Psychotherapy and the Family Tree

Our family shapes us, and then we shape our families. Growth and healing often involves facing the frequently shameful truths of your family, forgiving them all, rejecting their negative influences, and moving on with your life. There’s the tendency to keep trying to get an impaired parent’s approval, love, protection, support that the parent was never able to give. We carry the hopefulness/hopelessness in out attitudes long after adulthood, and frequently after the parents are dead.

There’s a joke about a young daughter asking her mother why she cuts off the ends of the ham when she puts it in the pan to bake. The mother replied that her own mother always did that, and there was no other reason. They later asked grandmother, who said that that’s the way ham should be prepared because that’s how her own mother cooked. They went to ask great grandmother, who said she cut the ends off the ham in the old days because her pan was too small. Traditions are often carried on long after their apparent necessity is gone, especially traditions of compulsions, emotional problems, inadequate parenting, etc.

Often, an emotional state is triggered when one of our own children reach an age when our own neglect or abandonment/abuse was started or at its height. Our suffering is consciously or subconsciously reactivated through the necessity of providing for, or protecting, our own child, and sensing that the parenting was insufficient for ones self. Giving to your own child what you never got will often trigger strong emotions that can be surprising, powerful, and yet often remain subconscious. The genogram is a standard intake tool which quickly documents the influences between and among the generations that can be influencing the current concerns. The genogram is the beginning of the process of filling in the personalities, interactions, stories and fates of the family members.