Hey, Deservyn listeners.

Today I'm going to answer patron emails.

This first email is from patron Nathan from France.

He writes,

Since you're a family therapist,

I was wondering if you sometimes used genograms.

What is your opinion of genograms?

And of email from Nathan from France.

Yes, I absolutely do use genograms.

If you don't know what genograms are out there,

they are clinical family trees in which a clinician or anybody really graphically depicts your family tree in a way that helps clinically

to assess and also to just keep track of things.

I use genograms for a number of reasons.

The two main reasons are one just to keep track of people's names

as if even an individual therapy therapy if a client tells me about their spouse or

their kids or their parents or their grandparents or their cousins I need somewhere

in my notes to keep track of those people and instead of writing it out in sentence form,

I can jot down notes next to the person on the family tree.

Like if someone died, for example, I down the year they died how they died and then say

weeks later or maybe even years later when they refer to that person I can look at my notes and very quickly by looking at the

genogram know just some of the details about that person's life without having to re-ask my client for that information.

You know, when you're in therapy, you just kind of want your therapist to remember the

...