Religion and spirituality are distinct axes of family identity — Marsha Frame (2000) and David Hodge (2001) have developed structured tools that make faith biographies, conversions, and religious trauma visible. In mainstream German-speaking therapy, the topic remains underrepresented to this day.

Why "worldview neutrality" often means religious blindness

Since the second half of the 20th century, psychotherapy in German-speaking countries has largely understood itself as secular. Sigmund Freud’s prominent critique of religion (The Future of an Illusion, 1927) had a long-lasting impact; well into the 1990s, it was considered a professional norm not to actively address religious topics in therapy. This norm is increasingly being questioned today — not because therapists should become religious, but because the practitioner’s silence on religious topics is often read by clients as a message: This is not something that can be discussed here.

In 2000, Marsha Frame proposed the spiritual genogram as a structured extension of the standard genogram in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. Her core thesis: Spirituality — understood as an individual search for meaning, which may or may not be religious — is an intergenerational dimension that shapes families, whether explicitly or implicitly.

In 2001, David Hodge presented a comparable methodology in the social work journal Families in Society, tailored more closely to the social work context and with a more precisely developed interview guide.

Hodge’s Key Questions

Hodge organises his guide into four areas:

Faith tradition and affiliation: Which religious or ideological tradition did grandparents, parents, and siblings belong to? How was faith practised — in everyday life, on holidays, in times of crisis? Was there a key person who transmitted the tradition?

Transitions and ruptures: What conversions, church departures, faith crises, or reconciliations have occurred in the family history? When, at what age, and in what context?

Conflicts: What religiously charged conflicts have there been — interfaith marriages, disputes about child-rearing, generational conflicts around practice and belief? Are there family members who have been ostracised because of their religious position?

Resources: What role has faith played in times of crisis — as support, as a burden, or both? What spiritual practices does the family use today, and which would the client like to use?

These questions are not to be rushed through, but serve as a map — they structure the conversation over several sessions.

Symbolism in the Spiritual Genogram

Frame and Hodge propose a differentiated symbolism, without setting a binding standard:

  • Faith symbols per person — Cross, crescent, Star of David, Om symbol, A for atheism, a question mark for uncertainty or a seeker position. In handwritten genograms, a legend suffices; in software tools, these symbols are increasingly integrated.
  • Conversion arrows — analogous to migration: arrow with year and direction, e.g. "Catholic → Protestant (1987)".
  • Practice intensity — some authors suggest indicating how central faith was for each person by font size or line thickness: nominal affiliation, active practice, fundamentalist.
  • Rupture lines — solid, double-crossed lines can indicate a formal break (leaving the church, excommunication); dashed lines can indicate a gradual process of alienation.

As always: The symbolism must be agreed upon with the client — questions of faith are sensitive, and having the power to define one’s own religious biography is a value in itself.

Interfaith Marriage, Leaving the Church, Faith Crisis

Three constellations occur particularly frequently in German-speaking practice:

Interfaith partnerships: An increasingly common phenomenon, often accompanied by conflicts around child-rearing, religious festivals, and funeral rites. The spiritual genogram helps to honour each person’s tradition of origin without playing them off against each other.

Leaving the church: In 2022 alone, over 600,000 people left the major Christian churches in Germany (DBK/EKD statistics). Leaving the church is often not "just" an administrative act, but a biographically and familially significant step — especially when it occurs against the resistance of older generations.

Faith crisis and reconciliation: Religious biographies are often not linear. The phase of an "atheist interlude" between ages 25 and 40, followed by a return to faith in later life, is a frequently documented pattern (see research on life-span religiosity, e.g. Vern Bengtson).

Religious Trauma and Religious Resource

For over three decades, Kenneth I. Pargament has shaped research on Religious Coping — for example in The Psychology of Religion and Coping (1997) and numerous follow-up studies. His central finding: Religious coping has both positive and negative forms, often within the same person. Positive: spiritual connectedness, a coherent framework of meaning, social embeddedness. Negative: punitive images of God, religious guilt, spiritual fantasies of punishment, stigmatisation of psychological distress as "lack of faith".

In the German-speaking context, Michael Utsch (ed., Religion und Spiritualität in Psychotherapie, 2014) has systematised the discussion. The Evangelische Zentralstelle für Weltanschauungsfragen (EZW), where Utsch works, increasingly documents religious trauma as a clinical phenomenon in its own right — experiences in authoritarian religious communities, fundamentalist upbringing, abuse in church institutions.

Both aspects belong in the genogram — recording only resources is idealising; recording only trauma is pathologising. Both sides are often present in the same family system, sometimes in the same person.

DACH Specifics

The religious landscape in German-speaking countries has particular features that must be considered in the spiritual genogram:

Secularisation with East-West differences: In the new federal states, church membership has been below 20% for decades; families without religious affiliation over several generations are the rule here, not the exception. This changes the typical constellations — here, conversion is often an adoption rather than a break.

Muslim communities: Over five million Muslims live in Germany, with great internal diversity (Sunni, Alevi, Shia, Ahmadiyya; Turkish, Arab, Persian, Bosnian, German convert traditions). Generalisations are particularly risky here.

Post-Soviet religiosity: Late repatriate families often bring their own religious history — Soviet repression, free church traditions, neo-pagan currents. In West German therapy contexts, this knowledge is often patchy.

Practice Vignette

A 35-year-old client, from a decidedly atheist, academically oriented family, converts to Islam. The family reacts with shock and rupture; her mother does not speak to her for two years. The spiritual genogram reveals a different pattern: The great-grandmother was also a convert (from Catholic to Protestant, which was a major decision in 1920s Bavaria); the grandfather left the church as a young man and remained a combative atheist all his life. Conversion — understood as a fundamental realignment of worldview — is a recurring pattern in this family, connecting generations. This insight does not relieve the client of the relational work with her mother, but it does place her step within a broader biographical arc.

State of Research & Discussion

In the US context, especially in therapy training programmes with a Protestant background, the inclusion of spirituality is well established; the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy has corresponding competency standards. In the German-speaking mainstream, by contrast, religious self-reflection was long taboo — the idea that therapists must be neutral in matters of worldview led to many practitioners not even reflecting on their own secular position as a position.

Pargament’s research on religious coping is considered methodologically robust and widely replicated. Consistency: Positive religious coping correlates with better mental health, negative religious coping (God as punitive, religious guilt) with poorer mental health — regardless of the specific religion. Importantly: Correlation does not imply causation; several causal pathways are plausible.

An open debate concerns the practitioner’s self-positioning. Some authors (including Eckhard Frick) advocate that therapists should make their own worldview position transparent if clients wish; others warn against overstepping boundaries. There is consensus that practitioners must know and reflect on their own position — what they share of it in conversation is a separate question.

Cross-References

  • Module 2 "Resources" — Spirituality as a resource in the coping model
  • Module 3 "Bereavement Work" — religious mourning rituals and their significance
  • Module 4 Lesson 1 "Cultural Genogram" — Religion as part of cultural identity
  • Module 4 Lesson 2 "Migration Genogram" — religious ruptures through migration

Further Links