Your Family Tree Is Actually a Fungal Network

What if your family wasn’t a tree at all, but something far more interconnected and intelligent?

Ashley Glowiak offers a radical reframing in her work on lineage and healing: families operate like mycelial networks, those underground fungal systems that connect entire forests and route resources toward struggle without anyone consciously directing them. In a healthy network, when one node—one family member—is depleted or isolated, the system senses it and sends what’s needed. But here’s where it gets complicated: when someone in your family gets severed through shame, silence, or judgment, they don’t just disappear. They become what Glowiak calls“distortion points where healthy signals scatter.”

Think about that for a moment. Every person you’ve quietly written out of your story, every family member you’ve distanced yourself from without quite acknowledging it—they’re still affecting the signal moving through your entire lineage. The network is trying to transmit something, but there’s static.

Glowiak proposes four movements to restore what’s broken. First, seal your boundaries so you become“selectively permeable”—able to protect yourself while staying connected. Second, acknowledge the excluded members, speak their names, restore their place in the larger family narrative. Third, metabolize the activation your body has been storing—the tension, the unprocessed grief, the unspoken resentments. And finally, prune the patterns that have outlgrown their protective function. What once kept your family safe might now be keeping it stuck.

The metaphor doesn’t stop there.“The saprotrophic fungi are the network’s composters,”Glowiak writes, and she suggests that what families release and metabolize becomes“the fertility of everything growing next.”In other words, your healing isn’t just for you. It changes what your family is able to create going forward. It matters for your kids, your kids’kids, the whole lineage downstream.

Here’s what makes this different from typical family therapy talk: no healing happens alone. You’re not trying to fix yourself in isolation. You’re tending to a network that extends far beyond what you can see from your individual perspective. The intelligence of the whole understands what no single node can see from its own position. That’s the promise—and the responsibility.