Generic Genogram Templates Miss the Relational Context That MattersGenogram Worksheet Generator
Drawing a genogram from scratch takes too long. Blank templates are empty grids with no clinical direction. Describe your client's family system and get a structured exploration worksheet that guides them through the patterns you've already identified.
Three-generation genogram with relationship lines
What Is a Genogram?
A genogram is a clinical family map that extends far beyond a standard family tree. Developed by Murray Bowen in the context of family systems theory during the 1960s and 1970s, genograms use standardized symbols to represent family members, the quality of their relationships, and emotional and behavioral patterns across multiple generations. While a family tree tells you who is in the family, a genogram tells you how the family functions as an emotional system.
The standard genogram notation was formalized by Monica McGoldrick, Randy Gerson, and Sueli Petry in their foundational text Genograms: Assessment and Intervention. Squares represent males. Circles represent females. An X through the shape marks a deceased individual. Horizontal lines connect marriages, diagonal slashes through those lines mark divorce, and dotted lines indicate cohabitation. Relationship quality is captured through line styles: double lines for closeness or enmeshment, zigzag lines for conflict, and dotted lines for distance or emotional cutoff.
What makes a genogram clinically powerful is what it reveals beyond biological lineage. By mapping emotional patterns, roles, triangulations, and nodal events (immigration, job loss, death, trauma) across three or more generations, both therapist and client begin to see how the current presenting problem fits within a much larger story. A client struggling with anxiety may discover that anxiety has traveled through three generations of women in their family, each one managing it through the same pattern of overcontrol and emotional suppression. That visibility changes the clinical conversation entirely.
When to Use a Genogram in Therapy
Genograms are versatile assessment and intervention tools. They work across modalities and settings, from individual therapy to family sessions. Here are the clinical situations where a genogram adds the most value.
Family Therapy Intake
For initial family assessment when you need to understand the system quickly. Mapping three generations of relationships, roles, and emotional patterns establishes a shared understanding of the family before diving into presenting problems.
Intergenerational Pattern Identification
When you notice themes repeating across generations. Depression, emotional cutoff, parentification, addiction, or divorce showing up in multiple family lines. The genogram makes these invisible threads visible.
Attachment Exploration
For clients whose attachment style is shaping current relationships. Mapping how caregiving, availability, and emotional responsiveness looked across generations reveals where attachment patterns were learned and reinforced.
Addiction and Substance Use Patterns
When substance use runs through the family system. Tracking who used what, who enabled, who was parentified, and who recovered helps clients see addiction as a systemic pattern rather than a personal moral failure.
Grief and Loss Work
When a loss activates broader family dynamics. Mapping how the family has historically handled death, loss, and transition reveals patterns of avoidance, emotional cutoff, or unresolved grief that may be compounding the current loss.
Couples Therapy (Family-of-Origin)
For couples stuck in repetitive conflicts. Each partner constructs a genogram to explore what they brought from their family of origin. Communication styles, conflict patterns, gender roles, and emotional expression often become clear through the comparison.
The Problem with Generic Genogram Templates
Most genogram templates are blank grids. They give you shapes to fill in but no clinical direction for what to explore. Your client draws their family, labels a few relationships, and then what? The template ends where the therapeutic work should begin.
Blank Grids Without Guidance
Standard genogram templates provide empty shapes and lines but no prompts for exploring the patterns that matter clinically. The client draws the family structure without guidance toward the emotional and relational dynamics underneath.
Missing Intergenerational Prompts
Generic templates don't ask about repeating patterns across generations. Without guided questions about how depression, conflict, or caretaking have traveled through the family, clients miss the connections that make genogram work transformative.
No Connection to Session Material
You've already identified family themes in your sessions. A blank template ignores all of that context. The worksheet should build on what you already know, not start from zero every time.
How Personalization Changes Everything
A personalized genogram worksheet uses the family dynamics you've already identified in sessions to create guided exploration prompts. Instead of starting from a blank grid, your client works through questions that connect directly to the patterns you've observed.
"I really like the metaphor feature, which is a nice way for the client to help bridge understanding."
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10 free worksheets. Export as PDF. No signup.
Clinical Applications for Genogram Worksheets
Genograms adapt to multiple clinical frameworks. Each approach brings a different lens to the family map, revealing patterns that would remain invisible without structured exploration.
Bowen Family Systems
Map differentiation of self, triangles, emotional cutoff, and the multigenerational transmission process. Trace how anxiety moves through the family system and identify where triangulation patterns repeat. The genogram is the primary assessment tool in Bowenian therapy, making visible the emotional processes that connect family members across generations.
Attachment Patterns
Explore how attachment styles have been shaped across generations. Map which caregivers were available, inconsistent, or withdrawn. Identify where secure attachment was present and where it was disrupted. This is particularly useful when combined with Adult Attachment Interview findings or when clients are exploring how their early relational experiences shape current partnerships.
Addiction Genograms
Track substance use, behavioral addictions, codependency, and recovery patterns through the family system. Map enabling dynamics, family roles (hero, scapegoat, lost child, mascot), and how sobriety or relapse affected the broader family. Helps clients move from shame ("I'm weak") to systemic understanding ("This pattern has been in my family for three generations").
Cultural Genograms
Developed by Hardy and Laszloffy, the cultural genogram maps ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural identity across generations. It explores acculturation, cultural pride and shame, intergenerational immigration experiences, language loss, and the intersection of cultural identity with family roles. Essential for clients navigating bicultural identity or family conflicts rooted in cultural expectations.
Medical Genograms
Map physical health conditions, mental health diagnoses, causes of death, and health behaviors across generations. Useful for psychoeducation about genetic vulnerability, helping clients understand family health patterns, and collaborating with medical providers on holistic treatment planning. Particularly relevant when clients present with health anxiety or somatic symptoms.
Spiritual Genograms
Developed by Frame (2000), the spiritual genogram explores how religious beliefs, spiritual practices, and existential questions have been transmitted across generations. Maps religious conversion, spiritual crisis, and how faith has been used as a source of support or control within the family. Valuable for clients experiencing spiritual distress or conflict between personal beliefs and family religious expectations.
When NOT to Use Genogram Work
Genograms are powerful, but they require clinical judgment about timing. Family exploration can surface material that overwhelms a client who isn't prepared. Here are situations where genogram work may be premature or contraindicated.
Active Family Conflict Without Safety Planning
If the client is in the middle of active, volatile family conflict, exploring family patterns can escalate emotional activation without resolution. Ensure there is a safety plan and emotional regulation skills in place before mapping the system.
Recent Traumatic Loss
When a family member has recently died or the client is experiencing acute grief, genogram work can feel overwhelming. Allow initial grief processing and stabilization before asking them to map the broader family system.
Client Not Ready for Family Exploration
Some clients are not ready to look at family patterns. This might be due to insufficient therapeutic alliance, limited emotional regulation capacity, or current life circumstances that make deep family work untimely. Trust your read of the client.
Risk of Destabilization
Genograms can surface family secrets, previously unacknowledged abuse, paternity questions, or other material that may destabilize the client. Assess whether the client has the resources to manage what might emerge.
Early Therapy Without Coping Skills
Family pattern exploration can trigger strong emotional responses. If the client hasn't developed basic coping and grounding skills, building that foundation first will make the genogram work more productive and less risky.
The therapist should assess readiness, prepare the client for what might emerge, and have a plan for managing emotional activation during the exercise. Genograms are most effective when introduced at a point where the client has sufficient stability and curiosity to engage with family material without becoming overwhelmed.
Key Bowen Concepts Visible in Genograms
Murray Bowen's family systems theory provides the theoretical foundation for genogram work. Several of his core concepts become visible when mapped across three or more generations. Understanding these concepts helps you guide clients through their genogram with clinical intention.
Differentiation of Self
The degree to which a person can maintain their own sense of self while remaining emotionally connected to the family. Low differentiation shows up in genograms as enmeshed relationships, reactivity to family members' emotions, and difficulty maintaining boundaries. High differentiation is visible as members who can hold their own positions without emotional cutoff. Mapping this across generations reveals how differentiation levels are transmitted.
Triangles
When tension rises between two people, a third person is drawn in to stabilize the dyad. Genograms make triangles visible: the child drawn into parental conflict, the in-law who mediates between spouses, the sibling who carries the family anxiety. Mapping these patterns across generations often reveals that the same triangulation pattern has repeated for decades.
Emotional Cutoff
The way people manage unresolved emotional issues with family by reducing or completely cutting off emotional contact. On a genogram, this appears as broken or dotted lines between family members. Tracing cutoff patterns across generations reveals how families have historically handled conflict and emotional intensity, often alternating between enmeshment and complete disconnection.
Multigenerational Transmission Process
The idea that small differences in differentiation across generations accumulate over time. Each generation's level of functioning is shaped by the emotional processes of the generation before. A genogram spanning three or more generations can trace how anxiety, depression, substance use, or relational patterns have been transmitted and amplified through emotional processes rather than genetics alone.
Generate a Personalized Genogram Worksheet
From family dynamics to structured exploration worksheet in under a minute.
Describe the Family System
Share the family dynamics you've identified in sessions. Mention key relationships, intergenerational patterns, roles, and any themes like addiction, emotional cutoff, or parentification. Use the client's own language for family descriptions.
