What to do with what you learn: life after seeing your family patterns

The session is behind you. A folded sheet with the names of three generations lies on the table at home, and two or three sentences you couldn’t say out loud a few hours ago keep echoing in your head. By evening you are surprisingly tired. The next day, on the drive to work, something suddenly tightens in your throat. On the third day you are convinced you have understood the whole thing — and that same week, exactly what has happened a hundred times before happens again with your partner.

This is the most common experience after someone sees their family patterns from the outside for the first time. It is also the least written about: there is a great deal said about insight, and almost nothing about what to do with it afterwards.

This piece is about precisely that — the first days, the first weeks and the first months after looking into your family story. What is normal, what helps, where the biggest trap lies, when it makes sense to talk about it with your family and when it doesn’t, and why so many people come back to the same sheet of paper a year or two later — and see something entirely new.

The first days: tiredness is a sign that work has happened

Almost everyone is tired after a genogram session. Not pleasantly sleepy, but drained in a way that takes them by surprise — as if after a full working day, even though all you did was sit and talk.

That makes sense. Ninety minutes of concentrated attention on your own story, with emotional waves moving through your body at the same time, uses up a great deal. On top of that, you have made connections that weren’t there before — and making connections is work for the brain, not rest.

What is normal in these days?

• Going over it again and again. The story keeps turning in your head, you remember things you didn’t say in the session, you piece together further coincidences. This is processing, not obsession — unless it turns into endless circling, which I wrote about in my piece on rumination.
• A delay in the feelings. Many people are hit only on the second or third day. The tears come with something completely unrelated — a song, your child, the sight of an old photograph.
• A need for solitude or, on the contrary, for closeness. Both are right. Listen to what you need.
• Restlessness in the body. Poorer sleep for a night or two, more dreams, more waking. It usually passes on its own.
• Nothing at all. Some people carry on calmly and feel as though nothing happened. That is fine too — some things settle quietly.

The only advice for these days: don’t do anything big. Don’t ring your mother to clear things up. Don’t write a long letter to your brother. Don’t make important decisions. The first days are for rest, not for action.

The first weeks: just watch, to begin with

Once the tiredness passes, the temptation arrives: now let’s do something with this knowledge. My suggestion is the opposite, and a little unusual — for the first few weeks, do nothing except observe.

The reason is simple. The pattern you saw on paper is still abstract. To be able to change it, you have to see it live — in the moment it is happening, in your own kitchen, at work, mid-argument. That is quite different from recognising it in a drawing.

So the task is: notice when it happens. “There, I’ve taken on all the responsibility again.” “There, I’ve withdrawn again instead of speaking up.” “There, I’ve become the peacemaker between two other people again.” With no demand that it be different. With no self-criticism because it happened again.

It is that second part that many people find hardest. New knowledge easily turns into a new stick to beat yourself with: “I already know why I do this, and I still do it — what is wrong with me?” Here self-compassion is more useful than discipline; Kristin Neff’s research shows that a kinder relationship with yourself does not reduce your motivation to change, but increases it. More on this in my piece on self-compassion.

Small experiments, not grand conclusions

Once you have seen the pattern live a few times, you are ready for the next step. And that step should be small — considerably smaller than you imagine.

Grand vows along the lines of “from now on I will set boundaries” don’t work, because they are neither concrete nor checkable. What does work are tiny, precisely defined attempts: “On Friday, in the meeting, I will be the first to say what I think.” “The next time my mother asks when I’m coming, I’ll say I’ll let her know, and I won’t explain myself.” “This week I’ll leave one thing I usually take on to somebody else.”

Psychological research on planning behaviour bears this out: plans of the form “when X happens, I will do Y” are considerably more effective than general intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999). The reason is that a situation defined in advance triggers an action defined in advance, without your having to summon willpower in that moment — and willpower is exactly what we tend not to have available at moments like those.

A few rules apply to these attempts. Keep them small. Try them in a situation that isn’t the most demanding one (don’t start with the hardest person in your life). And build in the expectation that it will feel awkward — a new response is always somewhat clumsy, because whoever is practising it is practising it for the first time. What helps when it comes to voicing your own position, I described in my piece on how to say what you think.

Count on slipping back, too. Changing behaviour does not run in a straight line; models of behaviour change include relapses as an expected part of the road, not as an exception. A slip is not proof that the insight wasn’t real — it is proof that the old pattern is well worn in.

The trap of intellectualising: I know, and nothing changes

Now for the greatest danger of the period after insight.

Once you understand your pattern, you acquire a very convincing story about yourself. You can explain where your anxiety comes from, which generation brought it in, what happened in 1974. The story is true, coherent and — this is the key part — comfortable. As long as you are talking about the pattern, you don’t have to be inside it.

We call this intellectualising, and it is one of the most refined forms of avoidance, precisely because it looks like working on yourself. In fact it is the opposite: knowledge about yourself has come apart from the experience of yourself.

