Genograms: Why Couples Come Together
A Genogram is like an elaborate family tree only it’s not about lineage. It’s about the emotional experiences couples have lived through in their families years before they met and how these experiences affect whether they have healthy relationships in the present. Genograms are about family subcultures - values, beliefs and attitudes - and how these shape our emotional behaviors in romantic relationships as adults.
When they come together all couples create a new and unique emotional system of their own but which is nonetheless influenced unconsciously by the experiences they had as they grew up. The value of Genograms is that they pinpoint those earlier, happy experiences that are being actively repeated and woven into their present relationships and the lingering, unhappy experiences that often become serious, unconscious obstacles in their struggle to create better lives in the present. As a couples therapist, I help piece together many Genograms while conducting couples counseling and therapy sessions.
Here are some examples of Genograms:
Bill and Carrie have been together for two years and they’ve just started making wedding plans. They care deeply for one another except for one minor problem. Bill likes to flirt openly with other women and on one occasion he was caught by Carrie with a woman he’d picked up in a bar and taken back to his apartment. Carrie also suspects other instances of Bill cheating on her that she can’t prove and this drives her crazy. She handles it by trying to control Bill like a prison warden, obsessively calling him three times a day to check up on him, questioning the bad influence his unmarried pals are having on him and showing up unexpectedly at his apartment late in the evening. More and more Bill and Carrie get into heated, no-win arguments in which Bill casually reassures Carrie that other women mean nothing to him and when this doesn’t work he accuses her of suffocating him. Carrie in turn accuses Bill of being a hopeless Don Juan, incapable of settling down with her or any other woman.
What Bill and Carrie learned from their families before they met
As a child Bill was always his mother’s pride and joy, the crown prince of the family. She pampered him, doted on him and responded to his every whim. In return for this privileged treatment, he was expected to cater to all of her wishes, from wearing clothing she picked out for him, maintaining good posture at the dinner table, having only friends that she approved of, etc. The list of things Bill had to do to pacify his mother was virtually endless. But he learned early on there were ways of getting around her. He’d either charm her into letting him do what he wanted and, if this didn’t work, he’d simply sneak behind her back. And whenever he got into serious trouble, he could always count on her to cover for him with his father. Today, in his relationship with Carrie Bill has this impish compulsion to test her, either by openly flirting with other women, occasionally sleeping with one or, more often than not, setting Carrie up to suspect something devious that he isn’t really doing. He also has this condescending way of telling Carrie that the women he plays with mean absolutely nothing to him. Well they may mean nothing to Bill but they mean a great deal to Carrie and all of it bad. Carrie’s father left her mother for another woman when she was seven years old and Carrie grew up feeling her father had “always wanted to get rid of us.” As far back as she can remember, Carrie has had a deep mistrust of men which in her adult life she’s always considered normal. Also, for years Carrie has secretly resented her mother for screwing things up with her father. Today, in coping with Bill’s half-hearted infidelities she falls into a compulsive frenzy to control him in a hopeless effort to prove she can be more competent with him than her mother ever was with her father.
How Bill and Carrie could create a happier life in the present
If Bill came to realize that his cheating on Carrie, whether real or designed just to drive her up the wall, is fueled by his unconscious desire to get real limits from his lover based on genuine trust and respect - things he never got from either his mother or father - this could free him to have a genuinely loving life with Carrie. It would also help if he were a great deal more sensitive to how excruciatingly painful his half-hearted infidelities are for Carrie and how they feed into her earlier emotional abandonment by her father, her mistrust of men and the shame she feels for her mother’s failure to hold onto her father. If Carrie, on her end, could take a lesson from simple child rearing and realize that the best way to handle Bill’s little boy hanky-panky with other women is to just leave him alone to stew in his juices, instead of jumping into a compulsive frenzy of phone calls, bed checks and putting down his drinking buddies. This could give Bill the breathing space he needs to realize that she’s the strong, dignified woman he really loves and not just another version of his controlling mother.
Rick and Sarah have lived together for several years and they’re deeply committed to one another. The one serious problem they have is that whenever they have serious disagreements, Rick withdraws emotionally and just walks away from her - in a restaurant, a supermarket, on the sidewalk - leaving Sarah angry, confused and isolated. When she returns to their apartment, she usually finds Rick curled up on the sofa. By then she’s given up trying to speak to him and she winds up going to bed alone where she sinks into deep despair over whether she can ever have a truly intimate, long-term relationship with Rick.
What Rick and Sarah learned from their families before they met
Rick had a deeply troubled childhood. His father and mother argued constantly, cheated on each other and his father threw his mother out when Rick was in his teens. Rick’s father was always hot-tempered with sudden mood swings. When he was a child Rick remembers his father hitting him frequently for little things and Rick would always get freaked out and run away from him. Shortly after his mother left, Rick started college and took pre-med courses mainly to please her, even though he had no real interest in the subjects. When he started failing his courses, rather than face his parents he took an overdose of valium tablets that almost killed him. A year later, after he started taking courses that interested him, he was able to calm down, finish his studies and come to a stable if troubled peace with himself. Today this peace is easily upset by any kind of intense emotional conflict with Sarah which Rick constantly tries to avoid at the cost of driving her up the wall. Sarah has good reason to be troubled by Rick’s silences. Her parents divorced when she was three and she remembers her mother always being emotionally distant and never really there for her. It also didn’t help that as Sarah grew up she watched both her mother and father get into other numerous romantic relationships that never lasted. In her worst moments she believes the same will happen to her and Rick. The more Rick closes down, the more likely she is to shout at him in hopeless frustration.
How Rick and Sarah are creating a happier life in the present
One night during a therapy session in which Rick was struggling to get clearer on his compulsion to run away from Sarah when things heat up, he suddenly started sobbing. “I just can’t handle emotions,” he said. “They’re too terrifying. I’m afraid I’ll turn into my father. I can’t bear the prospect of fighting with Sarah the way my parents fought. The worst part is what I might do to Sarah.” Sarah was amazed because she’d never seen Rick this open with his feelings before. In subsequent therapy sessions Rick has begun to reveal more of his fears to Sarah and he’s grown more tolerant of her shouting whenever he drives her crazy with his long-standing habit of sweeping conflicts under the rug. Sarah in turn is more gentle with Rick than she’s been in the past and they’re both starting to laugh more at each other’s foibles. The best part is that they’re now using couples therapy less frequently, mainly to save money because they’ve moved into a larger apartment. They’ve also started making plans for their wedding.
John and Laura are both hard working professional in their early thirties who’ve been married four years. They have a little girl named Susan who’s 12 months old. John resents Laura’s obsessive devotion to her work and has nearly reached the breaking point because she spends almost no time with Susan and leaves virtually all the feeding and diapering to him. “Susan barely knows her mother!” he bitterly complains. On top of this, John suspects Laura, who’s extremely flirtatious by nature, may be having an affair with someone she works with. During a recent therapy session, I got John and Laura to agree to set aside a family day in which they decided to visit the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, have dinner at a family restaurant and spend a restful evening at home. But right after they left the gardens Laura suddenly felt compelled to drop by her office to put the finishing touches on a project she’d been working on. John reluctantly agreed to drive her into Manhattan where they got stuck in a two hour traffic jam. By the time they got home, John was fuming, the baby was crying and Laura felt like a failure as a wife and mother.
What John and Sarah learned from their families before they met
John grew up in a working class family in which his father was totally devoted to the children. At one point his father actually turned down a job promotion in order to spend more time with the family. John’s mother was even more devoted than his father and doted on John, insisting, for example, on making his lunches long after he’d started working. John never had a serious girlfriend until he met Laura a few years after college. He’d always felt he’d have to wait until he hit fifty when he’d be able to afford a trophy wife. When Laura fell in love with him, he was absolutely dumfounded. It was easy for Laura to fall for John. Her father had always had a volatile relationship with her mother in which he flirted constantly with other women and may have been unfaithful. Laura’s mother was a perfect pillar of strength, a super caretaker who gave Laura and her brother everything they needed. Laura remembers always feeling inadequate compared to her mother. In school she became an overachiever to compensate for her low self-esteem. When she got to high school she started losing weight until she lost her electrolytes and had to be hospitalized. The Anorexia along with sporadic bouts of Bulimia continued all through college and, even today, she can’t tolerate John being near her when she eats and always kicks him out of the kitchen. Laura was also dumbfounded when John fell in love with her. In one therapy session she remarked somberly, “I never expected to get past thirty.”
The most striking thing about the John and Laura is that they never expected to be loved for themselves. John compensates by striving to be the ultimate, selfless caretaker like his father. Laura, on the other hand, doesn’t compensate at all. She just hides like hell from John, the same way she used to hide from her pluperfect mother. John and Laura have managed to weave the worst aspects of their earlier emotional experiences with their families into a classic co-dependent relationship. On John’s end it goes like this: No one is ever going to love me for myself, especially a beautiful, sexy woman like Laura. So I compensate by being the perfect husband and the greatest father Susan could ever wish for. On Laura’s end it goes like: John intimidates me exactly the way my mother did. But this time, instead of getting trapped in a deep pit of Anorexia and Bulimia, I’m going to do a merry tap dance outside my house – with work projects, business trips, socializing and flirting with clients and colleagues, involvement in local politics, etc – all designed to keep me from feeling intimidated by my incomparable mother/husband.
How John and Laura could create a happier life in the present
When John told me how Laura completely sabotaged their family day at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, I asked him why he just hadn’t let Laura take the subway to Manhattan and go home with Suzan, feed her, give her nap and settle down to watch the ball game. It never occurred to him to do this, i.e., to be true to his own needs instead of living for Laura. I further suggested that what Laura really did by insisting on going back to the office wasn’t sabotage but a way of unconsciously testing John to see if he’d let her get away with it and, on top of that, rub his nose in it by using him as her personal chauffeur. Laura really perked up at this. “Yes!” she shouted. And why not let me take Susan to the office as well, while you go home and watch the stupid ball game? Susan would have been quite cozy in her stroller with me on the subway. You never let me take care of her by myself! And this just feeds into my doubts about whether I can ever be a good mother.” John tried to take this in but I had the feeling only half of it got through to him. I then suggested three things that he and Laura could do to break out of their avoidant – co-dependent dance:
1. John should let Laura have more responsibility for Susan, alone, without hovering over the two of them like a super caretaker warden.
2. Laura should start working one-on-one with an eating disorders therapist, a woman who can help her work through her lingering fear of inadequacy which still gets played out sporadically in the secret rituals of her Anorexia and Bulimia.
3. John should start working one-on-one with a male therapist to help him out of the super caretaker fog he’s lost himself in and encourage him to face and work through his unconscious fear of ever being loved for himself by Laura.
Is there any hope for John and Laura? If Laura could just stop running long enough to make use of John to see her own internal beauty. Yes, but how can she do this while John in the guise of an exemplary caretaker mother - a role he hides in to deny his deeper feelings of worthlessness – always makes her feel inadequate? In spite of everything, they sometimes have moments in which they truly reflect each other’s beauty back to one another, the beauty lost to themselves alone. The elusive goal of their couples therapy is to encourage them to have more of these precious moments together.