QUADRILHA Carlos Drummond de Andrade "João que amava Teresa, que amava Raimundo, que amava Maria, que amava Joaquim, que amava Lili que não amava ninguém. João foi para os Estados Unidos, Teresa para o convento, Raimundo morreu de desastre, Maria ficou para tia, Joaquim suicidou-se e Lili casou-se com J. Pinto Fernandes que não tinha entrado na história."
The therapist’s family history and emotional relationships (engagements, marriages, romantic relationships) are an integral part of therapy, insofar as they interfere with the therapeutic relationship, as is the fact of having grey hair or being a young woman.
These characteristics of the therapist’s life are not topics of therapy, but our experience as systemic family therapists and observers of non-verbal communication leads us to consider aspects of relationships that are not expressed verbally to be very important.
Based on these reflections, we have experimented with a new way of describing couple relationships in therapist training by devising the DUOGRAM.
We have created a neologism to describe the work which, similar to the genogram, focuses attention on emotional relationships and downplays the idea that blood ties are the only important ones in the therapist’s history.
The term Duogram refers to the narration and graphic representation of a person’s emotional history, and we refer to the term genogram that describes it, rather than parental relationships.
The Duogram includes the romantic relationships that are significant to the subject throughout their life. From those they remember from childhood to those they experienced from adolescence to adulthood. It includes desired, fantasised and never realised stories, either because they were unrequited or because they remained secret.
Childhood loves and imagined love stories may mark a person’s life in a less dramatic way than a divorce or betrayal, but in a good systemic and relational reading, all vicissitudes have the same weight and are interesting as relational experiences, whether fantasised or experienced.
Even the memory of a rejection (a ‘no’) received in youth brings with it a series of emotions, meanings and experiences that have contributed over time to defining ideas and prejudices about love and emotional relationships.
The Duogram does not draw a cognitive map, but is a subjective representation of emotional relationships, just as the genogram does not refer to blood relationships, but to bonds of love for people of the same or opposite sex.
The Duogram takes into account only one generation of the narrator and follows the evolutionary development of their life story; in the narration and representation, the past-present temporality is not important. This temporal succession of bonds is interesting in relation to the development of the person’s life cycle (Walsh, 1993).
As a result, the graphic representation is very different from that of the family tree, commonly used for the genogram, which symbolises the link between past relationships and the multiplicity of the present.
In the duogram, each relationship can be graphically disconnected from the others. During the story, the person can freely follow the flow of memory without having to adhere to the chronology of events. They can recount their relationships in the order they prefer, choosing not to recount them all or to omit one or more. The choice to consciously omit certain stories is legitimate and should be respected, just as it is legitimate to forget a relative…
STUDENTS HAVE A HISTORY AND A FAMILY
We invite students at our school to reflect on their family of origin and previous generations in order to deconstruct any stereotypical and all-encompassing descriptions of family ideas.
To help future therapists be aware of how family history can influence thinking about a particular life situation, students are encouraged to look at their own family experiences, using a method similar to that which they may use in therapy with their clients.
During participation in simulations and group work, references and connections with the student’s family history are encouraged, but it is the presentation of the genogram that is the moment when the most explicit reference is made to the family history that each person brings with them. This work enriches the future therapist with new perspectives with which to view the families they encounter in therapy and sometimes leads them to discover and experience themselves within their own family contexts.
In this regard, Bowen (1972) argues that the level of differentiation of the clinician and their family of origin has a major influence on the family’s response in therapy, i.e. on the possibility of the therapy being effective.
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There are theoretical and methodological similarities between the genogram and the duogram:
both methods are not only a school for learning how to work with families and couples, but are tools that help to highlight the student’s prejudices in the description of their emotional and family relationships.
Working with the genogram and the duogram, we explore relationships and link these observations to the student’s attitudes.
Partes do texto sobre Duograma idealizado e escrito por Teresa Arcelloni e Gloria Ferrero - formadoras da Episteme Scuola di Psicoterapia Sistemica e Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia (Itália). Tradução: Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira