What I can see more clearly about the effect of my family situation on me personally is that, as a male child, I seem to have internalized without realizing it two facts that dominate family experience and that a genogram cannot capture: (1) the benefits of being the firstborn son in a Greek family, and (2) a structure of patriarchal authority that is not to be questioned.
Let us begin with the second point first. Some years ago, when my parents decided to emigrate back to Greece for a temporary period, it was very obvious to me that parental authority in the family was not to be questioned. Having read about the stages of human development in the literature, I realize that adolescence is an especially vulnerable stage because it is at this point in life when an individual is trying to perfect the skills of making abstract judgments and of constructing key transpersonal relationships.
However, the family genogram does not capture the fact that my immediate family spent what would have been my high school years running a restaurant and that I was basically a dropout during that period. My only access to education was the reading that I did on my own, and it was not until I turned 18 that I was able to we returned to this country that I was able to get a high-school diploma (GED) and plan for college. What I did not have access to in Greece was the normal course of friendships that most people get in school. As the genogram shows, it would have been physically possible for me to have remained in school in California if I had "boarded" with aunts and uncles. But it was emotionally impossible. Perhaps that was because my parents did not want my sister and me (or themselves) to undergo separation anxiety. Or perhaps it was simply because my parents neither wanted nor would have tolerated being challenged on this point. In any case, I have a specific memory of being told by my mother to do my crying in my room with the door closed and...