Counselling: Family Genogram and Suicide Risk

Running Head: COUNSELLING
COUNSELLING
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1COUNSELLING
Activity 1.2- Your family genogram
Family Genogram
Fig-1: Family tree showing three generations
(Source: Genopro.com, 2019; Directhit.com, 2019)
The family tree starts from my maternal grandparents Shakulawe and Tate. Tate
passed away in the year 2014 and my mother has two more sisters and two more brothers. My
father Chiru who passed away in the year 2006 has a brother named Bodwe. My family used
to stay at Congo and my mother whose name is Franchine lives at Congo till now. Franchine
and Chiru had four sons Pascale, Jack, Espoir, Muzasa, and Chris. I had 8 sisters named
Takwinja, Espe, Vela, Sifa, Ombe, Nathalie, Mape, and Ashuza.

2COUNSELLING
Overall Family Functioning
The focussed genogram discusses about two sections namely overall family relations
and self-esteem as the basic guide to the themes relevant to the family pedigree chart
(DeMaria, Twist & Weeks, 2017). The overall family relations show that the family being
described in the genogram is getting restricted to a very few number of people by the passing
time. The quality of relations is thus, deteriorating between the family members which
ultimately focuses on the decision making process of the family members (www.apa.org,
2019). The genogram also gives a clear picture that after the death of my father, Francine
stayed all alone in Congo. This showed the dependence of Francine upon her father who also
stayed at the same place. The genogram cannot tell descriptively about my aunts and uncles,
thus focussing on the fact that there is a great decrease in the size of the three generation
family (Sampson, 2017).
Self-Esteem
The next identified theme is the self-esteem of the family members as it is strongly
affected by the impact of the relationships present in the family as well the experiences
individuals go through in their family. It is very common to have a bad impact on the children
whose parents are either divorced or either of them is dead. This affects the children because
when the children are praised by the parents and guide them, the children develop healthy
self-esteem and confidence as well (DeMaria, Twist & Weeks, 2017). On the other hand,
there are certain experiences that lower the confidence among the children. This can be
explained by the genogram as Chiru died at a very early age when I was a kid leaving behind
Francine with 4 sons and 8 daughters. This affected me due to the suffering and difficulties
that Francine has to go through in raising the kids (Sampson, 2017).