SHAPING YOUR FAMILY’S FUTURE
CHAPTER 4 Skill-Building Genogram Exercise
For this session, your genogram project takes you into some potentially tricky territory. You will be asking your family members to talk about themselves and the messages they received about who they are and their place in the world. You will be trying to identify personal roles and family rules. This might be difficult for some of your family members, particularly those who grew up in a time when therapy and the whole idea of self-examination was unheard of. So tread lightly and be sensitive to the boundaries of each person. Here again, you can get as much information from what someone doesn’t say as you can from what they do say.
GENOGRAM—STEP 3
1. Do a self-assessment. Take stock of your own role in the family. Where did you fit? What role did you fulfill? Did you like this role, or did it rub you the wrong way?
2. Describe your perception of your self. What kind of person would you say you are? What pivotal events shaped this self? What overt and covert messages did your family send you that either matched this sense of self or contradicted it?
3. List the various spoken rules that governed your behavior, as well as unspoken rules that may have even more strongly represented things that were taboo or absolute must- dos. Did you tend to obey the rules, bend them, or defiantly break them?
4. Write down your perceptions of the personality traits and roles of your siblings and your parents. This will become a reality check for what you hear them say in your conversations with them.
5. Set up conversations with as many of your immediate family members as are willing and available to talk. Here are some questions to get you started: • What was your role in your family? • Did you choose that role or was it given to you? • How did you feel about that role? • Did your role ever change? If so, what brought about the change? • Who was the leader in your family, the person who set the tone for how things
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