Module 2 “Applying” — Lesson 14 · Reading time approx. 16 min

When an aunt holds the same status as a mother in conversation, that’s not a special case at the margin of the form — it’s a sign that the form itself was built too narrow.

Connecting to previous lessons — what isn’t repeated here

Module 4, Lesson 1 “The Cultural Genogram According to Hardy & Laszloffy” already laid the groundwork: the twelve key questions about the practitioner’s own cultural lens, the self-genogram across three generations, the risk of letting cultural knowledge tip into stereotype (essentialism) without self-reflection. This self-reflective work is assumed here, not repeated.

Flight and displacement are also not the topic here. Module 4, Lesson 19 “Genogram Work with Refugees and Asylum Seekers” and Lesson 26 “Genogram Work with Refugee Families” cover ambiguous loss, missing documents, and the interpreter setting. This lesson asks a different question: what do I do when it isn’t the displacement history but the kinship order itself that doesn’t fit into square, circle, and solid line? Module 4, Lesson 2 “The Migration Genogram” lays migration-related groundwork; this lesson fills a gap that can also exist entirely without migration — in families who have lived in one place for generations and whose kinship order still doesn’t fit the standard scheme.

“She was wrong” — a trainer learns to see anew

In 2010, Banu Moloney — at that point already more than 35 years into family therapy training — travels to Shepparton in the Australian state of Victoria to teach the first Graduate Certificate in Family Therapy: First Nations there — on Yorta Yorta Country, the traditional land of the Yorta Yorta Nation, along with the relationships and responsibilities that come with it for the people living there (this is how the article uses the term “Country” throughout). She is convinced she can translate her Western-shaped concepts with cultural sensitivity. Moloney and her co-authors (2026) describe the outcome in a brief passage of its own: “She was wrong.”

Her First Nations colleague Robyne Latham named the reason: “Cultural safety is for everyone. Cultural safety comes as a consequence of genuinely honouring and respecting all cultures.” Cultural safety first required transparency about herself from Banu Moloney, and the service of a cultural guide: First Nations colleague Shaun Coade, who accompanied her teaching and vouched for her in the community. Without such a guide, Latham notes, a non-Indigenous teacher is often not experienced as safe. The consequence usually shows itself quietly: students stay polite and simply stop coming to class.

This story opens the lesson because it anticipates a stance toward information-gathering: before a standard method is applied, it’s worth asking whose kinship order it actually describes — and whose it doesn’t.

What square and circle assume — and what they stay silent about

Murray Bowen developed the genogram in the 1960s and ’70s as part of his family systems theory, expanded by his colleagues Guerin and Fogarty (1972). Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson (1985) standardized it with “universally understood conventions” — the same symbol set that underlies this academy and GenoEasy as a standard: square for man, circle for woman, cross for deceased, solid and dashed lines for relationship types.

Moloney and colleagues (2026) call these conventions “low context”: they work as long as context is read in as a given — belonging, lived experience, the finer connections to family, community, and place. Square, circle, and line stay silent about all of that. Where a culture prefers to pass on knowledge through stories and images, the standard genogram doesn’t read as neutral but as “too stark.” One more effect comes on top, one that holds even outside any intercultural context: a Western genogram marks separation, divorce, adoption, or an “unexpected” pregnancy as a disruption by default — as a deviation from a tacitly assumed ideal form.

The aunt who is a mother: when the form’s logic breaks down

An inconspicuous observation needed real time before it truly landed with the teaching team: in First Nations families, aunts typically hold the same status as mothers, and uncles can be addressed like fathers. This is not an exception rule for a single case, but a different, internally consistent kinship system in which Country and community co-determine relational responsibilities, laws, and a spiritual order.

For information-gathering practice, this is the real point: the form’s logic of “one mother, one father” is an assumption, not a fact — and it breaks down silently. No one reports an error when an intake form quietly assumes it; the information simply doesn’t fit anywhere, until the drawing asserts an order the family never had. Banu Moloney’s own background helped her notice this: in her language of origin, the mother’s sister was also called “mother.”

In practice, this means asking more openly during the interview, instead of sorting the answer into mother/father/uncle/aunt in advance:

  • “Who raised you, who took care of you when you were little?” — instead of directly “Who was your mother?”
  • “Are there people you call ‘mother’ or ‘father’ who aren’t biologically related to you?”

The notation then follows the answer, not the other way around: additive symbols, a text note next to the standard symbol, possibly an additional, specially labeled connecting line — what matters is that the lived role becomes visible without falsifying or concealing the biological line.

