Module 4 “Specialize” — Lesson 26 · Reading time approx. 15 min

Families after flight often live scattered across continents, with estimated dates and relatives whose fate remains unknown. The genogram must be allowed to show this uncertainty — not smooth it over.

Connection to Lesson 19 — what is not repeated here

Lesson 19, “Genogram Work with Refugees and Asylum Seekers,” laid the foundations: stabilization before exploration, symbols for unresolved fates, the interpreter setting, implications under residence law, and self-care for practitioners. These foundations remain fully valid and are assumed here, not repeated.

This lesson deepens five points that were only touched on there or had no room: mapping transnationally dispersed families, handling missing or contradictory data, notating ambiguous loss following Pauline Boss, language work beyond the interpreter setting — and a basic stance that understands the genogram as a living document rather than a finished one.

Transnational Families in the Genogram

A genogram that silently assumes a family lives in one place does not fit many refugee families. Migration research has coined its own term for this: the transnational family — family members who live spatially separated yet maintain a sense of togetherness across national borders, as Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela describe in their edited volume The Transnational Family (2002). Celia Falicov added, in her widely cited article Working with Transnational Immigrants (Family Process, 2007), that such families live in “multiple contexts” at once — a Here and a There, both of which remain real. A genogram that draws only the household in Germany and treats the rest of the family as a footnote misrepresents this reality.

In practice, this means:

  • Country and location clusters instead of one surface. Subsystems are drawn grouped spatially — relatives living in Germany, say, on the left, those remaining in the country of origin on the right, further diaspora locations as their own clusters. A dashed line across a drawn border — already introduced in Lesson 19 as a geo-marker — connects these clusters without merging them.
  • Care and provision relationships as their own line types. Who sends money (remittances), who makes decisions for whom from a distance, who cares for whom by phone? These relationships are often stronger and more binding than geographic proximity would suggest. A distinct, clearly labeled line type makes them visible instead of hiding them under “contact exists.”
  • “Family by messenger” as a real quality of relationship. Daily voice messages, video calls, shared excitement across screens — for many transnational families this is not a substitute relationship but the relationship itself. It is worth noting contact frequency and channel on the genogram, rather than silently equating them with emotional closeness — or their absence with estrangement.

What matters is the stance behind this: transnationality is not a deficiency compared with the “complete” family at one residence, but its own, functioning family form — the practitioner’s task is to broaden the meanings of family, not to measure the transnationally lived family against a narrower concept.

When Documents and Data Are Missing — Documenting Uncertainty Honestly

The classic genogram according to McGoldrick, Gerson, and Petry runs on data: year of birth, date of marriage, date of death. For refugee families, exactly this data is often unavailable — not because no one knows it, but because birth certificates were lost, calendar systems differ, authorities in the arrival country assigned placeholder dates (“January 1” as an administrative stopgap for an unknown birth date is common practice), or because names are spelled slightly differently across documents due to differing transliterations.

The obvious temptation is to smooth over these gaps: entering a plausible year, calculating a concrete birth year from “roughly mid-twenties.” This creates false precision — a genogram that looks more accurate than the actual state of knowledge. This is not only methodologically unsound; it can become professionally risky if the genogram is later cross-checked against official records and inexplicable contradictions arise.

Recommended instead is a consistent, openly visible notation of uncertainty:

  • A tilde or “approx.” before estimated figures — “~1978” instead of a bare year that looks exact.
  • A source note for the estimate. Where does the figure come from? “According to the client’s account,” “per arrival registration” — this provenance is part of the information, not just the number itself.
  • A dotted rather than solid outline for people whose identity or relationship status is not fully clarified — for instance when it is unclear whether a named person is biologically related or is an “uncle” or “sister” in a broader, culturally different sense of kinship (more on this in the section on language barriers).
  • Note multiple spellings of a name side by side, rather than settling on one “correct” version, when documents are inconsistent. A parenthetical note “(also: …)” is usually enough.
  • No retroactive standardization. If a client corrects a figure in a later session, the old entry is not overwritten without comment; instead the correction is noted with a date — traceable also for practitioners who take over later.

