My Genogram in the room with your Genogram

*Genograms are a visual representation of a person’s family, relationships between members, and medical and mental health histories.

I want to thank Dr. Monica McGoldrick, Dr. Ken Hardy, and Dr. Ana Hernandez for their influence and inspiration. The graphics illustrating the blog come from a Distinguished Family Lecture given by Dr. Monica McGoldrick while I was at Ackerman.

As a counseling student, I was taught to consider myself a blank slate in the therapy room. The client is the focus and I am the “expert” in the room to diagnose and determine what is a best practices course of action for treatment. This aspect of my training implicitly emphasizes a common racially based therapeutic misconception: The universal truth that the racial identity and background (family of origin and socialization) of the therapist are irrelevant to the process of therapy. It is not just the inner life of clients that is at play in the therapeutic process. The life of the therapist is an active ingredient in the interactions between therapist and client.

There is such a clear before and after for me, professionally and personally, after studying and training at Ackerman Institute for the Family in NYC. Parallel to my training at Ackerman, I trained with Dr. Ken Hardy, founder of the Eikenberg Institute for Social Justice in NYC. I completed a ten week intensive Racial Trauma training and then participated in The Saturday Series on Race which was a 3 hour group format, twice monthly for six months, based on his book The Enduring, Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness.

So many silenced and fragmented pieces of me came together during my training at Ackerman. I, for the first time, explicitly identified as a white woman. I carry with me the visceral imprint of the moment in class where the intellectual met the experiential. 

Dr. Ana Hernandez, my Ackerman professor, and a Clinical Fellow at the Eikenberg Institute for Relationships, engaged us in an experiential exercise. We chose a number and there was a corresponding question.

My number corresponded to the question “Have you ever ended a relationship because of race?”

What came to mind for me was my relationship with N***, A Tunisian man I met while serving in the Peace Corps. As I was answering the question I was acutely aware of feeling extreme discomfort. Dr. Hernandez redirected me to my question, reminding me to share the racial aspect of my decision to end the relationship. At that moment, I knew what race meant intellectually. I knew I could ask for clarification and she would kindly offer me that definition. I froze. Time slowed. I noticed feelings of shame, embarrassment and ignorance. I did not know what to say. The reasons I was sharing were not reflective of the racial component of my decision.
Dr. Hernandez kindly moved along and as she did, I came to my senses and wrote down the racial aspect of my decision: as a white woman I could not hide in Tunisia, my skin color stuck out, and as a white woman I was a target for hostilities and I felt “less than.” I felt powerless. I notice, as I write this, that these multiple identities we carry and are born into intersect. Identity is complex. Yes, this was a question asked through the lens of race. And I know I did not end the relationship only for reasons of race. Gender, religion, language, and Nationality were also part of that decision. 

So one small example of one apparently simple question opens up so much opportunity for interrogation of self and understanding of self and others. My genogram in the room with your genogram! This was a profound moment for me. A life changing experience. Identifying as a white woman brings feelings of connection and belonging to a people, to an ethnicity and culture. Learning about my Dutch, French and German cultural/ethnic heritage has connected me to ancestry. My white self and my white people also embody the immense intergenerational trauma, burdens and intense cruelty we waged and continue to wage against People of Color and Black People. We have genocided Indigenous people and animals and stolen, sold, and enslaved Black People. 

My genogram in the room with your genogram guides me to think systemically. I believe I am not just the daughter of my biological parents, I am also the daughter of my society. Being in the room together includes our ethnic and cultural ancestry, family of origin, race, gender, sexuality, religion, region, class, and SES and our family of origin.

Within our society we carry multiple identities. How do we deal with those identities that are held in place by the definitions and values of others? What kinds of belonging matter? I believe and experience that thinking in this systemic way requires and propels transforming dysfunction-seeking practices toward more creative, resilience-focused healing and restorative interventions.