Three paths for when the standard symbol isn’t enough

Moloney and colleagues (2026) distinguish three levels of adaptation — not as a recipe, but as a set of options the family helps decide.

Conventional symbols plus historical context. Aunty Judy Atkinson’s six-generation genogram (Atkinson 2002) records the historical frame alongside standard symbols: displacements, massacres, disease, hunger, incarceration, plus substance abuse and violence both suffered and enacted. Created together with an empathetic, supportive practitioner, such a genogram can dissolve personalized guilt and shame — because it becomes visible that a pattern didn’t arise in this one family alone. The representation sits “somewhere between genogram and eco-map” (Hartman 1979, 1983), which widens the view beyond the family to community and social support. Alison Elliott calls this “story mapping with a cultural lens”: adapting genograms so they become more informative, more respectful, and safer for the family in question.

Art and narrative as genogram. Karen Doolan, a Tagaluka and Gurang Gurang artist and family therapist, draws her own nuclear family across three generations as two interwoven vines — one for the mother’s family, one for the father’s. Green leaves stand for the living, brown for the deceased, and pink for non-Aboriginal family members. Clarisse Slater — more on her in the next section — likewise chose acrylic on canvas over symbols on a screen.

Co-creation across cultural boundaries. Robyne Latham, a First Nations Yamatji artist, painted the five-generation family genogram of her colleague Dr. Kerry Proctor, an Anglo-Celtic family therapist with Italian heritage. Proctor named the colors she associated with each family member; Latham translated the themes of the conversation into composition and symbolism. Her line on it: “I look for the patterns that connect, rather than the lines that connect.” Proctor’s parents aren’t depicted separately in the image, yet “the rhythm of their influence” carries the whole piece.

“It was true but it wasn't the whole story” — Clarisse Slater’s genogram

Clarisse Slater, a family therapist with Yorta Yorta, Kamilaroi, and Wiradjuri belonging, had already created genograms during her work at the Bouverie Centre — for the Women in Prison Project and for the intake interviews of “Workin' with the Mob.” She had never drawn her own. So she downloaded GenoPro, “because that's what everyone in our sector uses.” Because her family connections are intact, she progressed quickly: all the way to her great-great-grandparents. “I know who I am. I know where I come from.”

Even so, the finished picture was confronting: “the symbols … were just very harsh” — in the end “just full of red lines and crosses, and Xs.” Her critique cuts to the heart of the lesson: “It was true but it wasn't the whole story.” It celebrated neither love nor strength nor resilience. “That's not me.”

So she painted her own: acrylic on canvas, during the Covid pandemic, lying on the kitchen table for weeks — what mattered was the process, “every family member was there with me in that room.” She drew circles for every family member, including those to whom there is no connection: her German paternal grandfather, for instance, has a large family in Germany that “it's not spoken about.” Her conclusion: “I felt fuller.” The picture showed family in all its ugliness, beauty, and pain at once.

The didactic point: when people can shape their genogram in their own language and their own images, “it hands back the shame to where it belongs.” One feature carries this concept: ownership. The story can be retold each time — it doesn’t have to remain a “stagnant moment in history.” “A conventional genogram does not allow that level of choice,” says Slater.

What’s missing is also a finding

A subtle observation about Atkinson’s six-generation genogram deserves its own attention: frequent experiences of incarceration are not entered in it — possibly because they are so commonplace for many First Nations families that they go unmentioned. What’s missing from a drawing is itself a piece of information, not a gap to be reflexively filled in. Applied to one’s own practice, this means: which topic never comes up with this family even though it would be an obvious one — and what if that very silence is the most important finding?

Applied to German-speaking practice — and the limit of this application

The article by Moloney and colleagues (2026) describes Australian First Nations and a very specific training context at the Bouverie Centre of La Trobe University. What follows is not a claim made by the article, but an act of transfer performed by this lesson — with a limit that must be stated explicitly: the colonial experience of Australian First Nations — loss of land, removal of children, generations of banned languages — cannot be equated with other migration or family experiences. Equating these experiences trivializes the one and overstates the other.

What can nonetheless be transferred is the methodological stance, not the concrete history: in German-speaking counseling practice too, practitioners encounter kinship orders that don’t fit the nuclear-family scheme — collectivist kinship structures in which aunts or older cousins carry parental roles; foster families with several simultaneously responsible “parents”; multilingual systems in which a kinship term from the language of origin has no exact German equivalent. In all these cases, the same information-gathering logic applies as in the aunt example above: don’t anticipate the answer, ask openly what the family means by a term, and let the notation follow the answer.

