Ch. 11: Growing Pains

The Roles We Play, a Serial Memoir

In my first year of grad school for marriage and family therapy, I was asked to gather all sorts of information about my family, organize it on paper, and psychoanalyze my family system by constructing what’s called a genogram.

A genogram is a diagram used by family therapists to map a family’s structure, dynamics, and patterns across at least three generations. Like a family tree, a genogram contains names, dates, and family constellations, but differs in the relational information it contains. It asks, Who’s cutoff in the family? Who’s so close they can’t seem to function without the other? Where do the conflicts lie? Who tends to get triangulated to reduce or diffuse tension? Who tends to play which roles and what invisible rules are upheld when everyone in the system colludes? The goal is to help the family members who are motivated to change learn to make shifts to take a more self-defined stance within their current contexts.

(In family systems therapy, we call this “differentiation of self”—the ability to stay healthily connected to the system without cutting off.)

By studying my own genogram, I began to notice the unspoken rules, roles, and relational patterns that governed my family system and influenced its functioning over time.

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