I used to work for an academic social work program and they insisted on detail genograms (family trees) for all the clients, but the genograms for my clients were often so complicated as to be useless, unless to draw the lesson that they had a chaotic family environment.

Example: Someone is the third child of a man’s third baby momma, and has two siblings from two different fathers, and everyone of those parents is in the same genogrammic situation of multiple siblings from multiple parents.

Best I could do was make a note to myself about who were the important relationships, but I couldn’t sully the official genogram with my personal notes.