The Genogram Project

The Genogram Project

 

“Love is the greatest gift that one generation can leave to another.”

Richard Garnett

 

I finished my spring semester last night.  This means that I am a little more than halfway through my grad school career at this point.  I now have a two week break before the summer semester starts along with my practicum.  Let the wild rumpus begin…

You would think that I would have come home and allowed myself to indulge in some pleasure reading and perhaps get up a little later in the morning this morning.  My body had other ideas because I woke up a few minutes before my alarm with this blog post itching to be put down on paper.

When I am finished with grad school I will graduate with 75 credits.  The program normally requires 60 but I am special and decided to pick up two concentrations and opted to spread my internship out across three semesters to make my life a little easier, thus the additional 15 credits. 

My concentrations are in co-occurring disorders and trauma.  Co-occurring disorders are mental health and substance use disorders that coexist in patients which is common and I started with that concentration when I entered grad school to get my masters in clinical and counseling psychology.  I quickly picked up a concentration in trauma also as the class I took in trauma reinforced what I saw weekly in my twelve-step meetings that many (but certainly not all) of the people I see in my meetings with substance use disorders also have a history with trauma. 

Gabor Maté is a renowned Canadian doctor who has worked for many years in the addiction field and holds a view (somewhat controversial) that addiction is a response to childhood suffering.  His views are embraced by some and spurned as narrow and simplistic by others but I feel that studying trauma can only bolster my skills before entering the field of psychology to help treat fellow addicts.

This semester I will admit I was not all that excited to take either of my classes.  I had Career Development and Couples and Family Therapy.  I prefer to work with people one-on-one and have no desire to counsel others on career choices.  As is usually the case, I got a lot more out of both classes than I expected.

In my Couples and Family Therapy class we had a genogram project we had to complete.  A genogram is basically a family tree but filled in with relational factors and is used in psychology to map out patterns.  It can be very revealing and highly effective when used properly.

We were tasked with graphing out our family trees from our grandparents down to ourselves and to our children if we had any and were to include siblings and cousins.  Once the people and dates of birth and any deaths were in place, we then layered in a color-coded set of “map” features to represent relational factors such as divorce, substance abuse, domestic violence etc…

I decided to concentrate on my mother’s side of the family and so filled in both sets of grandparents but only branched out the one side going down.  This project was labor-intensive.  Not so much in terms of gathering data, but in terms of bringing forth intergenerational pain.  We were only asked to share what we felt comfortable sharing. I am quite obviously an open book at this point and have felt the power of healing that shedding light on issues can provide, so I did not hold back.

When I presented this to the class and had my graph up on the screen from my PowerPoint, it was lit up like strings of multi-colored fairy lights.  There were some clear patterns, both shocking and sad.  Of course I already knew them, but knowing them and putting them down on paper and mapping them out and presenting them to others…  Two different things.

What I saw, were several generations of strong-willed women with large personalities who had emotional abuse spreading out from their names down to their children in ragged blue, squiggly lines.  Those children then had various emotional, domestic, mental or substance issues which spread out and down in other ragged and multi-colored squiggly lines.  It was heart-breaking but it also gave me renewed purpose.

After all, I too am a strong-willed woman with a large personality so I have to keep working on myself.  I don’t want any more squiggly lines coming from my name going out or down.  I don’t want any grandchildren I may be lucky enough to have standing in a classroom somewhere in fifty-odd years pointing to a genogram lit up like a Christmas tree. 

I want the buck to stop here as much as it can.  Dermot and Wren have already had to deal with enough and I hope to not be the cause of any more of their suffering.  I hope to be part of the solution.