Genogram Example

Reading the structure: Emily (circle with a double outline, b. 1994) is the index person — the client. Her parents David and Karen are married (solid line); her brother Jake hangs from the same couple line. One generation up, David's parents George and Ann were married; George died in 2009 (X through the square, 1938–2009). Karen's parents Frank and Rose divorced — two slashes through their line — and Susan, on the far left, is David's older sister.

Reading the emotional layer: the triple line between Karen and Emily is fusion — an enmeshed mother–daughter bond. The zigzag between David and Jake is open conflict. The broken line up to George is a cutoff: David had stopped contact with his father before the death, which is exactly the kind of unresolved loss a therapist would flag. Emily and Jake's double line shows the siblings are close — a resource in the system.

Why it matters: in one glance the diagram raises the working hypothesis — an over-close maternal dyad balancing a conflictual paternal dyad, with a father who lost his own father through cutoff. That is a Bowen triangle you can point at.

Reading the structure: Marcus and Denise divorced (two slashes). Their twins Tyler and Beth (b. 2001) hang from a shared point on the old couple line — the joined angled drop lines are the twin notation. Denise remarried Alan (solid line), and Nora (b. 2012) is the daughter of that marriage, which makes her the twins' half-sister. Notice that the divorce line is kept on the page: remove it and the twins lose their parents.

Reading the emotional layer: Tyler and his stepfather Alan are in conflict (zigzag) — the classic stepfamily friction point. Beth and little Nora are close (double line). The dashed distant line between the ex-spouses says the co-parenting relationship is minimal but not hostile.

Why it matters: blended families are where plain family trees fall apart. Genogram notation keeps every couple line, so "who is whose child" stays unambiguous across remarriages.

Reading it: Sarah (b. 1990, double outline) is the patient. Notes under each symbol carry the medical history: her father Robert has hypertension, like his mother-in-law Edith; her mother Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019; her paternal grandfather John died of a myocardial infarction at 63; both John's widow Mary and Sarah's uncle Paul have type 2 diabetes; maternal grandfather Carl died of colon cancer.

Why it matters: written out as a paragraph, that history is a wall of text. As a genogram, the diabetes cluster on the paternal side and the two cancers on the maternal side are visible in seconds — which is why nursing and medical programs require a three-generation diagram rather than a list. This is the format to bring to a genetics or primary-care appointment.