Genogram Symbols

A genogram uses a small set of standard shapes and lines. Squares and circles are people, horizontal lines connect couples, vertical lines connect parents to children, and colored lines show the emotional quality of a relationship. The chart below is a quick lookup; every symbol and its variants are explained in full further down.

Every person on a genogram is represented by a shape that encodes their gender. These shapes are the first things you place when building a genogram, and every relationship line, life event marker, and condition indicator connects to them.

Basic Shapes

The three base shapes represent identified gender. Males go on the left of couple pairs, females on the right.

Transgender Symbols

The outer shape represents identified gender and the inner shape represents biological sex. A square with an inner circle means this person identifies as male and was assigned female at birth.

Sexual Orientation

A small triangle inside the person symbol indicates non-heterosexual orientation. A solid triangle means homosexual, a dashed triangle means bisexual (McGoldrick, 4th ed., p. 65).

Life status indicators are markers added to person shapes to show whether someone is alive, deceased, or unborn. An X drawn through the shape means that person has died.

Birth year, death year, and age are recorded directly on or near person symbols. Couple relationship lines can also carry date labels (e.g., the year of marriage or divorce).

Birth and Death Years

Birth year appears above the person symbol on the left. For deceased individuals, death year appears on the right, separated by a dash.

Age Display

When enabled, a person's current age (or age at death) appears centered inside the symbol. Age is calculated from the birth and death dates automatically.

Date Labels on Relationship Lines

Couple relationship lines can include date annotations. Marriage lines commonly show the wedding year (e.g., "m. 1997"), and divorce markers may show the year the marriage ended. These labels appear near the center of the couple line, making it possible to reconstruct a family's relationship timeline from the genogram alone.

Medical conditions are shown by filling portions of the person symbol with colors. Each condition gets a unique color, and the symbol is divided into sections (halves, quarters) for multiple conditions. A color-coded legend is always included.

Horizontal lines connecting partners. There are 25 couple types in 9 categories. Color tells you the legal status: black for marriage, blue for partnerships (engagement, cohabitation, dating), pink for affairs, red for separation and divorce markers, gray for unknown. The line pattern tells you formality - solid for the most formal, dashed for established, dotted for informal.

Marriage

Solid lines. Black for active marriage, red with slash markers for ended states.

Engagement

Drawn as dashed blue lines with long dashes.

Legal Cohabitation

Drawn as dashed blue with a dash-dot-dash pattern.

Cohabitation

Drawn as dashed blue with a dash-dot-dot-dot pattern and a house marker.

Non-Sentimental Cohabitation

Drawn as dotted blue with wide spacing and a house marker.

Committed Relationship

Drawn as dashed blue with medium-length dashes.

Dating

Drawn as dotted blue with close spacing.

Casual / Affair

Temporary relationships and affairs. Affairs use pink to stand out.

Other

Vertical lines from the couple's family bar downward to children.

Lines between any two people showing how they actually get along - not their legal relationship, but the emotional reality. In McGoldrick's framework, relationships fall on a continuum from emotional distance, conflict, and cutoff at one end to closeness and fusion at the other. 39 bond types in 11 categories. Color tells you the tone (green = positive, red = conflict, blue = abuse, gray = neutral). More lines means more intensity. Markers like arrows, circles, and zigzags add specifics.

Neutral

Gray lines indicate a relationship that exists but carries nothing particularly warm or hostile about it, like two relatives who exchange Christmas cards but never call.

Disconnection

A line broken by gaps - someone deliberately cut off contact. An uncle who has not spoken to his mother in ten years and refuses to attend family holidays is in cutoff, not just distance.

Conflict

Red lines. These people argue, resent each other, or are openly hostile. Discord means active tension - two sisters who fight at every family dinner. Hostile is more intense and persistent. Distrust is quieter - they do not fight, but neither believes a word the other says.

Positive

Green lines. One line is basic goodwill - you get along fine. Two lines means genuinely close - you call each other when something happens. Three lines is the strongest, but be careful: three green lines means very close, while three red lines means fused (see Enmeshment below).

Enmeshment

Three parallel solid red lines represent two people so entangled that one cannot function independently of the other. A mother who calls her adult son five times a day and falls apart if he does not answer is showing fusion: the boundary between two people has dissolved. Enmeshment is a core concept in Bowen family systems theory.

Hostile Variants

These combine proximity with hostility - people who are in each other's lives and fighting. Close-hostile is the couple who bicker constantly but spend every evening together. Fused-hostile is the "can't live with you, can't live without you" dynamic.

Violence

A tight red zigzag indicates physical violence in the relationship. The proximity prefix (distant, close, fused) shows how entangled the people are beyond the violence itself, with fused-violence indicating that the relationship is severe and neither person can separate from the other.

Abuse

Blue zigzag with an arrow pointing from the person doing harm toward the person being harmed. Different fill styles distinguish physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Neglect uses gray instead of blue because it is passive - harm through absence rather than action.

Control

Solid red with a chevron (arrow-like marker) pointing toward the person being controlled. Dad monitors every dollar Mom spends and checks her phone - that is controlling. A sibling who guilt-trips you into doing what they want - that is manipulative. Fearful of is drawn differently, as a dashed amber line with a filled arrow pointing at the person who is feared, like a child who is frightened of an aggressive stepparent.

Focused

Gray lines with a chevron. One person is preoccupied with the other, not necessarily in a negative way. A grandmother who talks about her favorite grandson constantly is "focused on." A parent who fixates on everything their teenager does wrong is "focused on negatively." Caretaker is the exception: a green line with a double arrow pointing to the person being cared for, like an adult daughter looking after her aging father.

Other

This reading order matters because a visually striking emotional line can distract from a simpler structural fact, like a divorce, remarriage, or adoptive connection, that explains the family context more directly.

Example: Reading a Family Genogram

Try applying the three steps to the genogram below before reading the walkthrough.

Example Family GenogramView Only|Made with Genogram Pro

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1. Structure. Three generations are visible. The top row has two couples: Charles and Dorothy (divorced in 2004, note the slashes), Charles remarried to Evelyn (married 2007), and Arthur and Beatrice (married, Arthur deceased indicated by the X through his symbol). The middle row shows Henry and Fiona (married), plus George. The bottom row has four children: Ian, Julia, Kevin, and Lydia (a pregnancy, shown as a triangle).
2. Patterns. Notice how relationship difficulty concentrates around Henry. He has a hostile bond (red zigzag) with his father Charles and a fused bond (triple red lines) with his mother Dorothy. Meanwhile Fiona has a close bond (double green lines) with her mother Beatrice but a cutoff (broken red line) with her brother George. The emotional intensity in one generation connects to the divorce in the generation above.
3. Color and detail. Green lines between Fiona and Beatrice indicate warmth. Red lines between Henry and his parents signal trouble: the zigzag with Charles means active hostility, while the triple parallel lines with Dorothy mean fusion (enmeshment). The red dashed break between Fiona and George is a cutoff, meaning they have deliberately stopped contact.

Specific family situations explained step by step - how to draw them, common mistakes, and real-world examples: