Cultural genogram

Draw the family structure first, across at least three generations, as in the steps for how to make a genogram, and then add the cultural layers:

• Pick the identities you will track. Choose three to five layers, such as ethnicity, language, religion and generation since migration for a family in distress after a move, or religion, gender and class for a couple who disagree about faith.
• Add each person's background. In the editor, select a person and open Background. Countries of origin are drawn as flags beside the name and race or ethnicity as a line of text under it, and religion, income level and education are drawn as small pills below, with a religion icon, one to five dollar signs, or an abbreviation such as BA. The religion pill has a dashed outline when Non-practicing is turned on, and every country, religion, income level and education level you use is added to the key.
• Add language and anything else as a property. Open Other information, click Add property, name it Language, turn on Available on all people and Show in diagram, and type the languages each person speaks. On paper, write a short label under each person instead, such as "Punjabi, Sikh", and add a key for any colors or symbols you use.
• Write down each migration. The editor has no migration arrow, so write each move with the countries and the year in a note beside the person, as in "Moved from Punjab, India, to New Jersey in 1972" beside Harjit. Write each stage of a migration separately, because a grandparent who moved from Vietnam to France and then to Canada has a different history from one who moved straight to Canada.
• Mark ruptures and conversions. A rupture is any point where a cultural identity stopped being passed on, such as a generation that did not learn the family language, a member who left the family religion, an adoption across ethnic lines or a marriage across a class boundary. Write a short note next to the person, such as "converted to Catholicism, 1962", and record it as an event, not as a deficit.

Hardy and Laszloffy built the cultural genogram around questions of pride and shame. For each cultural identity on the genogram, ask the family two questions:

• Pride. Which parts of this identity does the family celebrate, name openly or pass deliberately to the next generation?
• Shame, secrecy or silence. Which parts are hidden, played down, contradicted or treated as something to overcome?

The answers are rarely clean, because one identity can be a source of pride and of shame at once, or pride for one generation and shame for the next. Write both on the genogram where they apply, for example a note that a father's ethnicity was a source of strength for him and something his own parents avoided. Many of the patterns clinicians see in culturally diverse families, such as language loss, religious estrangement, class dissonance and hidden identities, become visible only when shame is mapped alongside pride.

Questions about where each side of the family came from, its languages and its faith are on the genogram questions page, next to the label or note drawn for each answer.

A spiritual genogram is a narrower form of the cultural genogram, used in pastoral counseling and faith-integrated therapy, with religion and spirituality as its only layer. Marsha Wiggins Frame introduced it to family therapy in a 2000 paper in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. For each person, record:

• Their religious tradition or denomination
• How closely they practice
• Spiritual experiences they consider formative
• Conversions, deconversions and moves between traditions
• Their role in a religious community, such as clergy, lay leader or member
• Spiritual estrangements and reconciliations

A spiritual genogram is most useful when faith is a presenting issue, such as interfaith conflict, religious trauma or grief over a loss of belief, or a resource the family can draw on, such as a faith community, ritual or prayer.

A faith genogram is the same diagram under another name. Where the two terms are used differently, a faith genogram is about organized religion, such as the congregation a family belongs to, clergy in the family, baptisms and weddings, and periods of attendance and absence, while a spiritual genogram also includes spirituality outside any tradition. Use the term your client recognizes.

Sandra Rigazio-DiGilio, Allen Ivey, Kara Kunkler-Peck and Lois Grady described the community genogram in their 2005 book Community Genograms: Using Individual, Family, and Cultural Narratives with Clients (Teachers College Press). A standard genogram is about the family itself, while a community genogram is about the cultural communities around a person, with the person or family in the center and these groups around them:

• Religious or faith communities
• Ethnic or cultural communities
• Schools and colleges
• Workplaces and professional groups
• Neighborhoods and the places the family comes from
• Political, activist or civic groups
• Online communities

A community genogram is drawn in a similar way to an ecomap, but an ecomap is drawn to map a family's resources and services, and a community genogram to map where the family belongs culturally.

• Counselor and therapist training. Graduate programs for therapists, counselors and social workers ask trainees to draw their own family of origin, name the cultural identities they inherited and trace the pride and shame in each, so that they build cultural humility before they see clients.
• Multicultural couples. When partners come from different cultures, a therapist can draw a cultural genogram for each of them, and a conflict over raising children, extended family or money can often be traced back to patterns neither partner had named.
• Immigrant and refugee families. The moves, the languages kept or lost in each generation and the religious changes after arrival can all be drawn on one diagram, and a family that finds the story hard to tell in order can point to it instead.
• Self-of-the-therapist work. Clinicians come back to their own cultural genogram as their identities and clinical work change, because new relationships, losses and clients alter how they see their own family history.
• Career counseling. Career counselors use a related genogram, the career genogram, with each relative's job written under the name.