🌱 At Creative Fox Counseling, we believe that healing isn’t just about regulating the present moment — it’s also about understanding the story we carry. One of the most powerful tools for this is a genogram: a family tree that goes beyond names and dates to map patterns, relationships, and emotional dynamics across generations.
*you can skip to the end for a less complex version!
A Brief History of Genograms
Genograms were first developed in the 1970s by family therapists as a way to visualize family systems. Unlike a standard family tree, a genogram uses symbols, lines, and notes to show relationships, marriages, divorces, conflicts, losses, and alliances. Over time, they’ve been widely used in counseling, social work, and medical fields to trace not just family history, but also family health, resilience, and trauma patterns. Here’s an example Alexis had to do for graduate school:
Why Use a Genogram?
- Patterns Across Generations: Helps us see how behaviors, trauma responses, and resilience strategies repeat or shift.
- Making the Invisible Visible: Reveals dynamics like cutoff, loyalty binds, or cycles of neglect that may not be obvious until they’re on paper.
- Balancing Pain and Strength: We look not only at trauma but also at resilience, support, and healing passed down through families.
How to Get Started
1. Begin with yourself in the center.
2. Add levels for your sibllings, then your children (if any) and then note any significant people in your parents generation, or if you don’t have children, include your parent’s parents (grandparents). (use squares=Male, circles=Female, triangle=LGBTQIA2S+).
3. After you have the “shapes” draw a line that indicates the relationship between these people. Create a legend on a corner of your paper to remind you what each style of line means. Be creative, here are some ideas to get started:
You can continue to add important layers, like addictions or mental health issues.
3. Notice patterns: where does support show up? Where are the breaks?
Why It Matters for Healing
Genograms help us see that what feels personal often has roots in what’s historical and relational. Patterns of neglect, trauma, or survival strategies like fight/flight/freeze/fawn may have been passed down unconsciously. By mapping them, we create space for choice — to continue patterns that serve us, and to break those that no longer do.
🧬 A Note on Epigenetics
Research in epigenetics shows that both trauma and resilience can echo across generations. Stress, neglect, or safety experienced by parents and grandparents can influence how genes are expressed, shaping the way future generations regulate stress. This means that when we draw a genogram, we’re not just mapping family stories — we’re also honoring the biological imprints of survival and strength that travel with us.
✨ Try this practice:
Take a piece of paper and draw a simple genogram of your immediate family.
Notice where relationships feel close, where there are breaks, and where resilience shows up.
Ask yourself: What patterns do I want to carry forward? What do I want to change?
Here’s a worksheet to try, useful if genograms seem too fussy!
đź‘€ Next up: What role are you playing in your family system?