Genograms: what are they and how to do them?

Hello friends!

A while ago, I was asked by a dear reader to write about Genograms. For those who don’t know, genograms are symbolic representations of the relationships between members of a family. They are different from the famous family trees because they point out not only the degrees of kinship but also patterns of behavior, attitudes and physical and mental illnesses. Roughly speaking, we can understand genograms as a representative, summarized description of the relationships between the members of a family.

Easier than describing what a genogram is is visualizing one. See below the drawing of a simple genogram:

This simple Genogram was created by psychologist Claudio Drews. Already in a first visualization (although we don’t know about the specific symbols) we can see that a genogram looks like a family tree. However, unlike family trees, which show different relationships, genograms generally focus on the immediate (father and mother) and next generation (paternal and maternal grandparents) ascending generation. Evidently, if it is possible to add information about great-grandparents, the genogram will be more complete.

In addition to basic kinship relationships, clinical hypotheses and medical histories of related people are added. The idea, of course, is not to blame the father, mother, grandfather or grandmother for having an X or Y disease, but to understand that a certain problem may have had a previous origin. If this type of consideration is taken into account, the idea remains that it is not a family member’s fault, but relevant information about the individual history.

Returning to the simple Genogram, created by Drews, we can notice some information instantly. The numbers indicate the ages, the square represents the male gender and the circle the female gender. Horizontal lines show brother and sister relationships or marital relationships, while vertical arrows indicate paternity and maternity.

The information below each abbreviation (the abbreviation represents the initials of the name and surname) indicate physical or mental illnesses or habitual behaviors and attitudes of each person.

Thus, in this simple Genogram we can see that UBS got married (and separated because the two signs on the arrow indicate separation) with AMS, 28 years old, and with her he had a son, CMS, currently 11 years old. UBS has a 42-year-old sister, MBS, and a 40-year-old brother, LBS We can also note that UBS’s mother is 69 years old and his father committed suicide at the age of 45.

All this information is easier to locate in the Genogram, hence its usefulness.

Well, now that we’ve seen what a Genogram is, we can move on to a more detailed definition. A genogram – also known as a family diagram – is a pictorial representation of a person’s family relationships with the respective medical and psychic information of each member of the same. In a sense, it’s like a family tree, but much more complete as it includes data on repetitive patterns in generations or hereditary trends.

Genograms have been used by psychologists who work in the family-systemic approach and also by doctors, psychiatrists, social psychologists, as well as genetic researchers, educators, among others.

Genegromas were developed by Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson in their book Genograms: Assessment and Intervention, published in 1985.

How to make a Genogram?

Well, the first step in making a Genogram is to have the names of the family members and their respective kinship relationships. In this sense, we can start by first drawing the family tree and then collect more data about each of the family members.

If we are going to use it in the office, we can draw a simple Genogram with the names of the patient, his parents and paternal and maternal grandparents. Information on year of birth (and death if applicable), marriage and separation, known illnesses are added next.

A step that can also be taken at this stage is to ask the patient about feelings and affective approximations and distances with each of the family members. It is common for each person to identify more with one side of their family or, for example, more with the paternal grandfather than with the maternal grandfather, or vice versa.

If the patient or person interested in making their Genogram has information about their great-grandparents, the Genogram will be even more complete. If we think only of the genetic information that determines physical traits (such as eye color), we can see how incredible it is that certain genetic information from a relative who was born, perhaps, more than a hundred years ago, could have contributed to physical characteristics that are observable today. But the most amazing thing is to note that some psychic characteristics also pass from generation to generation.

As the initial objective of the Genogram was to survey the medical and psychological history of the members of a family, it is common to see Genograms that are specifically created with this objective in mind. But we can also make a chart that tells less about physical and mental illnesses and more about personality traits, mental characteristics (such as intelligence, education, tastes and hobbies), professional and academic interests, and so on.

To conclude this part of our text, I would like to share with you the excellent work of psychologist Cláudio Drews and, before that, an image that I translated containing the main symbols of Genograms. You will notice that the symbols may vary slightly, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the creator of a Genogram knows what each symbol in his Genogram means.

Main Symbols of Genograms

How to Make Genograms

Conclusion

In this text, the aim was to describe what a genogram is and how to make one. We can create a Genogram with a variety of objectives in mind, such as investigating more about a person’s medical history, analyzing emotional and affective relationships between family members, tracing possible genetic causes for physical and/or mental illnesses, in addition to other possible uses as patterns of unconscious behavior that are repeated from generation to generation or reappear after one or two generations.

In my master’s degree, I was once reading a text on the History of Ireland and I was struck by the fact that the Irish not so long ago considered that everyone had a family tree that went back to their grandparents only, that is, history of great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents was not considered because it was lost forever. What impressed me the most was the fact that, right after that, I realized that the same thing happens to us.

Who knows the story of your grandparents? Who knows the story of your great-grandparents? And after the great grandparents, huh?

The most common thing is that people don’t even know what their great-grandparents’ names were… who knew they knew information about health and illness, psychic tendencies, dreams and wills! The interesting thing about making a Genogram is to understand this lack of knowledge about our origin and go research. It is not uncommon to find someone who can tell us more about our family background…

Questions, suggestions, comments, please write below!

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