What to bring with you to a genogram session

“Will I need to research anything beforehand?” That is by far the most common question I get when someone books a “A Look into the Past” session. It is followed by a second one: “But what if I know almost nothing about my grandparents?”

The answer to the first question is no, and to the second: then you have come to the right place. Preparing for a genogram session is far simpler than most people imagine — and far more inward than outward. It is not about a folder of documents. It is about one question you bring with you, and an empty evening afterwards.

Still, a few things do help, and there are a few typical mistakes worth avoiding, so in this piece I have gathered everything that is genuinely useful to know about preparing: what you don’t need, what does help, what to bring in your head and how to prepare emotionally. How the session itself unfolds, phase by phase, I describe in my piece on the ninety-minute session.

What you don’t need: relief first

Let’s start with the things people often assume are compulsory — and are not.

• You don’t need to do genealogical research. A genogram is not a family tree. What interests us is not when your great-great-grandfather moved into the valley, but how your family handles closeness, loss and anger. For that, three generations you know at least by name are enough.
• You don’t need to bring documents. No birth certificates, no civil registry extracts, no probate papers. If you have them and they mean something to you, you can bring them — but they are not a requirement and we usually don’t look at them.
• You don’t need a tidy story. Many people try to assemble a neat, rounded narrative about their family in their head before the session. Please don’t. A tidy narrative is a smoothed-over narrative, and it is precisely that smoothing that hides what would be interesting. Come with the confusion instead.
• You don’t need exact dates. “Somewhere in the mid-fifties”, “in her forties, I think”, “after the war, I’m not sure exactly when” — all of that is useful. For spotting a pattern, approximations are almost as good as precise data.
• You don’t need your family’s permission. This is your map, your perspective and your hour. You are not notifying anyone and not apologising to anyone.

If you were worried that you aren’t prepared enough — you probably are more prepared than you think.

What helps, if you happen to have it

Now the other side. A few things genuinely do make the session richer, and if you can get hold of them easily, bring them along.

The names of three generations. You, your parents and your grandparents — ideally your parents’ brothers and sisters too, because uncles and aunts are often where the most is hidden. A name is the ticket in: as long as someone is “my father’s sister” she stays an abstraction; once she becomes Ivanka, a story begins.

Dates, as far as you know them. Births, deaths, marriages, divorces, moves. It is dates that make possible the comparison of ages, which is the most illuminating part of the session: how old was my mother when the thing happened that happened to me at the same age.

Where people lived and what they did. Place and occupation say a surprising amount about the conditions of a life — how much work there was, how much choice, how much help from the people around them.

Turning-point events. War, the loss of a child, emigration, illness, bankruptcy, alcohol, a suicide in the family. None of it needs to be documented; it is enough that you remember it happened.

Important: this is not a checklist you have to complete. If you have half of the above, you come with half. Plenty of people have arrived knowing only that their grandparents had “a lot of children and little money”, and from that one sentence the two of us got very far in an hour and a half — because a sentence like that contains a whole economy of attention that was passed down to the present day.

That’s all. If you feel like it, jot this down on a single sheet before the session — not as homework, but because the writing itself often brings the first connections. Research on expressive writing shows that putting personal experience into words in itself affects how we experience it (Pennebaker and Beall, 1986).

Talking to a relative: when it is worth it

If you have the chance to call your mother, your father, an aunt or an older sibling before the session, it is the most useful preparation I know of. But with two caveats.

First: keep your expectations low. The point is not to interrogate, but to enquire. “I’d love to know where Grandma lived before she married” opens a door. “Why did you never tell me about my uncle?” closes it.

Second: expect every relative to tell a different version. That is not a sign that someone is lying. Autobiographical memory is not an archive but a reconstruction made on the spot — psychologists have been describing this for decades (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), and Elizabeth Loftus has shown through a series of studies how easily later information alters memory. The differing versions are not a problem, they are data: they tell you how each of them needed to see that story in order to live with it.

It is also interesting where memories tend to cluster. People remember the period between the ages of ten and thirty in the greatest detail — a phenomenon psychologists call the reminiscence bump, and one that is very consistent across studies. So an older relative will probably describe their youth far more vividly than last year. That is not really a coincidence, it is how memory works — and for a genogram it is excellent news, because youth is exactly the period in which the decisions are made that go on to shape the next generation.

If the conversation isn’t possible — because there is no contact, because people have died, because it would be too painful — don’t force it. A genogram can be drawn without a single phone call.

Photographs, letters and objects: optional, but eloquent

Some people bring one or two old photographs with them. I never ask for it, but sometimes it turns out to be precious.

A photograph tells you things a story leaves out: who stands next to whom, who is at the edge, who is holding a hand and who has their arms folded, who is missing. In front of old photographs people often say things they otherwise wouldn’t — not because they were hiding anything, but because without the picture they simply don’t remember.

The same goes for objects. Your grandmother’s ring, your grandfather’s watch, a letter you never finished opening. If something like that comes to mind, you can bring it. If not, it won’t be missed.

