Genealogy & the Genogram
 

The Genogram:

A Psychographic Map Of Your World

Our fascination with tracing our family trees has never been greater. But what are we looking for when we start digging up the past? I think we yearn to know where we come from and where we belong.

"At a time when people seem more dislocated, family trees can be a way to help people create a coherent story of origins. For most of us, the question 'where are you from?' has more than one answer, and often the further we migrate from our family home, the greater our need to define our roots."
                               --- Kate Daniels, consultant and systemic family therapist.

We’re all selective about which of our ancestors we choose to identify with. Along the same line, we need to preserve our stories for future generations. All I know about my great-grandparents (on the left there) is from clues I can gather from their photograph. No one in my family remembers them.

How I wish that something had been left behind. A journal, a genogram, a scrapbook of remembrances, would have meant the world to me. As it is, I look at this photograph and wonder what my great-grandfather won the ribbon for that is pinned proudly to his lapel. I wonder what made my great-grandmother laugh. What were their days like? What made them happy, angry, sad?

A Gift For You, A Gift For Your Descendants

Because of my desire to help people preserve and document their stories, I offer an additional service called a genogram, or a psychological family tree.

A genogram is a graphic representation—a diagram—of family members and their relationships over 3 to 5 generations. It can look very much like a family tree or a genealogy chart. However, it is much more than genealogical information and can free a person from the entanglements of their family’s emotional system.

With your genogram, you will gain a deeper understanding of what kind of family you come from, why your family functions the way it does, and why the individual members of your family, including yourself, have come to be the way they are.

Understanding the past through the genogram will then help you move forward to create more of the life you want.

A genogram is also a gift to your descendants, if you so choose to pass it on to them. It will help them understand their roots and their emotional inheritance, with all its strengths and vulnerabilities.

I have done hundreds of genograms as a family therapist and have yet to have someone come away from this service without significant insights and “aha’s” into their own behavior and the behaviors of their family.

Key concepts we look at to explore and understand your family’s emotional system are:

• Beliefs and values
• Ways of relating to one another
• Relationship patterns when dealing with anxiety, change and crisis
• Sibling position, birth order, and roles
• Quality and kind of parent and marital relationship
• “Scripts” and “actors” in a family performing without conscious thought
• Triangles
• Relationship patterns and emotional responses to deaths, births, divorces, accidents,

      losses, etc.
• “Illness of choice” in a family
• Gender beliefs
• Family secrets

Most genograms take from one to four hours to complete, depending on the individual. Wherever you are located in the world, we can do your genogram!

Contact me today with any questions or to set up a complimentary 20 minute call to talk about the possibility of doing your genogram. My regular rates apply ($105/hour or $95/hour for 2 or more hours).