Generational Traits, Family Propaganda and the Gospel. 

By Steve Cuss

I think is must be very difficult to find your place in a family with a celebrity in it. Everybody wants to talk about your actress mother or your politician grandfather who ran for president. You endure six or seven questions about your famous relative until the person finally asks, ‘What about you? What do you do?’ Your most honest response is, ‘not much.’ That was Jason. He endured being related to two very famous people. Everybody in the world, literally, knew his grandfather and many knew his less famous but iconic younger brother Sheridan. People only knew of Jason in relation to them, not for who he was. People looked through Jason to see his celebrity family or sometimes befriended him to get to them. He was looked over and looked past.

Jason was a solidly built guy, son of a farmer, a salt of the earth type. He didn’t speak much and while he had a good brain, he did not have a quick brain and certainly not a witty one like his brother, nor a wise one like his grandfather. Jason was nothing more or less than normal which is to say he was invisible. He didn’t think fast, but he felt deep and what he felt most was anger, like the world owed him something. He didn’t battle entitlement like some people born into wealth, but a general underlying feeling that he was being taken advantage of because of his good nature. Jason’s deep-seated anger made sense when you study his genogram.

A genogram is a family tree that adds extra information that captures generational traits and relational patterns and issues. It captures things like divorces, remarriage, affairs, miscarriages, mental health. Who got along with whom, who was in tension, who was cut off, who was a favorite, who was a secret keeper? Once you’ve sketched this out, you gather some trusted friends and present your family history for an hour or so. A genogram helps you to see the cards you have been dealt, the traits passed down generation to generation, the assumptions you hold that may not aways be true, the meaning you’ve made out of your upbringing and family stories. While a genogram may reveal some significant challenge from your upbringing, it is not about blame or being a victim, it is about understanding what you’re holding and what is holding you and inviting the power of the gospel to release you from some of those dynamics.

Jason experienced two monumental events by the time he’d reached adulthood, one he was too young to remember and one he would never forget. Both events had profound impact on his worldview. Jason was the oldest of twins and his younger brother the celebrity. When they were born, his younger brother had him by the heel as he came out of the womb. Jason was literally helping his brother be born by going first, but that’s not how the rest of the world understood it – they interpreted it as Sheridan striving to get ahead while his dimwitted brother did nothing about it. Jason’s childhood was filled with his own mother blatantly favoring his brother every chance she could. His dad never intervened at all – he just sat by unengaged. From Jason’s earliest memories, he had to stand up for himself, but he always lost when pitted against a quick-witted brother and a colluding mother. He loved his younger brother and felt a sense of protection for him, but his brother didn’t replicate the feeling and as much as Jason didn’t like to admit it, Sheridan was smarter and cunning; he knew how to manipulate an advantage. Jason’s birth was the first event. The second event sealed it – Sheridan literally tricked his dad into signing over Jason’s inheritance and by the time Jason got wind of it, the papers had been filed and the inheritance moved. Jason is Esau, Sheridan is Jacob from the Old Testament book Genesis. His grandfather is Abraham, the literal father of all nations, one of the top five most famous people in history.

No matter what you think of Esau, we can all agree that he was dealt a rough hand when he was born. And yes, I named his brother ‘Sheridan’ because I’m pretty sure if Jacob were alive today, he’d be touring in a boy band. Esau’s brother is fighting him for birth order status, his mother is favoring his scoundrel brother at every turn, even colluding with him in the inheritance scam and his father is completely uninvolved, his own worldview deeply impacted by Abraham’s attempted murder of him. Esau would have benefitted from looking at his genogram because it would have allowed him to see some generational patterns in his family. One generational trait was deceit. Jacob was a third-generation deceiver and generational deceit impacted each member in the family. Some family members colluded in the deceit, some were victims of it. If we focused on Jacob’s genogram instead of Esau’s, we’d see how deceit impacted his spiritual outlook. Jacob saw everyone in the world including God as someone he had to work over. If we summarized Jacob’s assumption about the world, we might say, “Jacob always believed he had to be someone else in order to be blessed.”  Jacob began to grow when he realized he could be blessed by God because of grace, not because of his own huckstering. “I will not let you go until you bless me,” Jacob once said to God while wrestling him. Blessing on my terms and conditions. But that is not how blessing works.

A genogram gives insight into what you value, where your resilience comes from, why you see the world the way you do. It invites you to sift your assumptions through the truth of scripture. It provides a way to think about the way you think and break free of some patterns. Some common themes to look for are: cutoff, abuse, enmeshment, conflict and family propaganda.

I’ll say it again: a genogram has no interest in blame, its only interested is showing you the hand you’ve been dealt and of course, many of us have been dealt a fantastic hand from our family. But even with positive traits, a person can learn a great deal looking at their genogram. What are you gripping? What has you in its grip? A genogram can help clarify that. 

The prophet Jeremiah made a startling prophecy:

In those days people will no longer say, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ Instead, everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—their own teeth will be set on edge.  Jer. 31:29-34

This prophecy hardly sounds like good news, but it really is. Jeremiah is defining reality. Unaddressed dysfunction transmits generation to generation unless something intervenes. The good news of the gospel doesn’t just invade our individual soul, it can also invade our generational traits and family propaganda. It can redeem pain and help us break free from difficulty.

I had to do a genogram when I was a hospital chaplain over two decades ago. I have facilitated hundreds of genograms for people since. It is a powerful tool in breaking free from generational traits and allowing a deeper experience with the gospel in your life.