![]() So, why wouldn’t helping clients develop chronologies - along with a genogram - create a more cohesive story for my clients? To be sure, chronologies are not something new to practitioners and social service agencies as a means of tracking incidents relevant to a presenting client. ![]() But without an understanding of the underlying chronology, the meaning of the story falls apart.” Other events might be summarized or ignored. “That story is a series of ‘scenes.’ The timeline helps identify the scenes to draw out. “Once you have the events laid out on a timeline, you can pinpoint the most meaningful ones for the purpose of telling a story,” Zerwick told me in an email conversation. Phoebe Zerwick, director of journalism at Wake Forest University and a columnist I worked with when I was metro editor for the Winston-Salem Journal, refers to chronologies not just as a way to organize stories, but as a way to understand stories. ![]() In America’s Best Newspaper Writing, Christopher Scanlan and Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute note that when writers write in chronological order, they invite readers to enter a story and stick with it. I began to think about how writers create a cohesive narrative in fiction or nonfiction. Might there be a way to do more with a genogram - a way to put my narrative experience into it? So, as I’ve often done since beginning my second career as a clinical mental health counselor after 35-plus years as a journalist, writer and editor, I put on my critical thinking cap. Although the genogram helped promote conversation, I found I couldn’t always use the information gathered to help connect the issues presented by clients. Here was a tool that instantly created dialogue between counselor and client as they reviewed family history, dynamics, health, socioeconomic data and more.īut a funny thing happened when I began incorporating the genogram into my own work as an intern. The first time I watched my internship supervisor use a genogram, I became enamored.
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