As some of you may know, I am currently enrolled in a graduate program studying Change, something that I know a thing or two about already. Even without the school. But anyway, in our last module we were taught how to prepare and analyze someone's genogram and to use it to help a person (or a company) make sense of how they got to where they are today. A genogram is a kind of family tree that not only traces the usual - births, deaths, marriages, etc, - but also the emotional relationships between family members and individual events and decisions that occurred during each generation.
We had to prepare a genogram on ourselves and then analyze it and present it to the group. I thought ho hum, nothing new here and besides, I think this may be a bit of a pain to do....before I began. Mostly because I come from a big family and had birthed a big family and it would be a challenge to fit all the squares and circles onto the page. I was not expecting to learn anything new because, after all, I already knew the story that I was going to tell.
I struggled with a couple of versions. Why is it that no matter how hard I try, when it comes to mapping out something on paper I always end of cramming everything into one corner? I started in the middle of the page, all nice and neat, and ended up with half a generation reduced to squiggles in the far left corner. On version #3 I switched to a bigger sheet of paper and finally got it all down coherently.
Let me tell you something about self discovery: it almost always creeps up on you, either that or it drops on your head from above, kind of like a piano falling from the sky. In either case, you do not see it coming.Turns out that doing a genogram is no different.
We were supposed to do at least three generations. After I got all the characters onto the page; squares for the boys, circles for the girls (of course we are circles, all nice and smooth and round) I started drawing the emotional connections; conflicted, fused, close, etc. My genogram begin to resemble a dropped plate of spaghetti. Through all the jiggly lines I saw something that I had never seen before in quite the same way.
It was that BOTH my parents had had a sibling who had died as a child. Of course I already had known the two stories: that my father's older brother had been killed at 13 when the car his father had been driving crashed and that my mom's older sister had died of pneumonia as a baby while her mother had been pregnant with my mom.This was not new news BUT I had never made the obvious connection that BOTH my parents had come from families touched by this same tragedy. And they had found each other and gotten married.
You probably still are thinking.....so? But this is where some of the learning comes from. Patterns of circumstances often lead to patterns of behavior. One influences the other. For both of my parents, losing a sibling profoundly effected their parents and their families, even though in the case of my mother, she never knew her sister. (Another creepy fact - my grandmother named my mother after her dead sister) Those effects helped shape who my parents became and what kind of person they each married (each other) and what unconscious pain or other residual issues they were willing to tolerate in the other because they recognized it.
And then there is the trickle down effect. My parents raised my 5 siblings and me so therefore lots of their sh-- became our sh-- and so on. These deaths have affected me - indirectly but profoundly all the same. Those dead children had never had a chance to screw up, they had remained forever frozen in angelic perfection in their parents' memory. My parents were the disappointing realities. Can you say guilt.?
Well anyway, this shed a bit of light on why my parents were the way they had been and where some of my hang-ups and other crap could have come from.
Well you are probably thinking enough psycho babble Mary, what has all this got to do with anything anyway? Maybe nothing. Or maybe so...
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