldn’t process. Fourth: prune patterns that once protected you but have long since outlived their use. None of this requires confrontation or reconciliation. It requires presence and metabolic work.

The saprotrophic fungi—the network’s composters—break down what’s dead and transform it into fertility for everything growing next. That’s what happens when a family member stops being held out and starts being held in. Something shifts. Not just in your body (you’ll feel it), but in the signal moving through the entire lineage. Glowiak’s insight is almost radical in its simplicity: no healing happens alone. Your work in your own nervous system doesn’t stay in your body. It travels.

The invitation here isn’t to fix everything or contact anyone you’re not ready to contact. It’s to stop fragmenting the network by recognizing that the person you’ve been holding at arm’s length is still part of the system. Name them. Acknowledge their struggle. Notice what happens when you stop pretending they don’t exist and start treating them as what they are: a node in a living system that includes you.