What I do advise against is bringing extensive material — three albums, a folder of documents, an entire correspondence. Ninety minutes is too short for that, and the material would eat up exactly the time the two of us need for making connections.

What to bring in your head: one question

If you take one single thing from this piece, let it be this: come with a question, not with data.

The question is what turns an inventory into a search. Without it I could draw for three hours and everything would be equally important — which means nothing would be. With it, I know where to linger and what to merely note down.

What kinds of questions do people bring?

• “Why do I end up as the one who looks after everybody in every relationship?”
• “Where does my anxiety come from, when nobody in the family had it — or did somebody have it and nobody said?”
• “Why can’t I talk to my mother as one adult woman to another?”
• “What did I inherit from a father I barely knew?”
• “Why was one person in our family never spoken about?”
• “I became a father and something took hold of me. What?”

Notice that none of these questions is a research question? They are all personal and they all start in the present. That is as it should be: we go into the past because of the present, not because of the past.

If you don’t have a question and only have a feeling, bring the feeling. “Something isn’t right in our family, but I can’t say what” is a perfectly legitimate starting point — and often a very fruitful one, because it isn’t fenced in from the start.

How to prepare emotionally

This is the part people most often overlook, and the only one I really insist on.

A genogram session can open things up. Not because anyone is pushed into anything, but because looking at the whole brings up feelings that were previously scattered across time and across people. Plenty of people cry during the session. Plenty leave as tired as after a full working day. And plenty are hit by it only on the third day, driving to work.

So, two things. First: don’t plan a demanding day after the session. No important meeting, no family lunch, no conversation you have been putting off for months. Set aside a few hours in which you can walk, be silent, sleep or just look out of the window.

Second: tell yourself in advance that everything you feel is allowed. Grief for people you never knew. Anger that surfaces late. Relief that may confuse you because it feels inappropriate. Tenderness towards a parent you have been angry with for twenty years. All of it is normal and none of it is a sign that something has gone wrong.

And one more thing: you are not alone in the room. Part of my job is to make sure the session doesn’t end in the middle of an open subject — the last ten minutes are there precisely so that things can be brought to a close. What happens in the days and weeks after the session I write about in my piece on life after an insight.

What if you know very little

Now to what worries people most. “I didn’t know any of my grandparents.” “I haven’t seen my father since I was ten.” “I’m adopted.” “Nothing was ever talked about in our house.”

Blank spaces on a genogram are not a shortcoming. They are the most eloquent part of the sheet.

Look at it this way: someone talks fluently about one branch of the family and doesn’t even know the names in the other. That is no accident. Every family systematically preserves some things and systematically forgets others — and what gets forgotten is almost always what was too much for the system. Silence around a person is an active act, not the absence of one.

So the gaps interest me just as much as the data. I’ll ask you when you first noticed that you knew nothing there. What you made up about it as a child. What happened when you asked. Who it was who always brought the conversation to an end. From those answers a more precise picture often emerges than documents would give.

Psychological research on secrets shows that a secret weighs on us most when we think about it on our own, rather than in the moments when we are actively concealing it (Slepian et al., 2017). Something similar applies to family blanks: what burdens us is less the facts than what we assemble around the empty space ourselves. I have written more about this in my piece on family secrets.

And one more consolation, backed by research: the psychologists Duke, Lazarus and Fivush found that how much young people know about their own family history is linked to better psychological well-being in adolescence. That of course doesn’t mean you will feel better the moment you learn a few more dates — but it does mean that a connection to your own story is something that can be built. Even from a very modest starting point.

If you are adopted or grew up elsewhere

I get a particular question from people who were adopted, who grew up with grandparents, in foster care, or in a family that moved several times along the way. “Which family are we even supposed to draw?”

Both. Or all three. A genogram is not a document of descent but a map of bonds, and bonds can be by blood, by law or purely by experience. Onto the sheet goes the family that raised you, because that is where the daily experience of closeness, discipline and comfort came from. And onto the sheet goes the family you came from, even if all you know is that it exists — because absence is a bond too, and because the blank in that place almost always carries the questions that shaped you.

In practice, something lovely often shows up in these sessions: both stories have room, without competing with each other. Children who grew up between two families have often developed very early on the sense that they have to choose — and that any closeness to one side is a betrayal of the other. When you see both at once on paper and nothing disappears, that pressure often eases. This is one of those things a map does better than a conversation.

Practicalities: time, place and booking

To finish, the most everyday details. The session lasts ninety minutes and takes place at my practice in Ljubljana; come a few minutes early, so that you don’t go straight from a run into a conversation. Paper, pencil and water are provided by me.

Booking goes through the contact form or by phone; the service is described among my services under the name “A Look into the Past”. Before the session I ask you only one thing: what you are coming with. That is the whole of your homework.

If you would like to know what actually happens in the session, read my piece on the phases it moves through; and if you are wondering whether this should be a one-off experience or the start of regular work, my piece on both paths.

And if the whole thing still feels a little frightening: that is understandable. The past is one of the few things we can no longer change — but we can change our place within it. For that, it is enough that you come. Everything else takes shape on the paper.