Select Your Approach
Choose your modality. Family systems, attachment-focused, structural family therapy, or another framework. Adjust the strictness level to match how closely you want the worksheet to adhere to a specific model.
Generate and Export PDF
Receive a personalized genogram exploration worksheet in seconds. It builds on the patterns you described with guided prompts for deeper family mapping. Export as PDF for your next session.
What Makes Good Input?
Write like you're presenting in case consultation. Include:
- Key family members and their relationships ("enmeshed with mother, cutoff from father")
- Intergenerational themes you've observed ("three generations of parentified oldest daughters")
- Nodal events: immigration, deaths, divorces, major transitions
- The client's own words for describing family dynamics
10 free worksheets. Export as PDF. No signup required.
Standard Genogram Symbols Reference
Genograms use standardized notation so any clinician can read the map. Here are the most commonly used symbols, based on the McGoldrick, Gerson, and Petry system.
Additional symbols exist for twins, adopted children, foster children, and pregnancy. The full notation system is documented in McGoldrick, Gerson, & Petry's Genograms: Assessment and Intervention (3rd edition, 2008).
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Who This Tool is NOT For
We believe in being direct about fit. This tool works best for certain use cases:
- ✗Clients in active crisis. Genogram work requires emotional stability. If the client is currently destabilized, focus on stabilization and safety first.
- ✗Therapists who prefer static template collections. Reframe generates personalized worksheets. If you want pre-made blank genogram grids, a template library is a better fit.
- ✗Clinicians who want AI to replace clinical judgment. You review everything. The AI drafts guided exploration prompts, but you decide what fits your client and when they're ready for family work.
- ✗Genogram drawing software. This tool generates structured exploration worksheets, not interactive visual genogram diagrams. If you need software to draw the genogram itself, tools like GenoPro are designed for that.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a genogram used for in therapy?
A genogram maps family relationships, emotional patterns, and intergenerational themes across three or more generations. Therapists use it to visualize how patterns like anxiety, addiction, emotional cutoff, and parentification have been transmitted through the family system. It's both an assessment tool and an intervention that helps clients see connections they hadn't noticed.
How is a genogram different from a family tree?
A family tree records biological lineage. A genogram goes further by mapping relationship quality (close, enmeshed, conflictual, distant), emotional and behavioral patterns, family roles, cultural influences, and nodal events like immigration or trauma. A family tree tells you who is in the family. A genogram tells you how the family functions.
Can I use genograms in individual therapy?
Yes. Genograms are frequently used in individual therapy. The client constructs the map from their own perspective, which is clinically revealing in itself. What they remember, who they omit, and how they describe relationships all provide useful clinical data.
How is a personalized genogram worksheet different from a blank template?
A blank template gives you empty circles and squares to fill in. A personalized worksheet builds on the family dynamics you've already identified in sessions, creating guided exploration prompts that connect directly to the patterns you've observed. It starts where your clinical work already is.
Are the genogram worksheets free?
Yes. You get 10 free worksheets without signup. Generate a personalized genogram exploration worksheet, export to PDF, and use it in your next session. No credit card required.
Can I export genogram worksheets as PDF?
Yes. Every worksheet can be exported as a printable PDF formatted for professional use. The PDF includes your practice branding and is ready to use with clients immediately.
What is an addiction genogram?
An addiction genogram specifically tracks substance use, behavioral addictions, enabling patterns, codependency, and recovery across generations. It maps family roles (hero, scapegoat, lost child) and helps clients see addiction as a systemic pattern rather than a personal moral failing.
Is client information stored?
No. Reframe uses zero-retention architecture. Family descriptions are processed in memory and never stored on our servers. HIPAA-compliant by design, not just policy. No BAA needed because no PHI is ever retained.
What is a cultural genogram?
Developed by Hardy and Laszloffy, a cultural genogram maps ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural identity across generations. It explores acculturation, cultural pride and shame, migration experiences, and how cultural identity intersects with family roles. Essential for clients navigating bicultural identity.
How many generations should a genogram include?
The standard clinical genogram maps three generations: the client's generation, their parents' generation, and their grandparents' generation. Some situations warrant mapping four or more generations, especially when tracing patterns like addiction, immigration, or cultural identity that have deeper historical roots.
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Your Client's Family System Is Specific. The Worksheet Should Be Too.
Stop handing clients blank genogram grids with no direction. Describe their family dynamics, the intergenerational patterns you've observed, the relationship qualities that keep showing up. Get a structured exploration worksheet that builds on what you already know. Export as PDF.
Under 60 seconds. Zero data retention. 10 free worksheets, no signup.
Built by a Registered Psychotherapist | Zero Data Retention | HIPAA Compliant | Export as PDF