A Look into the Past: what happens in a 90-minute genogram session

You arrive at the agreed time, we sit down, and I put a large blank sheet of paper and a pencil between us. Nothing ceremonial — just paper. Ninety minutes later, your family across three generations will be on it: circles, squares, dates, lines that connect and lines that break off. And you will most likely look at that sheet differently from the way you looked at your family when you came through the door.

Almost everyone who books a “A Look into the Past” session asks me something similar beforehand: what will actually happen? Do I need to know anything in advance? Is it like therapy or more like an interview? What if I cry? And: why ninety minutes, rather than the usual fifty?

The questions are entirely fair. Ninety minutes is a long time if you don’t know what is coming — and a short one once you are in it. So in this piece I’ll describe the session as it actually goes: phase by phase, with a description of where we usually pause, what people feel along the way, and what you take away with you. Not about what a genogram is (I’ve written about that in the piece on the genogram as a family tree and in the one on what a genogram reveals), but about what it is like to be in such a session.

Before you come: one arrangement and one question

Getting to the session is simple. You write to me or call, we choose a time, and before the session I ask you one single question: what are you bringing? Not in the sense of a diagnosis or a long story, but in the sense of the one sentence that is hanging over you.

People answer very differently. “I’d like to understand why I end up in the same role in every relationship.” “In our family nobody talked about my grandfather and I never knew why.” “I’ve become a mother and suddenly I hear my own mother coming out of my mouth.” “Nothing specific, I just have a feeling that something in our family was never said.” Every one of those sentences is a good beginning. The last one too — in fact the last one especially.

That question isn’t an administrative formality. It is a compass. I could draw a genogram for three hours and there would still be more to add; your question determines where the two of us linger and what we simply note down and move past. Without it the session would be a census. With it, it becomes a search.

If you can’t answer the question, don’t worry. Sometimes we shape it together in the first ten minutes — and sometimes the real question only appears once you see on paper what you have drawn. I write separately about what is useful to bring with you and what really isn’t necessary in the piece on preparing for a genogram session.

The first fifteen minutes: where you are now

The session doesn’t start with paper. It starts with you in the present.

First we get to know each other a little — who you are, how you live, what brought you. I also tell you how the session will go, how much time we have, and that at any point you can say “I wouldn’t go further here”. That is not a courtesy: in work with the past it is very important that your hand stays on the wheel throughout. Confidentiality is the same as in any other therapy hour, which I’ve written about in the piece on confidentiality in therapy.

Something else happens in those first minutes which, from the outside, looks like small talk but is in fact work: your nervous system settles. Nobody opens up a family story in the first minute after running in from the bus. The body needs some time to establish that it is safe here. Which is precisely why I don’t hurry — hurrying would be the fastest route to a conversation that stays on the surface.

Drawing: three generations on one sheet

Then we pick up the pencil. We start with you — a square or a circle in the middle of the lower part of the sheet — and move outwards: partner, children, siblings, parents, their siblings, grandparents. Three generations is the standard introduced into family therapy by Murray Bowen and systematically documented by Monica McGoldrick in her handbook on genograms; there are three not because it is a neat number, but because it is across a span of three generations that patterns start to be visible at all.

We give each person a few details: name, year of birth, year of death if they have died, occupation, where they lived, broadly what happened to them. You don’t need complete information. “Sometime in his mid-thirties”, “after the war, I think”, “I’m not sure exactly, maybe forty” — all of that is usable. A genogram is not a parish register.

Once the people are on the sheet, we start drawing the relationships: who was close to whom, who was close to nobody, where there was friction, where contact was cut off, who was excluded, who held everyone up. This is usually where the rhythm of the session changes. Until now you have been listing facts; now you start telling a story. And it is in the telling that the information lives which no table would hold.

It is interesting to watch how your relationship to the sheet changes as we draw. At the start people often look at it as a task — afraid of saying something wrong, of forgetting an uncle, of it looking untidy. Somewhere in the middle that loosens. Once it becomes clear there is no right answer here, you start adding things you wouldn’t have mentioned at the beginning: that the house was always too cold, that your father retreated to the garage every Sunday, that everyone went to funerals but nobody to birthdays. These are fragments that look unimportant on paper and in fact carry the most.

I’ve described the practical procedure of drawing in more detail in the piece on how to make a genogram — if you want to know what each symbol means, read it; in the session I explain the symbols as we go and you don’t need to know them in advance.

Where we pause: the points that surprise you

A genogram isn’t evenly dense. In places we write quickly, then something catches — and that is where we stay.

What are the typical points where we pause?

• The same age, the same event. “Your mother lost her father at nine. You were nine when you and your father lost contact.” A coincidence of ages is one of the most powerful things a genogram shows — and almost nobody notices it alone, because we don’t place our own years and our mother’s years on the same axis.
• Blank spaces. A box where you know nothing. An uncle nobody mentions. Your grandfather’s first wife, whom you found out about at twenty-five. Gaps in a genogram are not a shortcoming but information — I write about them in the piece on family secrets.
• Recurring dates. Moves at the same point in each generation, marriages at the same age, separations after the same number of years, children born soon after someone’s death.
• A sudden change of tone. Someone speaks calmly about war, poverty, illness — and gets stuck on a sentence about what Sunday lunches were like. The body reveals where the heat is long before the content does.
• Roles that get handed down. The carer, the successful one, the difficult one, the quiet one, the one who holds the family together. More on this in the piece on roles in the family.

