Before a practitioner can work in a culturally sensitive way with clients, they must first see through their own cultural lens. Hardy and Laszloffy (1995) provide a tool for this purpose, structuring self-reflection across three generations with twelve precise questions.

Why "Cultural Competence" Is Not Enough

In North American family therapy of the 1980s and early 1990s, a concept now viewed critically was dominant: cultural competence as a bundle of knowledge one could acquire. The assumption: if you know enough about "the Turkish family", "the Catholic family", "the African American family", you can work sensitively. Kenneth V. Hardy and Tracey A. Laszloffy strongly disagreed in their now-classic paper The Cultural Genogram: Key to Training Culturally Competent Family Therapists (Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 21/3, 1995): cultural knowledge without self-reflection produces stereotypes, not sensitivity. The epistemological leap they demanded was a shift in the locus of learning—from the client to the practitioner.

Thus, the cultural genogram is primarily a training and personal-process tool, not a diagnostic procedure. It makes the practitioner’s own cultural identity visible, including their blind spots, before these encounter client systems in the counselling room. Only in a second step is the method also applied in client contact.

The Twelve Key Questions

Hardy and Laszloffy formulate twelve questions that every trainee family therapist works through during training. The questions can be grouped into three clusters:

Cluster 1 — Organising Principles: What values, beliefs, and behavioural rules structure the culture I come from? How does this manifest in everyday life—in concepts of time, the role of authority, approaches to emotion?

Cluster 2 — Sources of Pride and Shame: What is my cultural group proud of? What is it ashamed of? Which topics are spoken about openly, which are kept under wraps?

Cluster 3 — Intergroup Relations: Which other cultural groups are idealised, which are devalued? What historical wounds shape relationships with neighbouring cultures?

These questions are explored across three generations—grandparents, parents, one’s own generation—and symbolically anchored in the genogram. Hardy and Laszloffy suggest working with colours and cultural symbols: each cultural group receives a colour, cultural ruptures (conversion, migration, class mobility) are marked with distinctive lines.

Practice Guide: Practitioner’s Own Genogram Across Three Generations

The exercise does not begin on the drawing board, but with a seemingly simple question: Who am I culturally—and how do I know that? Often, a pattern already emerges here, which Hardy and Laszloffy describe as the "cultural taken-for-granted trap": those who belong to the dominant group in a society (in Germany: white, German, Christian or secular, middle class) often experience their own culture as "neutral"—and can therefore perceive the culturality of others as disproportionately salient.

The practical process follows four steps:

  1. Draw a standard genogram—three generations upwards, persons, connections.
  2. Mark cultural affiliations—ethnic, religious, linguistic, socioeconomic, regional. Multiple affiliations are possible.
  3. Enter cultural ruptures—migrations, conversions, class mobility, language loss.
  4. Symbol reflection—Which symbols did I choose? Which are missing? Where was I unsure how to "categorise" someone?

The fourth step is often the most fruitful—the moments of uncertainty reveal where the practitioner’s cultural schema reaches its limits.

Cultural Ruptures as Diagnostic Material

Hardy and Laszloffy emphasise that cultural identity is not static—families undergo ruptures that have intergenerational effects. Four types are particularly relevant:

  • Migration—geographical and often social change; explored in detail in Lesson 2.
  • Conversion—religious or ideological change; addressed separately in Lesson 4.
  • Assimilation—abandonment of origin culture in favour of the majority culture; often accompanied by language loss.
  • Class mobility—social upward or downward movement; long underexplored in German-language research, brought back into discourse by Didier Eribon (Returning to Reims, 2009) and Annie Ernaux.

Each rupture creates a dual membership, which in later generations is often experienced as "diffuse non-belonging"—a finding that converges with research on second- and third-generation migration.

From Self-Tool to Relational Tool

Only those who have worked through the method themselves can use it meaningfully with clients. In client contact, the focus shifts: rather than a complete cultural mapping, the aim is to ask relevant questions—which cultural themes does the client wish to bring up, which are taboo, which surface indirectly in symptoms? Hardy and Laszloffy’s key questions are not used as a checklist here, but serve as an internal map for the practitioner.

A frequently overlooked aspect: the counselling setting itself also has a culture. Whether working in a counselling centre of the Protestant church, a Muslim welfare association, or a private practice in an affluent neighbourhood—the institution sends cultural signals before the first question is asked.

Limits: The Risk of Essentialism

The sharpest criticism of the cultural genogram comes from migration sociology and postcolonial theory. Steven Vertovec (Super-Diversity, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30/6, 2007) argues that "culture" as a container concept no longer does justice to modern realities—people live in multiple, often contradictory affiliations, and static attributions such as "Turkish-German" or "Catholic-enlightened" fall short. Mark Hutter and more recent intersectional approaches (Kimberlé Crenshaw) also emphasise that categories such as ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation intersect—a single cultural attribution fails to capture this complexity.

The consequence is not to discard the cultural genogram, but to use it as a hypothesis-generating tool—not as a diagnosis. A client does not "equal" their culture; rather, they have connections to cultural spaces, which they themselves prioritise.

Practice Vignette

A 42-year-old therapist, Protestant and from an educated middle-class background in northern Germany, works with a Kurdish-Alevi family from Anatolia, second generation in Germany. In the first sessions, she is frustrated by the parents’ repeated lateness, which she initially interprets as "resistance". Only through her own cultural genogram work in supervision does she realise: punctuality in her family is not just politeness, but a moral category—her grandmother used to say, "Tardiness is a form of theft." She had unconsciously projected this assumption onto her clients. After reflection, she openly addresses the different time cultures—and the setting becomes more relaxed for both sides.

Research Status & Discussion

Hardy and Laszloffy’s approach is established in North American family therapy training; the Multicultural Family Institute (founded by Monica McGoldrick) has disseminated the method since the 1990s and systematically expanded it in McGoldrick, Giordano, and Garcia-Preto’s Ethnicity and Family Therapy (3rd ed. 2005, Guilford). However, empirical effectiveness studies on the method itself are limited—the majority of the literature is conceptual and case-based.

In German-speaking countries, the German Association of Systemic Therapy and Family Therapy (DGSF) has integrated the approach into its recommendations for transcultural systemic work, albeit in an adapted form—with greater consideration of the specific German migration history (guest worker programmes, late repatriates, refugee movements since 2015).

As already mentioned, the risk of reifying "culture" is a subject of critical debate. Vertovec’s super-diversity concept and intersectional approaches call for cultural identity to be understood as a bundle of overlapping affiliations, not as a closed block. A second debate concerns whether the tool works equally well for the majority culture and marginalised groups—Hardy himself has emphasised in later works (including Racial Trauma, 2022) that practitioners from the dominant group often show more resistance to the method, as it makes privilege visible.

Cross-References

  • Module 1 "Family Forms Worldwide" — cultural variation as a foundation
  • Module 2 "Sensitive Topics" — methodological approaches to shame and taboo
  • Module 3 "Family Therapy" — clinical applications
  • Module 4 Lesson 2 "Migration Genogram" — cultural ruptures in detail
  • Module 4 Lesson 20 "Practitioner’s Own Genogram" — deepens the self-reflective dimension

Further Links