would meet everyone she ever knew (Satir et al., 1991). When family counselors meet new families, the people from their past whom they are most likely to reexperience come from their own families of origin. So how can you come to understand your own family well enough that you can know what will push your buttons and then how to challenge your automatic responses?
There are several avenues that you may find useful. The first is to create a genogram of your family, going back at least three generations (counting your own) to the families of your parents’ parents. Getting this information will probably require you to interview people in your family and perhaps ask questions that are personal and that you never would have dreamed of asking before. Even if this is difficult to do, push yourself further than you would normally. Call people up. Go home for a visit. Send letters seeking information. Teach yourself to just listen and consider information without reacting as you normally might.
Genograms are explained in more detail in Chapter 7 on Bowen’s multigenerational family therapy. They are essentially structural maps of at least three generations of your family’s life. Creating a personal structural map, however, is just the beginning. Within the map, there will be room to note all of the relational connections that happened in your family and to indicate the emotional ties and reactions too. Do not be surprised when old emotions surface just from the process of creating your own genogram. This happens quite often; it is supposed to happen. Take careful note of the people and situations that trigger these emotional responses in you.
Use the genogram to tell a story that is representative of each of the relationships in your family of origin as well as significant relationships between you and members of your extended family. What themes run through these stories? What can you learn about your cultural affiliations from these stories? What have you learned about men and women? What meanings are attached to these stories that still seem to permeate your life?
Take some time to put an adjective next to each person in your genogram. Choose an adjective that represents the quality that the person brings to your life. Next to your parents and your siblings, put three adjectives instead of one. Think of the adjectives you assign to your parents as relational (Bitter, 1988). If you give your father the adjective “critical,” ask yourself in what way he was critical of you and how you felt. If you say your mother was “loving,” in what way did you feel loved by her? What tones of voice did each parent use? How did they phrase their criticism or offer their love? What meaning did these experiences have when you were little? What meaning do they have now?
We often find an initial place in the world in relation to our siblings. Which of your siblings was most different from you? In what ways? Which of your siblings was most like you? Again, in what ways? Have these relationships stayed the same or changed over the years? What meaning do you associate with the adjectives that you assigned to yourself and each of your siblings?
You can take the adjectives that are part of your three-generation genogram and think of them as a wheel of influence (Satir et al., 1991). Put yourself in a circle in the middle of a large piece of paper. Draw spokes out from that circle leading to each of the adjectives and the people who represent those adjectives. Make the spokes of the wheel of varying lengths to indicate which of the qualities, traits, or descriptions you want to keep close to you and which ones you want to keep at a distance. What influence do the various adjectives actually have in your life? My wheel of influence is shown in Figure 3.1.
FIGURE 3.1 • Jim’s Wheel of Influence
Another tool you may want to create is a historical timeline of your family of origin. Starting with the birth of your oldest grandparent, mark by year all of the comings and goings in your family up to the present time. When were all of the people in your family born? When did they go to school, change schools, or graduate? When did each family member marry, move into a new home, have children, launch children, start jobs, change jobs, or retire? Who died and when? Put all of this information on top of a year-by-year line. Below the line, note what else was happening in history during the various periods of your family’s chronological development. To give you an idea of how this might look, I have included a small section of my own family timeline in Figure 3.2.
Putting together all of this information may in and of itself raise all sorts of emotions and old memories. We are all human. So were all of our family members. Some did better with us; some did worse. We were all imperfect. Having the courage to be imperfect is also having the courage to be more fully human—and to validate and respect the humanness of others. If you are in a course on family counseling, you may find it useful to share what you learn about yourself with your classmates. Sometimes telling your story to others helps you organize it and own it. Sometimes the questions that others ask open up new avenues of investigation.
As you begin to learn more about yourself and your family of origin, you may want to explore your life through personal counseling. Although I believe that couples and family practitioners can gain a great deal from being a client, I am not in favor of requiring personal counseling for all trainees. Such a requirement flies in the face of freedom and is inconsistent with the democratic ideals that are part of my own life. Still, it is hard for me to understand how anyone can flourish in the helping professions without a dedication to self-reflection, self-awareness, and personal and family explorations.
Counseling should not be limited to those who suffer from pathology or dysfunction. Some of the field’s most important work has been in supporting the growth and development of those who help others. Counseling can help you examine your own attitudes, values, convictions, beliefs, and needs. Counseling can help you understand yourself and your own family so that you will not inadvertently impose your own values on the families you see in practice. And as you begin to practice, ongoing personal counseling and supervision can offer you chances to understand and reconsider the issues in your own life that occasionally interfere with your ability to help others. The more we can learn about ourselves, the less likely we will be to enter into countertransference—and the more likely we will be to be fully present with the families we meet in counseling.
Hanging Hats and Clearing the Mind and Heart to Focus
Virginia Satir was one of family therapy’s great models of presence when working with families. Her full focus was on the family and each of its members. Her focus was characterized by congruence and allowing the full use of her senses from seeing and hearing to touch and intuition. Her clarity of heart and mind is not something that everyone seems capable of achieving, but she always claimed it could be learned: It did not have to be innate. Here is an exercise she called Hanging Hats that she used to help people become more fully present (see Satir et al., 1991). She used this name for the exercise to emphasize the natural human tendency to proj ect internal images onto others, to hang old hats on the new people we meet. This kind of exercise is a useful step in gaining Bowen’s differentiated self.
FIGURE 3.2 • A Small Segment of Jim’s Family Timeline: 1957–1961 (Ages 10–14)
Satir would start by asking those who wanted to be family practitioners to close their eyes. This was not an attempt to shut out the outside world; rather, it was a decision to focus internally. She wanted those who would help others to start with themselves, focusing on what was natural and even physical. Her first suggestion was almost always to “pay attention to your breathing; just notice that air, which gives us life, comes easily in and out of