The underlying principle: an honest gap is more informative than an invented number. Anyone who consistently shows in the genogram what is uncertain gives everyone who reads the drawing later — including the client herself — a realistic rather than a polished picture of the state of knowledge.

Ambiguous Loss — Pauline Boss’s Concept and Genogram Notation

With her concept of Ambiguous Loss — laid out fundamentally in Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (1999, Harvard University Press) and deepened methodologically in Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work With Ambiguous Loss (2006, W. W. Norton) — Pauline Boss described a form of loss that allows for neither clear grief nor clear relief: people who are physically absent but remain psychologically present. Missing, disappeared, or relatives left behind under unresolved circumstances are the core example — and anything but rare in refugee biographies.

Lesson 19 already introduced the question-mark marker for this situation: a person is not crossed out (deceased) and not depicted like a living person, but shown with its own, open symbol. What Boss’s concept adds is the reasoning behind this — and a consequence for how conversations are conducted that goes beyond the notation.

The reasoning: according to Boss, ambiguous loss is not a special case of grief that eventually turns into “normal” grief once enough time has passed. The uncertainty itself is the burdensome element — not an intermediate state on the way to certainty. That is why the goal of therapeutic work, per Boss, is not primarily to bring about clarification (which is often not possible at all), but to strengthen the ability to live with ongoing uncertainty — Boss describes this as building tolerance for ambiguity. For how conversations are conducted, this means: questions like “When did he die?” presuppose a clarification the client often cannot give. More sustainable are open formulations such as “What do you know about him, what do you suspect, what do you hope?” — knowledge, suspicion, and hope as three simultaneously valid categories, rather than merging them into a forced answer.

For practice with transnational families, another layer is added, one that Olena Nesteruk describes in a 2018 study on transnational grief published in Family Process: geographic distance from a death in the country of origin complicates caregiving and burial rituals — but can, paradoxically, also act as an emotional buffer, while obligations at the new place of residence favor a quick return to functioning. Nesteruk also describes that many immigrants already experience an anticipatory loss with migration itself — a grief for what was left behind, long before an actual death. Practitioners should keep this in mind when asking about “the loss”: there can be several, differently named losses, of which the one currently being discussed is only one.

Language Barriers Beyond the Interpreter Setting

Lesson 19 covered the triadic interpreter setting in detail. However, not every language barrier can be resolved through an interpreter — and not every session takes place with one.

Plain language as a methodological tool. When a client is only in the early stages of building German as a second or third language, it helps to explain the genogram work itself in plain language: short sentences, one idea per sentence, concrete rather than abstract terms. “We’re drawing your family” instead of “As part of the biographical exploration, we are creating a graphic representation of your family system.” This is not a simplification of the content, but of how it is conveyed.

The image as a shared language — with limits. A genogram can enable understanding where words are lacking: pointing together at the sheet, naming symbols together, confirming or correcting through nodding or shaking one’s head. What Lesson 19 already emphasized remains important, though: symbols too are culturally coded — they do not replace understanding about their meaning, they facilitate it.

Kinship terms that don’t translate 1:1. Many family cultures have extended kinship systems in which a term like “uncle” or “sister” designates people who, in the German understanding, would be cousins or not biologically related at all — for instance close friends of the parents, treated classificatorily like biological siblings. If such a term is translated unreflectively into the German nuclear-family scheme, incorrect relationship lines result. The only reliable approach is to ask, without questioning the client’s own certainty: “Is that your mother’s sister, or did you call her that because she was so close?” — both answers are relevant, just with different notation.

