Genogram Journey,The

Book excerpt: The godmother of genograms revises her revelatory work that explores how to reconnect with your past and invent a new future. This notable work poignantly explains how a tool of family history—gathering the genogram, or a basic family tree—can help us to better understand and mend family relationships and dynamics. Here, fully updated for the first time, Monica McGoldrick's book elaborates on the ways in which genograms can reveal a family's history of estrangement, alliance, divorce, or suicide, exposing intergenerational patterns that prove more than coincidental. Weaving together photographs and genograms of famous families—including the Kennedys, the Freuds, and the Fondas—she sheds light on a range of complex issues such as birth order and sibling rivalry, family myths and secrets, cultural differences, couple relationships, and the pivotal role of loss. In this important work, readers learn to mine previously untapped information about their own family patterns, leading to a reconnection to home and a deeper sense of identity. Originally published as You Can Go Home Again.