Puppet genogram

This is a puppet show about healing ancestral trauma. I took a class on family art therapy at Southwestern College (Santa Fe, NM) where we studied the book, It Didn't Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Woylnn.

https://markwolynn.com/it-didnt-start-with-you/

Here's what Mark writes about it on his website:
"It Didn’t Start With You shows how the traumas of our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents can live in our unexplained depression, anxiety, fears, phobias, obsessive thoughts and physical symptoms—what scientists are now calling “secondary PTSD.”

Documenting the latest epigenetic research—how traumatic memories are transmitted through chemical changes in DNA—and the latest advances in neuroscience and the science of language, It Didn’t Start With You is an accessible and pragmatic guide to breaking inherited family patterns."

Our assignment was to create a creative family genogram in whatever way we wanted to. A genogram is a graphic representation of a family tree that displays detailed data on relationships among individuals. It goes beyond a traditional family tree by allowing the user to analyze hereditary patterns and psychological factors that punctuate relationships.

I made puppets and wrote out a script using the ceremony ideas that Mark suggests in his book and my classmates and I all participated in a puppet show together using my puppets and the script I wrote.

I want to make a point here that is important. Even though we worked with this book by Mark Wolynn and his exercises in this class, he is by no means the first to come up with these ideas. Obviously, honoring our ancestors is imbedded in indigenous people's practices and has been since pre-history. I just think that's an important point since giving a white man credit for "discovering" something that indigenous people have known for thousands of years is so common in western culture.

This is not a comment against white men of course. There are lots of good white men. It's just a big blind spot in western culture that we need to look at and become aware of.

The Daily Rally interview link is: https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/essays-culture/daily-rally-podcast-suzanne-teune/

Enjoy!
My website: suzannejoyteune.com