Description
Are you ready to reconnect with family in a meaningful way, but unsure where or how to begin?
This beloved classic poignantly explains how constructing the genogram, or a basic familytree, can help us to better understand and mend family relationships and dynamics. Here,readers learn how genograms can reveal a family’s history of estrangement, alliance, divorce, orsuicide, exposing intergenerational patterns that prove more than coincidental. The book shedslight on a range of complex issues such as birth order and sibling rivalry, family myths and secrets,cultural differences, couple relationships, and the pivotal role of loss.
In the third edition of this revelatory book, “godmother of genograms” Monica McGoldrickand family therapist Tracey Laszloffy focus on aiding readers in their own work to understandtheir family history and change their role in relationships where there is distance, conflict, orcutoff. Readers will also find new and updated material on the intergenerational transmission oftrauma, the ramifications of uncovering family secrets via DNA testing, and more.If you’ve ever struggled to understand the complex dynamics of your family—and yourplace within it—this book is for you.
About the Author
Tracey Laszloffy, PhD, LMFT, director of the Center for Healing Connections, lives in Norwich, Connecticut.
Monica McGoldrick, MA, MSW, PhD, cofounder and director of the Multicultural Family Institute and adjunct faculty at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, lives in Highland Park, New Jersey.
Praise For…
McGoldrick and Laszloffy provide a comprehensive examination of the genogram and its relevance to promoting a deeper understanding of family history. At a time when our world seems hampered by tribalism and polarization, this profound book provides a glimmer of hope and inspiration about the significance of relational connection and, more importantly, each of us finding home. A must-read for anyone searching for a guide to finding deeper and more substantive relational connections within our families and beyond.
— Kenneth V. Hardy, PhD, author of Racial Trauma: Clinical Strategies for Healing Invisible Wounds
This book is stunning in its power to inform and enrich our understanding of the family we landed in, and to shake up the fixed stories we tell ourselves about the people who comprise it. The page-turning stories about famous families are so captivating that you may not notice how much you are learning about family system theory, and how relationships get stuck over generations in distance, conflict, triangling, labeling, cutoffs, and the like. Yet the magic
of this book goes beyond its extraordinary scholarship on family functioning. You Can Go Home Again will open your heart and move you to a more accurate, curious, compassionate, and courageous view of yourself, as well as the heroes, villains, and just plain folks who comprise your family history. To read this book, which you (and your therapist) must do, is to become an expert on that fascinating dance we call family as you re-vision your past and move forward into your relational future in bold new ways.
— Harriet Lerner, PhD, author of The Dance of Anger
We are all relational beings, yearning for loving connections. Yet many are estranged from their families of origin and most of us know little about our multigenerational roots. Monica McGoldrick, a luminary in the field of family therapy, is masterful in understanding how those relationships reverberate in our lives and bonds. In this fascinating read, she and her coauthor Tracey Laszloffy invite us on a journey to discover our own families’ stories and secrets, their passions and sorrows. They brilliantly illustrate the use of genograms by revealing complex (and hidden) relational patterns in families of famous persons. Readers will most value the practical guidelines in their efforts to reconnect, heal old wounds, and gain new perspectives of their families’–and their own—struggles and resilience.
— Froma Walsh, PhD, professor emerita, Crown Family School, the University of Chicago, author of Complex and Traumatic Loss: Fostering Healing and Resilience