Research into the mechanisms of change is fairly clear here. Deeply written-in emotional expectations are not overwritten by a rational explanation; they change when an old experience is reawakened and you live through something different alongside it (Lane and colleagues, 2015). A meta-analysis of the link between insight and the outcome of therapy likewise shows that insight contributes to change, but is not enough on its own (Jennissen and colleagues, 2018).

How do you recognise that you are in this trap? A few signs: you talk about your family smoothly and without emotional charge; you often reach for technical terms; when someone asks how you are, you answer with an explanation rather than a feeling; and nothing in your life has actually changed, even though you know a great deal more than before.

The way out of the trap is not more thinking, but less — and more experience. A concrete action, a bodily practice, a real conversation with a real person. I wrote about what working on yourself actually is and isn’t in my piece on working on yourself.

When to talk about it with your family — and when not to

This is a question I am asked almost every time. The answer is: carefully, and certainly not in the first week.

The temptation is understandable. When you understand something, you want others to understand it too — especially if it feels as though you have found the key to your family’s tangles. But your insight is yours. For other members of the family the same information is not insight; it can be an accusation, an intrusion, or the opening of something they did not choose.

A few guidelines that have proved useful:

• Ask yourself what for. If the aim is for someone to apologise to you or admit fault, it probably won’t go well. If the aim is curiosity — “I’d like to know what it was like back then” — the chances of a good conversation are considerably higher.
• Ask, don’t explain. “I’ve been wondering what that year was like for grandma” opens things up. “I’ve worked out that you passed this on to me” closes them down.
• Don’t open up secrets without thinking it through. Family secrets have their own logic and their own owners; opening them has consequences for several people, not only for you. I wrote about this in my piece on family secrets.
• Count on disappointment. Many people prepare a lovely conversation and get the answer “I don’t remember” or “why are you raking that up now”. This isn’t necessarily a rejection of you — often it is the protection of someone who cannot manage to open that door.
• Some conversations don’t need to happen. Insight works even if you never tell anyone about it. You are the one changing, not them.

If the relationship is complicated and you are worried about how the conversation might end, it makes sense to prepare for it in therapy rather than improvise over Sunday lunch.

How insight settles over the months

Real change after insight doesn’t happen in a single event, but as a quiet shift you only notice in hindsight.

What do people usually describe after a few months? That a short gap appears in familiar situations — a second or two between trigger and response that wasn’t there before. That the old pattern still happens, but ends sooner. That in a conversation with their mother they don’t feel like a ten-year-old for the first time. That they are less severe with themselves. And often: that they are a little softer towards their parents, without excusing anything.

That gap is really everything. It isn’t dramatic and nobody notices it from the outside, but hidden inside it is the possibility of choice — and choice is what wasn’t there before. I write about how a pattern is actually broken in my piece on breaking the cycle of patterns.

Many people find writing helpful in this period. Not long diaries — just the sentences that come. Research on expressive writing shows that putting an experience into words affects how we live through that experience (Pennebaker and Beall, 1986), and in my experience the greatest benefit is precisely that, over the months, you can see an arc you don’t notice as it unfolds.

For some people something else worth mentioning happens in this period: their relationship with their own children changes. When you see what you received and what you didn’t, many an everyday thing in your own parenting suddenly feels more important — and also easier. You no longer have to be perfect; you only have to break one concrete thing. Plenty of people have told me this is the most tangible thing the genogram gave them: not a great deliverance, but the knowledge of which one thing will not be passed on through them.

Returning to the genogram later on

One last thing, which often surprises people: a genogram is not a finished document.

The same sheet you drew at thirty-five will say something different at forty. Not because the facts have changed, but because you have — and because in the meantime you have entered stages of life you didn’t know before. When you become a parent yourself, the mother on the paper is suddenly no longer only a mother. When you experience a loss of your own, your grandfather’s story takes on a different weight. When you reach the age at which someone in the family made a fateful decision, the sheet reads quite differently.

That is why many people come for a second session a year or two later, sometimes five years later. Sometimes they bring the same sheet and add what they have learned from relatives in the meantime. Sometimes they come with a new question, one that couldn’t even have been asked the first time.

To me this seems the most natural relationship to have with a family story: not as a task you complete once, but as a landscape you return to for a walk from time to time. Each time you see more, because you are standing somewhere else.

When to look for support

Most of what I have described can be got through on your own, with friends and with time. But some signs mean it would be good to have someone alongside you: if more opens up than you can carry; if scenes or feelings keep returning that you cannot settle; if your sleep or mood worsens noticeably and doesn’t pass within a few weeks; if you notice the pattern sharpening rather than easing; or if you simply feel you would like to work further but don’t know how on your own.

That is when it makes sense to talk about ongoing work — I described how such a process unfolds in my piece on ongoing therapeutic work, and the choice between a one-off experience and a process in my piece on both paths. All the options are described among my services, and we can arrange things through contact.

And if in six months’ time you find that almost nothing has changed, except that you now know — know that this is no small thing either. Many of us lived a pattern for the first forty years without ever seeing it. Seeing it is the first condition for everything else. And everything else is, like most important things, slow.