Module 1 “Understanding” — Lesson 29 · Reading time approx. 10 min

A genogram shows who belongs to whom. It does a poor job of showing what happened when. This lesson introduces the family chronology — the second representation that McGoldrick and Gerson provide for as a fixed component of genogram work — and uses an example to show how only the chronology reveals a connection that the picture alone conceals.

Two Representations, Two Questions

The genogram answers the question of structure: who is who, who belongs to whom, which generation, which relationship. It is a picture that can be read at a glance — positions, lines, symbols. That is exactly where its strength lies.

And that is exactly where its limit lies. A genogram does show that a grandmother has died and that the family has moved. It does not show whether both happened in the same year, or five years apart. Spatial proximity in the picture does not mean temporal proximity in the family’s life. Two symbols standing next to each other in the genogram can represent events twenty years apart — and two symbols standing far apart can have happened in the same month.

For this reason, McGoldrick and Gerson provided for a second representation from the outset in their standard work on genogram practice: the family chronology, a simple, dated list of the important family events. Not a second picture, not an additional symbol system — just a sequence. It answers the question the genogram leaves open: not “who,” but “when,” and above all: “what coincided with what.”

Why This Is More Than Bookkeeping

One might object that this is merely a formality — data one would note down somewhere anyway. Clinically, it is more than that.

People rarely tell their story chronologically. They tell it thematically: first everything about childhood, then everything about the marriage, then everything about the illness. In this narrative order, coincidences disappear that would stand out immediately in a temporal order. A mother reports at length on her son’s illness three years ago. Elsewhere, in a completely different part of the conversation, she mentions in passing her separation from her partner. Only when both events are placed on the same timeline does it become apparent: it was the same year, even the same month.

This kind of coincidence has a name in family therapy: the coincidence of symptom onset and family event. Not every temporal proximity is meaningful — but every temporal proximity deserves the follow-up question of whether it is. Without a chronology, the question often never arises at all, because no one has ever placed the two dates side by side.

A related phenomenon is what are known as anniversary reactions: symptoms, crises, or behavioral changes that cluster around the anniversary of a distressing event — the date a parent died, the date of a separation, the age at which a sibling died. This, too, can only be recognized if dates are systematically recorded and compared, not reconstructed from memory as the need arises.

And finally, a chronology shows clusters that simply get lost in the genogram picture: several major events in one and the same year — a move, a job loss, and a diagnosis within twelve months. In the genogram, these three things appear in three different places, with three different people. On the chronology, they appear on the same line.

How to Compile It

The chronology is not created in a separate session. It is created in parallel with the genogram interview — as a second set of notes alongside the first.

During the conversation in which the genogram is created, dates come up constantly anyway: birth years, the year of the wedding, “that was when the children were still small.” These details often end up in the genogram only as a label next to a symbol — and there they easily get lost in the surface of the picture. Anyone who keeps a second, chronological list in parallel loses none of it.

It makes sense to pay targeted attention to the following classes of events, because experience shows they correspond most closely with symptom courses:

• Births and deaths — including those that, at first glance, do not seem to belong to the current question.
• Separations and divorces — including the date someone actually moved out, not just the date of the divorce.
• Moves, especially those that involved a change of school, a change of location, or the loss of a social environment.
• Onsets of illness — both physical and psychological, including in relatives, not only in the person seeking help.
• Job losses and other economic setbacks.
• Migrations — emigration, flight, any change of country or culture, even generations back.

The form in which this is recorded does not need to be complicated. A simple two-column table is enough: the year on the left, the event on the right, one line per entry. More important than the form is the discipline of really entering every date mentioned — even when it is not apparent at the moment what it might later be useful for.

Three Questions for Reading It

A chronology that is only collected and never read is pure filing. Its value emerges in the reading, specifically through three targeted questions.

First: What falls in the same year? The simplest and most productive question. You go through the list year by year and look for where several entries coincide. Often a cluster emerges here that was never named as such in the conversation itself, because the events came from different areas of life and were therefore told separately.

