Sometimes school counselors use genograms to help their students understand behavior and relationships and help set goals and career development. That is why mental health professional have clients build genograms, it helps them to see patterns and creates understanding of what can be done for healing and identify areas of what needs improvement.Įven couples who are struggling to improve their relationships can use genograms to understand the influences of their families in their relationship. When you get done you can see the extensive history of your family in terms of health like diabetes, heart diseases, alcoholism related death, cancer and other illnesses that has a high risk of being passed down in line or even behavior patterns. It means labeling them to understand helpful patterns. It involves digging up more to add to your ancestors or current family names. So, as you can see, it takes more in just building a family history of names, birthdates and death dates. Also using symbols to mark males, females, divorces, separations and deaths. It is a matter of using different symbols to mark those traits. You use different symbols to key in behavioral patterns, individual traits, historical happenings, health, cause of deaths, what kind of family relationships there were, unhealthy or healthy, alcoholism and drug use. The key is to visualize patterns and psychological factors that affect family relationships. You can go back as far as you can in generations.

Of course, you can always freehand it if you are great at drawing but sometimes it can get messy, unless you are a good artist and of course you can always use a computer art program to draw a template.Ī genogram looks like a family tree template, using names, birth and death dates of your family. Some are free and some you had to pay for and some offer a free trial. And there is software available online that can help you to build a genogram. Counselors, social workers use genograms to help their patients to understand their family relationships and history and how it affects them.Ī genogram is a picture drawing of a person’s family relationships and history. In building family trees, sometimes we want to go further and build a genogram.

Genopro software trial