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In other words, key moments can represent triumph, failure, fear or any other emotion. What qualifies as a key moment? I typically use my own life as an example: I tell clients about the devastation I felt when my father died unexpectedly when I was 22, the joy of being the person to deliver my daughter (also unexpected) 10 years later, and the transformation I began after being fired at age 51 and recognizing that my life’s work as a journalist was over. The assignment for the geno-chronology asks clients to identify “key moments” in their life - as few as two or three, or as many as 20 or more. Already in my career, I’ve observed that clients typically are more eager to get into work if they’ve done a homework assignment. The purpose is to continue to engage the client in the process of therapy between sessions. When clients recognize and understand their dominant narrative, they often send signals - by their excitement or impatience - that help me decide to begin the geno-chronology.Īs with the three-word dominant narrative, building the geno-chronology usually starts with a homework assignment. At our next meeting, we discuss the client’s identified three-word narrative to learn more details about current feelings and how things got to this point. I typically ask clients to do this as a homework assignment at the end of an initial assessment session. Toward that end, when I work from a narrative perspective, one of the first things I do is encourage clients to identify a “three-word dominant narrative” that brought them to counseling (see my previous article “ Counseling from an editor’s perspective”). One of the principal jobs of a therapist is to help create moments of insight for clients.

My goal was not just to seek connection with specific family relationships or occurrences, but to allow clients to themselves identify and discuss the reasons behind key moments in their life - the “dominant narrative” that brought them to counseling - that may or may not be connected to their family history.

When I started working full time in September 2019 for CareNet Counseling as a licensed clinical mental health counseling associate, I decided it was time to merge chronology and genogram. In genogram work, chronologies have typically been used as a side tool to flush out connection between family occurrences and a specific presenting problem. So, why wouldn’t helping clients develop chronologies - along with a genogram - create a more cohesive story for my clients? To be sure, chronologies are not something new to practitioners and social service agencies as a means of tracking incidents relevant to a presenting client. But without an understanding of the underlying chronology, the meaning of the story falls apart.” Other events might be summarized or ignored.

“That story is a series of ‘scenes.’ The timeline helps identify the scenes to draw out. “Once you have the events laid out on a timeline, you can pinpoint the most meaningful ones for the purpose of telling a story,” Zerwick told me in an email conversation. Phoebe Zerwick, director of journalism at Wake Forest University and a columnist I worked with when I was metro editor for the Winston-Salem Journal, refers to chronologies not just as a way to organize stories, but as a way to understand stories.

In America’s Best Newspaper Writing, Christopher Scanlan and Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute note that when writers write in chronological order, they invite readers to enter a story and stick with it. I began to think about how writers create a cohesive narrative in fiction or nonfiction. Might there be a way to do more with a genogram - a way to put my narrative experience into it? So, as I’ve often done since beginning my second career as a clinical mental health counselor after 35-plus years as a journalist, writer and editor, I put on my critical thinking cap.

Although the genogram helped promote conversation, I found I couldn’t always use the information gathered to help connect the issues presented by clients.

Here was a tool that instantly created dialogue between counselor and client as they reviewed family history, dynamics, health, socioeconomic data and more.īut a funny thing happened when I began incorporating the genogram into my own work as an intern. The first time I watched my internship supervisor use a genogram, I became enamored.

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Purpose of a genogram in social work