https://psyche.co/ideas/why-you-should-talk-to-your-dead-ancestors
Why you should talk to your dead ancestors
by Mariam Vahradyan, positive psychologist
The simple act of communicating without expecting anything in return can bring you closer to your family – and to yourself
The first time I spoke to my dead grandfather, I was six years old. My parents had taken us to Armenia to visit ancient monasteries, eat perfectly ripe apricots, and meet relatives whose names I wouldn’t remember. One of our stops was my grandfather’s permanent place of residence: Tokhmakh Cemetery in Yerevan.
‘Look who came to see you,’ my dad announced to the memorial stone – an ornate carved cross known as a khachkar. He nudged me forward gently, placing a red carnation in my hand.
‘This is for you,’ I said, and dropped the flower onto the gravel.
In my household, dead ancestors were not to be feared or avoided. From a young age, I learned to light khoonk, a strong-smelling incense, on death anniversaries and to tell stories about people I had never met. Later, I discovered that there are many ways to speak to the dead, even after so much time has passed between generations. But most importantly, I learned that ‘talking to your ancestors’ doesn’t involve waiting for a reply. The simple act of communicating without expecting anything in return can bring you closer to them – and to yourself.
Many cultures around the world actively maintain relationships with the dead through storytelling, prayer and ritual. In Japan, for example, the spirits of the dead are welcomed during the Obon festival. For four days each year, families remember their ancestors by tending to graves, lighting small fires, and making offerings. Similar practices take place during the Mexican Day of the Dead, the Korean Chuseok harvest festival, and the Hindu Pitru Paksha remembrance period.
There are also less formal ways of reaching out. From Chinese Taoist oracles working during the Hungry Ghost festival to espiritismo practitioners leading séances in Latin America, intermediaries between the living and the dead operate wherever there is a need for guidance or closure.
These practices, however, often assume a spiritual dimension that interacts with the living. But talking to ancestors, as I see it, doesn’t require access to an unobservable realm or a visit from those who have ‘passed over’. Instead, communicating with the dead can be an imaginative practice that helps create an overlap between past and present, placing us on a larger human continuum. The effects can be transformative.
Where individualism reigns, extended family ties have largely evaporated
Though this form of connecting with our ancestors doesn’t require access to a spiritual realm, it does involve unpacking certain modern biases we may hold. In Being Mortal (2014), the surgeon Atul Gawande writes that:
Modernisation did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people – the young and the old – a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations.
The elderly are now treated in hospitals or age away in nursing homes, and when a loved one dies, we’re permitted a few days off work, but are expected in the office soon after, coffee in hand. Where individualism reigns, extended family ties (and perhaps relationships with ancestors, too) have largely evaporated. Instead, the self has taken centre-stage as we prioritise our independence and uniqueness over belonging and cohesion.
Along with the rise of individualism and the demotion of the family, secularism has ousted almost everything with even a mildly spiritual scent. As a result, in many parts of the world, talking to ancestors has been tucked away neatly as a relic of an unenlightened past. Can we learn to relate to the dead in a way that still feels relevant and meaningful today? Perhaps a more urgent question is this: why should we bother?
Research has shown that, for bereaved people, maintaining a connection to someone who has passed can help process the loss and foster meaning. In one study, the psychologists Claude Normand, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman describe the case of a boy named Dennis who was 11 when his father died of cancer. Eventually, after regularly visiting the cemetery and speaking to his father in his mind, Dennis came to see himself as ‘a living legacy of his father’. The authors argue that this kind of ongoing imagined connection, though sometimes challenging to create, has many benefits: ‘Like any construction, it takes time to build; and with time, instead of reviving the pain of loss, relating interactively with the deceased brought a sense of presence and continuity of caring.’
Importantly, connecting in this case isn’t built on the hope of receiving something in return, such as guidance or information. Instead, its power lies in the feeling of intergenerational strength and purpose that you learn to carry within yourself. So, how should you start?
There is no ‘correct’ way to speak with your ancestors. It’s a process you’ll have to craft yourself. But one place to begin is by learning more about the person you want to cultivate an imagined relationship with. You might ask family members to share details as you leaf through photo albums together. In her book Through the Eyes of Your Ancestors (1999), the genealogist Maureen Taylor argues that this process of learning can allow us to ‘discover ourselves through our relatives’.
Talking about the dead can foster intergenerational continuity and a stronger sense of self
Once you have more information, you can start engaging directly, either out loud or in your head. You could start by telling an ancestor what you’ve learned about them and how their life parallels your own experiences. Recently, a friend of mine discovered that her grandfather, whom she had never met, had also worked with people with disabilities. Learning of this shared passion made her feel even more committed to her work and to her grandfather.
Research suggests that simply telling stories about ancestors can have a positive effect. According to the The Power of Meaning (2017) by the psychologist Emily Esfahani Smith, connecting to something larger than oneself through storytelling cultivates meaning, which is essential to leading a fulfilling and psychologically rich life. Also, adolescents who grow up in families that tell intergenerational stories around the dinner table have better emotional wellbeing, suggesting that talking about those who have died can foster intergenerational continuity and a stronger sense of self. By retelling their stories alongside our own, we shape more empowering collective narratives.