My job in those moments is simple and demanding at the same time: to ask questions you wouldn’t ask yourself, and not to rush ahead with interpretations. A genogram is not my interpretation of your family. It is your story, which the two of us look at together from the outside.

First connections: when the pattern shows itself

Somewhere after an hour, the thing this session exists for happens. You look at the sheet — not at me, at the sheet — and say something like: “Hang on. All three women in this row were left alone with three children.” Or: “Nobody in this family ever stayed in one place for more than five years.” Or, very quietly: “Ah.”

Neither I nor you make that happen — the paper does. A pattern that was there all along, but spread out across time and across people, is condensed on a single sheet into a shape the brain recognises in an instant. Cognitive scientists who study moments of insight describe exactly this: the solution doesn’t creep up gradually, it appears suddenly, when scattered information rearranges itself into a new whole (Kounios and Beeman, 2014).

My task then is not to add three more interpretations. It is for us to stay with it long enough that the insight doesn’t remain purely mental. I ask you where you feel it in your body. What just shifted. What you would say to your grandmother if she were sitting in this chair now. An insight that goes only through the head evaporates by the evening; one that goes through the body stays.

I write separately about the typical aha moments and why they bring such relief in the piece on aha moments when looking into the past. The mechanism of transmission across generations is explained in the piece on intergenerational transmission.

The last ten minutes: what you take away

The final part of the session is for grounding. I never finish in the middle of the most open topic — that would be like leaving you halfway across a bridge.

Together we sum up what emerged: two or three sentences you will still be able to repeat a week later. We check how you are now — literally, how the body is, how the head is. We talk about what you will do with the sheet: some people take it with them and put it in a drawer, others hang it on the wall, others photograph it and leave the original with me. All three choices make sense and none is wrong.

And we agree whether this is a closed story or a beginning. For many people one session is enough — they have their map and now they live with it. For others more opened up than they expected, and then it makes sense to talk about continuing. I write about this distinction in detail in the piece on the genogram as an introduction to therapy or as a standalone experience.

Why ninety minutes and not fifty

An individual therapy hour with me lasts fifty minutes, and for ongoing work that is a good rhythm: enough for a topic to open, not enough for it to be exhausted, and just right for something to settle over the following week. For a genogram, fifty minutes simply isn’t enough.

The reason lies in the rhythm of opening up. The first fifteen minutes are used by the nervous system to establish that it is safe. The next thirty go into drawing the skeleton — and that is work that cannot be skipped, because without a skeleton there is no pattern. Only then does the space open in which things begin to connect. If I had fifty minutes, that is exactly when I would have to say “time is up”. That is the worst possible moment to end.

The longer format is not my invention. Protocols that work with memory and emotional processing — prolonged exposure in the treatment of trauma, for instance — routinely use ninety-minute sessions precisely because they need an opening phase, a working phase and a closing phase within the same session. The same logic applies here: what we open, we also have to close before you go out of the door.

It is also interesting how different a longer format makes the conversation feel. When you know you have an hour and a half ahead of you, that quiet race against the clock which many people know from therapy stops: get to the point quickly, don’t waste minutes, don’t wander off. And with a family story, wandering off is often the main route. If, halfway through talking about your mother, something about her sister comes to mind, there is no need to push it away — that is exactly where we go.

And one more thing: in ninety minutes something happens that rarely happens in fifty — a tiredness sets in that breaks down the usual well-ordered telling. That moment, when you stop narrating from a prepared script, is often the most fruitful of all.

What people feel along the way

Let me tell you what I would have wanted to know before my first session of this kind: everything you feel is normal.

• Tiredness. Almost everyone. Ninety minutes of focused attention on your own story is serious work. Many people tell me they were more worn out that evening than after a whole day at work.
• Relief. Very common and often surprising. When something you have carried without a name takes shape on paper, the weight lessens. Neuroscience calls this the effect of labelling: when we put a feeling into words, the amygdala’s response settles (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007).
• Sadness. Sometimes for people you never met. Grieving for a grandmother who lost three children is real grief, even though it happened seventy years ago.
• Anger. Often comes last and often takes people by surprise. Sometimes it is aimed at parents, sometimes at a system that demanded too much of someone.
• Tenderness. People don’t expect this one: many sessions end with more softness towards parents, not less. When you see what someone was carrying when they themselves were thirty, judgement recedes a little.
• Nothing in particular. That happens too. Some people leave calm and only three days later something hits them on the drive to work. The delay is normal.

Which is why I also advise you not to plan a demanding day after the session. I’ve described what happens in the days and weeks that follow in the piece on life after an insight.

Who I recommend this session to

“A Look into the Past” is not for everyone and it isn’t necessarily the first thing you need. If you are in the middle of an acute crisis — a separation happening this week, a loss that is ten days old — it is wiser to stabilise the present first. The past will wait.

It does make sense if any of this sounds familiar: the same script keeps repeating in your relationships and you don’t know where it comes from; you have become a parent and the past has suddenly caught up with you; there is something in your family that was never spoken about; you are considering therapy but don’t know where to start; or you are simply curious whose voice is speaking when you speak.

You’ll find the session among my services under the name “A Look into the Past”; we can arrange it through the contact form. I am a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy, under supervision — which means I work within a clear framework and review my work regularly with a supervisor, which for work with family stories is in my view an advantage rather than a shortcoming.

And if you are wondering whether you will “know enough” — ninety minutes has never yet been too little for someone who knew almost nothing. The blank spaces turned out to be the most eloquent part of the sheet.