How I Came To Terms With My Complex Family History

It wasn't until I was about 27 years old that I really started asking questions about my family.

I look back on my life now and wonder why I had waited so long to dive into my heritage. Maybe because my parents raised me in such a way that asking questions about the black side of my family made me feel like I was disrespecting them.

When I began a long-distance relationship with my biological father I found myself battling all kinds of guilt and shame. Like I was somehow cheating on the people that stuck around and raised me my whole life.

It was really tough to navigate because the more I got to know my biological father, the more I could see how similar we were. I'm not going to lie, it freaked me out a little especially because he didn't have any impact on how I was raised. He wasn't there for my birth, he didn't pop in and out of my life as I was growing up, he didn't try to instill any wisdom or bandage my knee when I scraped it, he was completely non-existent.

I guess I didn't take into consideration how deeply we are influenced by our DNA. I spent a lot of my childhood feeling really alone in the way that I thought about life. My mom would always say " You get your neat and tidiness from him because it's definitely not my trait" this would make me laugh, but it also made me curious about the other quirky things I would do.

Its funny because none of my family members ever pointed these traits out or made me feel bad about the way I would say things or the random thoughts I would have, but I always felt very alone. Kind of like I was an alien dropped into this family.

As my relationship with my biological Dad progressed we talked more about how he grew up, his siblings, my grandmother, and my siblings. I had known for quite some time that I had two half-sisters from him, but I had never met them.

I was slapped upside the head with a difficult awareness when I had to do a project in my family & relationships class. As I waded through the embarrassment, guilt, and shame of being the product of teen pregnancy, one where the father did not stick around and the weight of not knowing really anything about my Dads family I struggled through the task of completing my genogram.

You might be wondering what a Genogram is, I sure was when I first heard about it. A genogram is very much like a family tree, except the depth that you can go into is unlike any other charting tool I have ever come across. A great way to differentiate the two would be a family tree is one-dimensional and a genogram is three-dimensional. You get to chart the tone of the relationships, mental health information, education/occupations, age, sex, marital status, all of it!

At first, I was a bit overwhelmed, especially after the research phase of gathering all of this information. I complained to one of my professors about how I felt about the project and he was able to help me identify the feelings, even letting some of the feelings go that weren't even mine to take on in the first place. For example, the shame that I had about my mom being a single teenage mom. I didn't have any choice in the matter, those were just the circumstances I was born into.

On the bright side, this tool gave me the courage to ask hard questions. I got to chalk it up to being a school project, not just being nosey about people's life and digging up dirt on my family members.

I asked my biological Dad all about the emotional/relational connections of our family and we talked about how he felt about growing up without his biological Dad. This discovery really gave me a chance to see him differently and recognize that there was a pattern happening in our family. For the very first time, I saw him as a little abandoned boy, which helped to dissolve some of the anger that I held towards him.

Overall there were so many positive changes that this project helped me open up to. I knew more about the missing pieces of my family, I found a deeper more understanding relationship with my biological Dad, I trusted in the history that I charted, and felt more at ease in my family.

This is why it was so exciting for me to share this tool with all of you! I created a webinar so you wouldn't have to go on this journey alone. I have included a workbook for you to collect all of your family info, a few journal prompts for a deeper discovery, and a digital version of the program so you can go at your own pace.

Click here to get started on your very own Genogram.