We also expand our sense of time and, with it, our sense of meaning. In a study on the differences between a happy life and a meaningful life, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues found that happiness was ‘largely present-oriented, whereas meaningfulness involves integrating past, present, and future.’ Building imagined connections with our dead ancestors may be one way of practising such integrations.
Talking out loud or in your mind are not the only options. As an alternative, you might prefer writing a letter. In the past, engaging with the dead in this way was much more common. The scientist Marie Curie, for example, kept a diary of letters written to her husband after he died in 1906. ‘My dear Pierre,’ she wrote in one. ‘I want to tell you that the laburnum is in bloom, and the wisteria, hawthorn, and iris are just the beginning – you would have loved to see it all.’
Rather than simply describing events in your life, the benefits of communicating with an ancestor might be enhanced through letters that specifically express appreciation. In a study from 2021, graduate students wrote gratitude letters to someone who’d had a meaningful impact on their lives. These letters were then delivered to the person and read aloud by the students. The results of the research showed that, echoing similar gratitude studies, sharing written notes like these can have a powerful positive impact by fostering forgiveness and joy.
In Break the Cycle (2024), the psychotherapist Mariel Buqué argues that writing letters to the dead can do more than just foster positive feelings: it can facilitate healing from intergenerational trauma by focusing on the strengths and resilience that carry over. She encourages letter-writing for those who hope ‘to stay connected to their loved ones’ ancestral love and wisdom’.
It’s possible to create an imagined relationship that weaves many complex realities together
I’ve observed this firsthand with communities that have experienced extreme adversity. A few years ago, I worked with Armenian psychologists and the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, Australia to design narrative interventions for Armenians who developed PTSD after being displaced during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. One activity we included in the six-week programme was a letter-writing intervention often used in narrative practice – a form of therapy that helps people author their own life stories. In the programme, participants wrote to ancestors or deceased family members, telling them about their struggles in their new homes or how much they missed them. This programme has now been carried out with more than 500 Armenians, with 92 per cent reporting an improvement in personal agency and belonging.
While anyone can speak to the dead, some may find it more challenging than others. In certain cases, families may not want to share details about ancestors due to shame or stigma around certain narratives. And for those families who have faced genocide or displacement, details might have been lost or erased. So what should you do if your family doesn’t share stories about ancestors, or there simply isn’t enough information available?
Regardless of the amount of available information, it’s still possible to create an imagined relationship that weaves many complex realities together. When I interviewed young Armenian Americans living in the United States for a research project, I discovered that some individuals were able to create narratives based on more general collective stories heard in their community, while others found that even telling stories of pain and hardship had positive impacts. In these interviews, people used words like ‘pride’ and ‘perseverance’ when reflecting on familial hardships. Additionally, simply learning more about their family history, even when those details were painful, helped them make better sense of their own lives and develop a personal responsibility to continue telling these tales. ‘If the future generations don’t tell [these stories], who’s going to do it?’ one participant asked.
These inherited narratives can become integrated into the storyteller’s identity and contribute to a resilient and coherent sense of self. In one study with younger generations of Armenian Americans, the stories of great-grandparents were relayed using words like ‘we’ – the interviewees shared these stories as if they had lived through the events themselves.
‘Remaining silent about family pain is rarely an effective strategy for healing it,’ writes Mark Wolynn in It Didn’t Start With You (2016). ‘The suffering will surface again at a later time, often expressing in the fears or symptoms of a later generation.’ When I first read Wolynn’s book, I thought about the story of my maternal great-grandmother, Nana Mam, whose husband had been killed during the Armenian genocide of 1915-16. I was in my 20s by the time I learned that her second husband was a controlling man who’d taken her away from her four-year-old son and forbidden her from travelling to visit him. In my family, like so many others, suffering that had snowballed over generations was often tiptoed around.
But was there something else that had carried over that I had overlooked? Aside from the untold stories and unprocessed pain, what had happened to the strengths, virtues and resilience that flowed through that same family tree? Well, that got transferred, too. Learning to speak to the dead helped me understand the good and the bad, and the inbetween.
Conversations with my ancestors now trickle into my days: a small chuckle as I remember a joke shared with my grandmother, or an update to Nana Mam that I am learning to say no. And, of course, I still talk to my grandfather. I feel close to this man I never met. We both shared a brown freckle placed beneath our eyes: mine under the left, his below the right.
More recently, I think about my future grandchildren and hope they might speak to me one day, too, long after I’m gone.
I won’t respond. But that was never the point.
Mariam Vahradyan is a positive psychologist, writer and educator based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the co-founder of the charitable organisation Kaitzak and was the recipient of the 2023 Christopher Peterson Memorial Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, US. She writes on storytelling, wellbeing and culture.
Anupamaa
Seher Hone Ko Hai