The Genogram as a Living Document — Stance Instead of Completeness

The preceding sections converge on a shared stance: a genogram with refugee families is never “finished” in the sense of a fully completed form. It is a document that becomes more precise, more corrected, and sometimes more uncertain again with each conversation — when an apparent certainty turns out, in the next conversation, to have been merely a supposition.

This tolerance for error must be actively communicated, not silently assumed. A simple sentence often carries far: “We’re drawing what you know today. If something changes later, we can adjust it at any time — none of this is final.” For clients who have experienced, in dealings with authorities, that information once recorded is treated as binding, this announcement alone can be a relief.

In practice, this can be supported by not “cleaning up” uncertainty and estimate notes at the end, but leaving them as a visible part of the finished genogram — even if this makes it look less tidy than a textbook genogram. A genogram that honestly shows what remains unknown is professionally more valuable than one that feigns completeness.

Practice Vignette

A four-person family — mother, two children, a grandfather in need of care — comes to a social-pedagogical family counseling service. The father was lost from sight at a border while leaving the country of origin; for more than two years there has been no confirmed news, only an unconfirmed rumor of imprisonment. A brother of the mother lives with his family in a neighboring country; a sister emigrated to a European country decades ago and regularly supports the family financially. The maternal grandmother died many years ago; no one still knows her birth year for certain — the mother only remembers that she was born “in the year of the great drought.”

The counselor draws three country clusters together with the mother. A dotted line with the note “supports financially, monthly” connects the sister with the household in Germany. She draws the father with the question-mark symbol from Lesson 19 — not crossed out. For the grandmother, she enters “~ year of the great drought (per account, no year known)” instead of inserting a guessed year.

The mother looks at the finished sheet: “It looks like who we really are. Not like on the form, where something has to be written everywhere.” In a later session she recalls a detail about the grandmother’s birth year, which the counselor adds with a date — the old note remains visibly crossed out, not deleted.

State of Research & Discussion

The empirical basis for the specific use of the genogram with transnationally living refugee families is — as with many systemic methods — primarily conceptual and case-based, not secured through randomized controlled trials. The research base on the underlying concepts themselves is more robust.

Bryceson and Vuorela’s edited volume (2002) substantially helped shape the concept of the transnational family in European migration research and argues for understanding it as an independent family form, not as a deficient deviation from the nuclear family at a shared residence. Falicov’s work (2007) transfers this perspective into the therapeutic context and provides the theoretical foundation for the “multiple contexts” view that this lesson makes usable.

Nesteruk’s qualitative study (2018) provides empirical evidence from interviews with immigrants on transnational grief: geographic distance affects grieving processes in both directions — complicating rituals, while partly relieving through the buffering effect of everyday obligations at the new place of residence. The study also supports the observation that migration-related losses are often multilayered: loss of homeland, anticipatory grief before a death, and the actual death itself — analytically distinguishable levels that are often merged in lived experience.

Pauline Boss’s concept of ambiguous loss is widely received in international grief and family research. There is discussion of how the emphasis on tolerance for ambiguity can be distinguished from avoidance of necessary grief work — Boss herself, in her practice volume (2006), places value on the goal not being repression, but a deliberately held dual perspective: allowing hope and grief at the same time, without having to decide for one or the other. For genogram work this means: the question-mark notation is not a dodge to avoid a decision, but a professionally grounded form of representation.

Cross-References

  • Module 4 Lesson 19, “Genogram Work with Refugees and Asylum Seekers” — foundations: stabilization before exploration, symbols for unresolved fates, the interpreter setting, implications under residence law
  • Article “The Interpreter in the Genogram Conversation” (art79) — deepens the language-mediation setting, which this lesson supplements with situations without an interpreter
  • Module 4 Lesson 21, “The Genogram in Grief Support” — Pauline Boss’s ambiguous-loss concept there with a focus on family loss patterns across generations, here with a focus on transnational and flight-related uncertainty
  • Module 4 Lesson 2, “The Migration Genogram” — general migration-related foundations on which this lesson’s transnational perspective builds

Further Links