The article closes with a caution that transfers regardless of cultural context: to be wary of any story produced by the counseling professional, child welfare services, or an authority — and instead to support the family’s sovereignty over its own narrative.

What digital software can do — and what it can’t

An honest framing belongs in this lesson, precisely because it appears in a software academy: at its core, the article is also a critique of standardized symbol sets — and GenoEasy is software with a standardized symbol set, the same McGoldrick-Gerson standard the article describes as “low context.”

What GenoEasy offers beyond the standard symbols can soften this sparseness but not dissolve it: freehand drawing, text fields, freely selectable special symbols, and colors can be used to add context, name relationship quality, or keep uncertainty visible — similar to Karen Doolan’s leaf colors, just on a screen instead of canvas.

What software doesn’t accomplish should be stated just as clearly: it doesn’t replace the process Clarisse Slater went through at her kitchen table over weeks. And a screen is not a neutral place: whoever controls the mouse also controls the narrative. The consequence is easy to forget in everyday counseling practice: wherever possible, the client herself should draw or name what goes into the genogram — instead of the practitioner drawing it for her.

Practice vignette

A family counselor at a child guidance counseling center sits at the table with an eight-year-old client and her mother, a blank genogram sheet in front of her. Asked who belongs to the family, the girl immediately talks about “Mama Elif” and “Mama Sevil.” The counselor reflexively draws a circle symbol for “mother” and waits for a name, but the mother gently interrupts: “They’re both her mothers. My sister helped raise her from the time she was a baby, because I was working back then.”

The counselor pauses before continuing to draw, and asks: “How would you describe the two of them if you had to explain what each of them means to your daughter — regardless of what the form usually provides for?” The mother explains: both women breastfed her, both went to parent-teacher meetings, both are asked in case of conflict. The counselor then draws two equal-ranking mother symbols, connects both to the child with a solid line, and notes in a text field: “shared parental role since birth, both addressed as ‘Mama.’” The biological line of descent is additionally preserved as a thinner, specially labeled line.

At the end, the mother looks at the sheet: “That’s really what it looks like for us.” The counselor makes a note to ask the same open question with every family from now on — before filling out the form, not after.

Research status & discussion

The paper by Moloney and colleagues (2026) in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy is, as the article itself discloses, an experience and concept piece from a training program — not an efficacy study. There are no measurements, no control group, no effect sizes. The more than 200 graduates of the Graduate Certificate in Family Therapy: First Nations mentioned are context information about the program’s reach, not a sample from a systematic survey. It is also notable that no anonymized cases are discussed here: Alison Elliott, Karen Doolan, Clarisse Slater, Robyne Latham, and Kerry Proctor are co-authors of the piece and speak about their own families; Clarisse Slater explicitly consented to the inclusion of her genogram. Whoever writes about family sovereignty here discloses their own story first.

The paper joins a lineage of genogram variants that each answer the same larger question — how culture, sexuality, gender, or spirituality are taken up into the therapeutic project: the sexual genogram (Hof & Berman 1986), the gender genogram (Barrett et al. 2019), the spiritual genogram (Wiggins Frame 2000), and the cultural genogram (Hardy & Laszloffy 1995, see Module 4, Lesson 1). The authors’ own ambition goes further: not merely to adapt the genogram, but to transform it. For German-speaking practice, it remains open how far this stance can be transferred without the specific Australian training context. This lesson offers information-gathering questions and a stance toward this, not a proven method.

Cross-references

  • Module 4 Lesson 1 “The Cultural Genogram According to Hardy & Laszloffy” — the practitioner’s self-reflection on their own cultural lens; assumed here, not repeated
  • Module 4 Lesson 2 “The Migration Genogram” — migration-related groundwork; this lesson addresses kinship orders independent of migration
  • Module 4 Lesson 19 “Genogram Work with Refugees and Asylum Seekers” and Lesson 26 “Genogram Work with Refugee Families” — displacement-related topics such as ambiguous loss and the interpreter setting; here the focus is not on displacement but on ways of representing kinship
  • Module 2 Lesson 4 “Working with Incomplete Family Information” — methodical handling of gaps in knowledge during the conversation; here specifically applied to kinship orders that the form itself doesn’t provide for
  • Module 2 Lesson 5 “Addressing Sensitive Topics” — conversational technique for shame and silence in general; here with a view to the fact that shame can also stem from collective history and doesn’t belong to the family alone

Further links