Second: What lies shortly before the symptom onset? The period from a few months to about two years before the onset of a symptom or a crisis deserves particular attention. Not because every temporal proximity would be causal — but because it is worth a question that would otherwise not be asked.

Third: Does a pattern repeat across generations? When kept across several generations, some chronologies show that certain events occur at a similar age — a separation in the mid-thirties, an illness onset shortly after the birth of the first child. This, too, is only visible on the timeline, never in the structural picture.

An Example

Hypothetical case example: A family comes to counseling because of the school refusal of their fourteen-year-old son. The genogram is drawn up quickly: two parents, two children, the paternal grandparents still living, the maternal grandmother deceased a few years earlier. In the picture, the family looks unremarkable — no rupture, no separation, no cluster of symbols for death or conflict.

In parallel, a small chronology is kept. The mother mentions in passing the year her own mother died. Later in the conversation, in response to a completely different question, the father mentions that “that one year” he was posted abroad for work and the family commuted for ten months. And later still, the son mentions, just as casually, that his best friend also moved away “back then.”

Only when the counselor places the three dates side by side after the conversation does it become clear: all three events — the grandmother’s death, the father’s posting abroad, and the friend’s move — fall in the same year, the year the son moved from primary school to secondary school. None of this appeared in the genogram. The deceased grandmother was a single symbol with a cross, the father’s posting did not appear in the picture at all, and the friend did not belong to the family anyway and so was never part of the genogram.

On the chronology, it appeared in three consecutive lines. The school refusal, which began two years later, was thereby given a different framing: not as the fourteen-year-old boy’s isolated problem, but as the possible delayed effect of a year in which, within a few months, he lost a close attachment figure, his familiar everyday life with his father, and his best friend — while the school changed at the same time. Without the chronology, this connection would probably never have come up.

Where the Data Come From When Memory Has Gaps

Not every family knows its dates by heart. The question “when exactly” is often met with a shrug, sometimes with a disagreement between two relatives who remember different years. This is no reason to give up on the chronology — it is a reason to work with approximate values and mark them as such.

An “around 2015” or a “when the son was in third grade” is still worth more than no entry at all. What matters is only keeping conjecture and confirmed date apart — for instance with a question mark after the estimated year. Anyone who later works with the chronology must be able to recognize which entries are reliable and which remain rough approximations.

It also helps to question several family members independently of one another, where the setting allows it. Differing memories of the same event are themselves a piece of information — they show how differently one and the same year was experienced within the family, and sometimes it is precisely this difference that is the real finding.

Limits: Coincidence Is Not Cause

The chronology makes temporal proximity visible. It does not thereby prove a connection. Two events in the same year can be entirely independent of one another — a year, after all, has only twelve months, and given enough recorded dates, something will inevitably coincide sooner or later.

The chronology therefore does not provide an answer, but a question. It shows where a follow-up question is worthwhile — not where an explanation is established. Anyone who presents a coincidence they have found as a cause too hastily risks imposing on the family an interpretation it would never have shared itself. The right response to a finding like the one in the example above is an open question to the family — “did you notice that all of this happened in the same year?” — not a ready-made verdict.

Just as little should the absence of a coincidence be taken to mean there is no connection. Some effects only show up years later, others not at all in observable symptoms. The chronology is a tool that sharpens the view — not an instrument that delivers a diagnosis.

Working Digitally

On paper, the chronology needs nothing more than a second sheet next to the genogram. Modern genogram software can additionally display life events on their own timeline, so that the structural view and the temporal view are available directly side by side — GenoEasy, too, comes with a timeline view for this.

Summary

The genogram shows a family’s structure, the chronology its sequence — and the two together show more than either on its own. Anyone who keeps a simple year-event list in parallel with the genogram interview and then works through it with the three reading questions finds coincidences, anniversary patterns, and clusters that remain invisible in the structural picture. The effort required is small — a second column in the notepad. The payoff, as the example shows, can make the decisive difference.