COUC 601 Week 5 Family Genogram Project Example

Family Genogram Project: Three Generations of Coal Country and Steel Town, Cutoffs, Caretakers and a Pattern of Drinking

Building the Genogram

I built my genogram in GenoPro over three weeks, using the symbols described by McGoldrick et al. (2008) for marriages, divorces, deaths, close and conflicted relationships and cutoffs. The information came from phone calls with my mother, my paternal aunt and my maternal grandmother, now 88, along with a family Bible that records births and deaths back to 1912. The genogram covers four generations: my grandparents, my parents and their siblings, my own generation and my nephews. Where relatives disagreed, I noted the uncertainty rather than choosing a version. To protect my family's privacy, I have changed names in this paper, and I asked each relative I interviewed whether they were comfortable with the information being used for a class.

Family Structure

My father's family comes from the coal fields of eastern Kentucky. His parents, Earl and Ruth, had six children; Earl worked underground for thirty years and died of black lung disease at 61. My mother's family is Italian American from a steel town outside Pittsburgh. Her parents, Sal and Rosemary, had three daughters, and Sal worked in a mill until it closed in 1983. My parents met in Columbus, married in 1990 and divorced in 2002, when I was ten. My father remarried within two years, and I have two half-siblings from that marriage, along with my older brother and younger sister. My stepmother, Lynn, has been part of my life for twenty years, and the genogram shows her as a significant relationship with a close line to my younger sister. My mother never remarried; she lived alone with the three of us and later with Rosemary, which makes her household on the genogram a long chain of women caring for others.

Life Cycle Transitions and Critical Events

McGoldrick et al. (2008) encourage looking at how critical events cluster around life cycle transitions. In my family, they cluster dramatically. Sal lost his mill job the same year my mother left home for college, and the family describes that year as "when Dad started drinking." My parents' divorce came eighteen months after my father's younger brother died in a car accident at 34, a loss my father never talked about. The genogram suggests that the family rarely had time to grieve one loss before the next arrived, and that the divorce may have been, in part, a delayed reaction to grief that no one named. My own decision to leave engineering for counseling came the year my grandmother Rosemary was diagnosed with dementia and I helped move her into my mother's home.

Patterns Across Generations

The clearest pattern on my genogram is that men in both families met loss with alcohol and silence, while women met it by taking care of everyone else. Earl drank heavily after mine accidents; Sal began drinking after the mill closed; my father's drinking increased after his brother's death; and my older brother stopped drinking two years ago after a DUI. On the women's side, Ruth raised six children largely alone, Rosemary cared for her mother for a decade, and my mother now cares for Rosemary while working full time. I am the first man in my father's line to choose a caring profession, which may be a way of joining the women's role. Work itself is a pattern too: three generations of men in physically dangerous jobs, with injuries, lung disease and early deaths, suggest that the family's stress was not only emotional but bodily and economic. Seeing that helped me feel more compassion for the men I had mostly judged.

Bowen theory describes how such patterns pass through generations, a process Kerr and Bowen (1988) call multigenerational transmission. I want to hold this interpretation carefully, though. Miller et al. (2004) found that research supports the link between differentiation and chronic anxiety, distress and marital satisfaction, but that research on multigenerational transmission has rarely tested Bowen's own model. Genetics, economic hardship and regional culture may explain the drinking as much as emotional process does. Heavy drinking was common among the men in both communities, and the closures of mines and mills hit whole towns, not only my family. A responsible reading of my genogram has to hold the family's emotional patterns and these larger forces together.

Relational Patterns and Triangles

Two relational patterns stand out. The first is emotional cutoff. My father's family handles conflict by not speaking; two of his sisters have not spoken in fifteen years, and my father was cut off from his own father for most of his twenties. The second is a recurring triangle. After the divorce, I became my mother's confidant and my brother sided with my father, so the conflict between my parents continued through us. For years, holidays were scheduled around which parent each child would side with, and my younger sister, the only one who stayed close to both, often carried messages between the houses. A similar triangle appears a generation earlier, when my mother, the oldest daughter, took her mother's side against Sal's drinking.

Skowron and Friedlander (1998) describe emotional cutoff and emotional reactivity as two of the dimensions of poorly differentiated functioning, and both are visible across my family. I can also see where differentiation has grown: my aunt reconciled with her sister last year, and my brother's sobriety has made him the first man in his line to talk openly about grief. Those changes suggest that the family's patterns are tendencies, not destiny.

Culture and Faith

Culture shaped how my family understood its struggles. In the coal camps, men were expected to endure, and asking for help was weakness; in my mother's Catholic, Italian American neighborhood, family loyalty was everything and problems stayed inside the house. Both traditions valued faith. My paternal grandmother's Baptist church and my maternal grandmother's parish were lifelines, and my own faith grew partly from watching those women pray through hard years. Goldenberg et al. (2016) note that culture influences what families define as a problem and whether they seek outside help, which helps explain why no one in either family sought counseling until my brother's court-ordered treatment. Gender and class also shaped the pattern I described: the men's jobs gave them little control and much danger, and the women's caretaking was expected rather than chosen. Those forces were larger than any one person in the family.

Implications for My Counseling

This project showed me three things I must watch for. First, I may overidentify with caretaking clients and encourage them to keep carrying too much, as the women in my family did, when what they may need is permission to rest and to ask others for help. Second, I may react strongly to clients whose fathers drink or withdraw, and I will need supervision to separate their stories from mine. Third, my family's pattern of silence means I may be tempted to avoid painful topics with clients; recognizing that tendency is the first step to resisting it, and I will ask my supervisor to point out when I steer away from difficult material. I also bring strengths: an understanding of working-class and rural families, respect for faith as a resource, and firsthand knowledge that patterns can change, as my brother and aunt have shown. I plan to share parts of this genogram with my own counselor and to revisit it during practicum, adding what I learn as relatives share more of the family's story.

Conclusion

Building this genogram turned scattered stories into a picture. My family's history includes loss, drinking, silence and cutoffs, but also faith, endurance and recent signs of change. The genogram, as McGoldrick et al. (2008) present it, lets a family glimpse patterns invisible from within, and that has been true for me. Seeing these patterns clearly will not erase them, but it gives me a better chance of choosing a different response, in my family and with the families I will counsel.

References

Goldenberg, I., Stanton, M., & Goldenberg, H. (2016). Family therapy: An overview (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. W. W. Norton.

McGoldrick, M., Gerson, R., & Petry, S. (2008). Genograms: Assessment and intervention (3rd ed.). W. W. Norton.

Miller, R. B., Anderson, S., & Keala, D. K. (2004). Is Bowen theory valid? A review of basic research. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 30(4), 453-466. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2004.tb01255.x

Skowron, E. A., & Friedlander, M. L. (1998). The Differentiation of Self Inventory: Development and initial validation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 45(3), 235-246. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.45.3.235