It’s really powerful (and often sad) to see just how pervasive patterns of mother-daughter close-hostile relationships have been down your maternal line, or to see that there is distant-violent patterning across the paternal line of husbands and wives down the paternal side. I’m including a link to a good set of symbol charts here and I will say that, of the multiple charts listed, I personally find the most valuable charts the displayable attributes and interpersonal relationship symbols.Īll of the symbols are great and worth adding (if you can create a genogram on a piece of paper big enough to accommodate all the symbology!), but because I tend to work with individuals who have experienced complex relational trauma (or developmental trauma), I find it to be helpful to my clinical work with them when we can identify and make explicit any mental illness or dysfunctional/abuse dynamics that may have played out (using the displayable attributes and interpersonal relationship symbols) in order to better contextualize and normalize their experience of suffering as a result of coming from dynamics like this. To make a family genogram you need to have a baseline understanding of the names and roles and births and deaths of your ancestors, and you also need to have access to a few charts of the different symbols we use on a genogram. Some licensed mental health professionals have access to software that can help us co-create elaborate family genograms for our clients, but honestly, you definitely don’t need to have this or have a therapist who has access to this in order to create a powerful family genogram. With this knowledge, with this increased self-awareness, we can then be more mindful of what we may need to do if we want to stop certain intergeneration patterns from perpetuating (with our kids, with our spouse, with ourselves, etc.), we can better understand why our living relatives are the way they are, and we can, perhaps, have greater compassion for ourselves and others when we see more plainly what their experience has been like.Īnd, put plainly, making a family genogram can just be plain old fascinating! How do I make a family genogram?įamily genograms can be simple or astonishingly complex. When we can see the patterns (for better or for worse) of interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics that have come before us, influenced us, and may still be influencing us, we’re armed with increased self-awareness. When we create a family genogram, we can make explicit the intergenerational patterns that have played out across the generations of our ancestors (patterns that may still be playing out today). I’m a big believer that knowledge is power (hence my love of those personality-inventorying quizzes!). Think of it as a family tree for grownups or as an ancestral, psychological map-making. The goal of the family genogram is to offer us a graphical, rich, detailed look at the unique and possibly complex medical and psychological factors that play out across the generations of your family. Remember those family trees most of us had to make in elementary school?Ī genogram goes far beyond the listing out of individuals and names and dates of birth and death to use a set of symbols to identify deeper, richer, and important information about the kinds of relationships that exist(ed) across the family tree and what the individuals on the family tree may have dealt with/deal within their lives. So, if you, too, enjoy tools that help illuminate puzzle pieces of your personality and history, and if you’d like to explore one of my favorite psychological tools, keep reading. Now, a family genogram isn’t as simple as answering a checklist of questions a family genogram requires more effort and self-reflection (if not historical digging) on your part, but once you complete your family genogram, it can often contain very valuable data that can better help you understand where you come from, why dynamics are the way they are now, and what you may need to be mindful of in terms of your own personal work if you would like to create intergenerational change (with your own kids, your own spouse). No quiz is ever going to contain the be-all-end-all answer to who you are and show you all of what you may need to know as you move through the world.īut, recognizing this, one of the most powerful “puzzle pieces” I’ve come across for myself and my clients can sometimes be found in the tool of making a family genogram.
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