Genogram: what your family tree can tell you about yourself

You may have said at some point: “I’ll never be like my father” — and then caught yourself years later using exactly his tone with your own child. Or you notice that in your family certain things simply aren’t discussed: money, illness, the uncle who one day vanished from conversations. Families have their own unwritten rules, their own roles and their own silences — and we carry all of it with us, even after we’ve left home.

There is a tool that draws those invisible threads onto paper. It’s called a genogram, and it’s something like a family tree — except that it isn’t interested in names and dates but in relationships: who was closely connected to whom, who was in conflict, who was cut off, which stories repeat from one generation to the next. In family therapy the genogram is one of the central tools, and I also use it as a standalone experience, because I believe that looking at your own family picture is one of the fastest ways to understand yourself.

In this post I explain what a genogram is, what it can reveal, what theory it rests on — and what it looks like when we draw one together.

A family tree that shows relationships, not names

A genogram is a graphic map of a family across at least three generations. At first glance it resembles a pedigree: squares for men, circles for women, lines connecting couples and their children. But at the very next layer it parts ways with the pedigree — because onto those same lines we draw the quality of the relationships. A double line means a close relationship, a jagged one a conflicted relationship, and a broken one a relationship that has faded or been cut off. Alongside that we note important events and themes: divorces, deaths, moves, illnesses, addictions, losses, and also occupations, roles and family “titles” (“the good girl”, “the difficult one”, “the pillar of the family”).

The genogram in the form therapists use today was standardised by the family therapist Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson in the book Genograms: Assessment and Intervention (first edition 1985), still the foundational manual in the field. Their key idea: families are not collections of individuals but systems — and you cannot really understand an individual’s behaviour until you see it in the context of the system they come from. The genogram makes that context visible. What was previously scattered across memories, anecdotes and feelings assembles, on a single sheet of paper, into a picture.

And it is precisely that visibility that is so often a turning point. In my work with people I notice that many “know” their family story but have never seen it. When a story turns into a picture, something particular happens: patterns that felt like a personal failing show themselves as part of a wider weave.

What a genogram reveals

Once a genogram is standing, a surprising amount can be read from it. Here are a few of the layers I meet most often in practice:

• Repeating patterns. Divorces in every generation. Women who always “endured”. Men who left — into work, into alcohol, into silence. Choices of partner that rhyme with the parents’ relationships. I’ve written in more detail about why we repeat the familiar in relationships in the post on attachment patterns — the genogram is the tool that places those patterns on a timeline.
• Family roles. Almost every family distributes roles: the hero who achieves; the carer who holds the family together; the scapegoat on whom tension collects; the invisible child who mustn’t be a bother. Roles are the glue of the system — but as adults we often carry them on into work, friendships and partnership, long after they’ve stopped serving us.
• Coalitions and triangles. Who came “as a package” with whom? Mother and daughter against father? Father and son in a silent alliance? When there is too much tension between two people, the system likes to draw in a third — a child, a mother-in-law, work — to spread the tension out. These triangles emerge on a genogram with astonishing clarity.
• Secrets and silences. Every family has topics at which the conversation stops. And a secret has this quality: it works even when nobody speaks about it — children sense that a wall stands somewhere, and build their own explanations around it, often at their own expense.
• Anniversaries and coincidences. Sometimes it turns out that important events cluster around the same years or ages — that your anxiety, for instance, began at the same age at which your mother lost her mother. Such coincidences aren’t magic; they show how much of the unspoken is passed on.

Bowen: what isn’t worked through gets passed on

The theoretical background of the genogram is the work of the psychiatrist Murray Bowen, one of the fathers of family systems therapy. In his family systems theory Bowen described the multigenerational transmission process: the ways a family handles feelings, closeness and tension do not end with one generation but are handed on — mostly unnoticed — to the next. Not through genes in the narrow sense, but through everyday relationships: a child learns to regulate emotions alongside parents who learnt it alongside their own parents, and so on back down the chain.

Bowen pointed out something else too: within each generation the transmission does not happen evenly. The child who was more caught up in the parents’ emotional life — the one who comforted their mother or calmed their father, say — as a rule carries forward more of the unprocessed material than their more “free” sibling. That is how a brother and a sister from the same family can end up with such different lives.

But the good news of Bowen’s theory is this: transmission is not fate. The key concept is differentiation — the capacity to stay in contact with your family without being pulled into its currents every time. And the first step towards differentiation is exactly this: to see your system at all. I’ve written about how to stay yourself and stay in relationship at the same time in a separate post on differentiation.

What science says about intergenerational transmission

The idea that ancestors’ experiences show up in their descendants is not merely clinical intuition. For decades attachment research has shown that the way an adult tells the story of their own childhood predicts surprisingly well what kind of attachment their child will develop — not so much what happened to them as how far they have worked their story through and made sense of it. Put differently: what is passed on is not the past itself, but the fact that it hasn’t been processed.

