“I Carried Trauma I Didn’t Know Was Mine”: How Isabella Skrypczak Broke Free From Inherited Pain

Have you ever felt something inside you that didn’t quite belong to your life, but lived in your body as if it did? A quiet grief. A tension that never fully released. A sense of vigilance with no clear source.

For years, Isabella (Iza) Skrypczak carried that feeling. Not as a passing emotion, but as a baseline state, something woven into her nervous system, shaping how she moved through the world. What she would come to understand is that sometimes, what is carried is not just personal. It’s ancestral, and utterly human.

She Had the Career and the Checklist. Something Still Felt Off

Isabella was born to Polish immigrants and raised in Houston. She built an HR career in Big Tech, settled in Austin with her daughter Kamila, and by most measures was doing everything right. But something underneath kept pulling at her, a restlessness no promotion could completely satisfy.

She spent every childhood summer in Poland with her grandmother, Ida Kinalska-Pietruska. Those visits were filled with warmth, but something unspoken always hung in the air, an unnamed gravity Isabella unconsciously absorbed. It resulted in a tension within her body whose origin she could not explain, sensing deep below that something was off.

Until Her Grandmother Wrote Her Story and Everything Made More Sense

In April of 1940, Ida was six years old when Soviet soldiers forced her and her mother onto a train and deported them to Siberia. Ida survived starvation, typhoid fever, freezing winters, and separation from her imprisoned father. She published her memoir, “Syberia: Oczami Dziecka,” in Polish in 2011 to national attention, but the English-speaking world never had access to it.

So she began translating the memoir, one sentence at a time, not knowing the process would become the most transformative experience of her life.

As she sat with Ida’s words, grief she had never named rose to the surface. The chronic tension she had accepted as just how she was built began to soften and release. She was not just translating a book. According to Isabella, she was experiencing what she describes as ‘energy healing from the inside out,’ with a sense that long-held, inherited pain was beginning to move rather than remain stored.

The translated memoir became A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile, published through Disruption Books. Kirkus Reviews called it “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.” But the real revelation for Isabella was physical and undeniable: Isabella suggests that she had been carrying what she interprets as her grandmother’s trauma in her body for much of her life, and that it could be released; she frames this as a process she believes may be possible for others as well.

What Ancestral Trauma Healing Taught Isabella About Her Own Body

This is the heart of ancestral trauma healing: the people who came before did not just pass down eye color and recipes. Isabella describes unprocessed pain as something she believes can be passed down and experienced through the nervous system, potentially presenting as anxiety, chronic tension, or a persistent sense of unease without a clear cause.

The miracle is that Isabella’s grandmother did not just survive Siberia. Despite the trauma, she became a physician in Polish medicine, earning the Order Odrodzenia Polski, two Doctor Honoris Causa titles, and researching the Chornobyl disaster’s effects on endocrinological health. Ida transformed her pain into purpose. Isabella explains that, by interpreting that narrative and sensing a release in her own body, she appeared to respond in a similar way.

That experience became the foundation of Iza Clara Healing, the holistic healing practice Isabella built to help others navigate their own inherited patterns. Through intuitive healing, somatic awareness, and spiritual healing and emotional release, she works with people who feel the way she once did: weighed down by something they cannot name, exhausted from carrying pain that was never theirs to hold.

You Do Not Have to Carry It Forever

If any of this sounds familiar, Isabella wants you to know something she wishes someone had told her sooner: you are not broken. The heaviness you feel may be real, but it may not be yours. And you do not have to keep carrying it alone.

Through Iza Clara Healing, Isabella offers a space where inherited pain is not treated as a flaw but honored as proof of what your family survived. Her holistic healing practice is built on the belief that when what the body has been holding is finally witnessed, space can be given to set it down.

That is not weakness. That is the bravest kind of strength there is.