When Knowing Why Isn't Enough

What fourteen years of family photographs taught me about inherited fear, healing and rewriting our inner stories 

When my kids went back to school in September, I did the thing that had felt impossible for more than 14 years.

I printed my children’s baby photos.

My daughter was born in early 2012, and I took hundreds of photos of her. Very diligently, I created a beautiful photo book of her first year, as well as printing 4 x 6 inch photos to slide into the plastic sleeves in a photo album. I successfully completed up to her at three months old before printing and organizing photos fell off my list of priorities, though it always weighed on me as something I should be doing.

My son was born in early 2014. I printed no photos of him. I did not make him a photo book. We were in the midst of a massive renovation, and I had two babies.

My third baby was born in mid 2016. I printed no photos of him, did not make him a photo book, and was riddled with guilt about it for over a decade.

Thoughts crept up on me in the middle of the night, causing me to break into a sweat: They don’t have a photo album of their baby pictures! What damage am I causing them? It sounds dramatic and like something that I should have been able to rationalize and give myself a break about. But it felt to my frazzled nervous system that I was failing as a mother, and my children would suffer from not having an album in which to look back on their lives. (I grew up with a huge cupboard full of beautiful, labelled photo albums, which I loved looking through, so my not providing this for my own children was my failure).

Every time a child started school, or the calendar year turned over, I expected that I would finally prioritize printing and organizing the photos. And every time I chose writing a book or taking a course or doing literally anything else. And every time it pressed on that wound.

I remember talking to a friend of mine when our kids were little about how she did life. It was a big question, but I was desperate for solutions. She told me about a book she read about how to simplify her life, and it was easy to follow, so I bought it. I read it cover to cover and can’t remember any of the things it told me to do, except that every month I should have been organizing and printing my family photos so that it didn’t turn into a monster project that became too overwhelming to tackle.

During the pandemic, when I decided it was a good time to deeply examine my own inner wounds, I recognized where my aversion to dealing with the mounting issue of the family photos had been born. When my daughter was nearly 11 months old, the Sandy Hook shooting happened in the US, and I saw how beautiful photos of people’s sweet kindergarteners could be turned from a celebration into a memorial. I had a hard time not seeing my baby’s photos – trying her first solid food, learning to crawl, taking her first steps – as something that the unknown of the future could turn into an unimaginable tragedy.

This wound didn’t come from Sandy Hook; it was rooted further back in my family where child loss had been written into our story before I was born. And so I was raised with the shadow of the past projecting itself into my present and ultimately reaching for my future.

Organizing the photos of my babies became a task that I was not capable of doing. It was something that symbolized my inability to heal an ancestral wound, to see clearly, to move on with life, and so it hung over me as a terribly impatient inner voice demanding to know why I couldn’t just do it.

And the reason felt ridiculous.

My mind wanted me to just choose the photos, upload them to the photo printing website, have them delivered to my house, and slide them into the plastic sleeves. The four steps were not complicated, but they felt impossible.

My body wouldn’t let me.

Every time I opened my digital photo library, the fear rose up like a tight chill through my belly. I could pop into the photo library quickly to choose photos for holiday cards, or if I needed to print a few for a gift or small project. But the task of organizing all of them, by year, month, season, felt too onerous.

So I didn’t.

For 14 years.

But while the photographs sat untouched, I was doing other work.

Over the past three years, I immersed myself in studying clinical hypnotherapy and exploring the ways our nervous systems learn to respond to experiences, beliefs and stories. I spent that time working with my own responses, learning to recognize the difference between a fear inherited from the past and the reality of my life in the present.

I've also been writing my second novel, The Things We Carry, which explores the ways grief and trauma move through generations of a family. In telling that fictional story, I've been examining the story I inherited, too.

And somewhere in that process, I made a decision: the losses in my family's past were not going to dictate how I experience the life I have created.

I didn't need to erase that history or pretend it hadn't shaped me. But I could stop allowing it to write the next chapter.

Fast forward to September 2026. As soon as the kids went back to school, I sat at my laptop and selected the photos. It took all week because I selected 3,285.

My eyes hurt by the end of each day, but I didn’t realize until I had confirmed my order and the photos were on their way to my house that no triggers had come up.

I had a great week. I got to revisit my life over the last 14.5 years, the time when I became a mother, when I was so uncertain about how to do it and who to be, and from this place now, when my kids are 14, 12 and 10, and they are amazing people who I am so proud of, I got to be proud of me too.

I should have been doing marketing for my business. I should have been working on my book. But I spent an entire week going back over my life and seeing myself, my husband, our children, parents, friends, and family with fresh eyes. In a way, it felt like the life review near-death experiencers report when they return to this side of the veil. It felt like seeing all the beauty that always existed, without editing out the messy parts.

I included a photo I took of both boys lying on the floor red-faced and screaming, and I remembered that all I could do in that moment was take a deep breath and snap the photo because I knew it would pass. I included photos of the absolute disaster that my house was for years. I laughed at how many different versions of my house it has been, with all the baby gear, the toys, the mess. I loved revisiting my kids’ rooms with their cribs, their beds, artwork, the way they have transformed our house in every way.

I loved the photos of my husband, holding baby after baby, and I am so grateful to him for trusting me that we needed three kids. And two dogs. I loved seeing us age as our kids grow up.

And though I waited all those years to do it, organizing my family photos and sliding them into the plastic sleeves in albums, was not the triggering, painful experience it might have been if I had pushed myself to do it earlier. It was nourishing and affirming and therapeutic.

There is something about being able to flip through the pages of a book and see yourself grow up. To grow into yourself. To see old photos of when life felt impossibly hard and know that you get through it. It’s seeing the passage of time and rather than fighting against it, recognizing that life works out, even if not the way we plan.

Sometimes the things we avoid aren't signs that we're lazy, failing or not trying hard enough.

Sometimes they're connected to stories we've been carrying for so long that we've forgotten they aren't necessarily ours to keep living.

For years, I knew what I needed to do with those photographs. I even understood why I couldn't bring myself to do it. But understanding the fear wasn't the same as changing my relationship with it.

That took deeper work.

And when I finally opened those photographs in September, I realized just how much had changed. I wasn't looking at evidence of everything I stood to lose. I was looking at everything I had been fortunate enough to experience.

The photographs hadn't changed. The story I was telling myself about them had.

This is the work I have the privilege of exploring with people at Ascendant Hypnotherapy. We look at the beliefs, experiences and automatic responses that shape how we move through the world, and whether the stories we've come to live by still serve who we are today.

Because the past will always be part of our story.

But it doesn't have to write our future.

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Robyn Murphy is a clinical hypnotherapist, novelist and former documentary producer based in Toronto. She is the founder of Ascendant Hypnotherapy, where she helps people explore the stories, beliefs and automatic responses that keep them feeling stuck, in order to create meaningful change in how they experience themselves and their lives.