Biology adds its part too. Rachel Yehuda and colleagues have studied changes in the regulation of stress hormones and epigenetic markings — chemical “tags” on genes that affect how they work — in the descendants of people who survived severe trauma. The field is young and scientists are rightly cautious about their conclusions; but the sheer seriousness with which leading journals study it tells us that the question “how much of what I carry isn’t mine at all?” is not a New Age whim but a legitimate scientific question.

For everyday use, though, you don’t even need epigenetics. Simple observation is enough: a child growing up with parents who freeze in the face of anger learns that anger is dangerous. A child who watches conflicts being resolved with weeks of silence will carry silence into their own marriage. Nobody decided any of this — but no decision is needed for a pattern to be passed on. A decision is needed only to stop it.

What making a genogram looks like

You don’t draw a genogram alone in silence — it comes into being in conversation. We start with you and your generation, then move upwards: parents, their brothers and sisters, grandparents. For each person we put down the basic facts, and then comes the layer that makes a genogram worth doing at all: the relationships and the stories.

As we draw, I ask questions that have probably never been asked out loud at home: how did your parents meet — and who told that story? Who in the family was closest to whom? What wasn’t talked about? What happened in the year before you were born? Who was “difficult”, and what did that word really mean? How did people in your family cry, get angry, celebrate, say goodbye?

The symbolic language is simple: a circle for a woman, a square for a man, a horizontal line for a couple, vertical lines down to the children. The quality of the relationships is drawn with additional lines — and that’s where the paper comes alive. The infographic below shows a simplified example: three generations, one close relationship, one conflicted and one cut-off contact.

With the example above, we would probably pause at three places in conversation: at the close bond between mother and son (how much does the son have to carry for her?), at the conflict between father and daughter (whose conflict is it really?) and at the cut-off contact between father and grandfather — because cut-off contacts have a habit of repeating themselves, in some form, a generation further down.

A genogram isn’t an indictment — it’s a map

Here I like to pause at an objection I hear often: “I don’t want to pin the blame on my parents.” I understand completely — and that isn’t what a genogram is for. On the contrary: when someone sees three generations on one sheet, blame often softens into understanding. The mother who couldn’t hold you gains her own mother alongside her, who lost her father at four and grew up in a house where there was no time for tenderness. That doesn’t excuse the pain you lived through — but it does put it in context, and context is a space in which it’s possible to breathe.

Another common fear: “What if I discover something terrible?” Experience shows that a genogram rarely “discovers” things a person didn’t at least sense. More often it does something else: it gives those senses a shape and a name, and in doing so takes away part of their weight. What has been drawn is no longer a monster under the bed — it’s a fact on paper, and facts can be worked with.

And thirdly, perhaps most importantly: a genogram isn’t a look backwards for the sake of the past. It’s a look backwards for the sake of the future. A pattern you can’t see, you can’t change — you’ll repeat it and call it character or bad luck. A pattern you can see becomes a choice: you can keep it, because it serves you, or you can decide that the chain stops with you.

Questions you can start with on your own

A full genogram comes about in a guided conversation, but you can begin the exploration at home. You don’t have to draw anything — it’s enough to take half an hour and answer a few questions on paper:

• Which three words would describe the atmosphere in the family you grew up in? And which three would describe the atmosphere in your parents’ home when they were children — if you know at all?
• How did anger show itself in your family? What happened when someone cried? Who comforted whom — and who was never comforted?
• Which sentences kept repeating at your house? (“What will people say.” “Don’t be a cry-baby.” “In this family we don’t give up.”) Which of them do you still hear in your head today?
• Who in the family was the “black sheep”, and what did they actually do? It often turns out that the scapegoat carried a truth the system couldn’t bear.
• If you could ask your grandmother or grandfather one single question, what would you ask? That question almost always points straight to the heart of your family story.

If the answers open up more than you expected, that’s a good sign — it means the material is alive. And at the same time it’s a warning that some layers are better opened in the company of someone who knows how to hold the space when a story gets heavy. That is exactly why I created the session I describe below.

“A Look into the Past”: 90 minutes for your family picture

Because I find this experience so valuable, I’ve shaped it into a standalone service called A Look into the Past: a 90-minute session in which we draw your genogram together. No preparation is needed and no commitment to longer therapy — you come, we talk, I draw, and you go home with your family picture and with questions worth carrying with you.

The session makes sense if you want to understand better where your patterns in relationships come from; if you’re standing before an important transition (marriage, parenthood, separation, loss) and want to know what you’re bringing with you; or simply if your family story interests you and you’d like to see it whole for the first time. For many people a genogram is also a gentle way into therapy — but it can equally remain a complete experience in its own right.

You can find more about this and other services on the Services page, and the quickest way to arrange a time is through the contact form. If you’d first like to see how I work and who I am, my story is on the My Approach page.

Your family gave you a great deal — including things it never meant to give. A genogram is a way of spreading that inheritance out on the table and deciding for yourself what you’ll carry on. This is not a betrayal of your ancestors. It may be the most respectful act towards them: that the story which hurt them learns, with you, a new ending.