I never wanted to accept what my sisters accepted. My sisters married through family arranged marriages before they reached the age of eighteen. In my society, women generally get married at an early age through traditional arranged marriages. All of them now are parents of many children. All my siblings responded to family pressure and accepted traditional arranged marriages. In my cultural context, women do not and are not allowed to have a voice or live on their own. Women in my society are controlled by their fathers and brothers when they are single, and by their husbands after they marry. Gaza is a patriarchal, conservative, male-dominating and close-minded society, where men are the final decision makers and have power over women within the family, and women do not have a voice and are oppressed through a culture of silence. Being a woman in Gaza is extremely difficult. While developing my family genogram, it was clear that main conflicts and various forms of violence were committed by my brothers and their wives against me, for cultural reasons. In this paper, I have decided to focus on the conflicts shown in my family genogram because these conflicts impacted my life, shaped my personality and made me the person I am today. These characteristics run on both my father’s and my mother’s sides of the family. The characteristics that exist within my family that are a result of nature are Heart Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, High Blood Pressure, Arthritis, and Depression. The third generation includes me and my seven siblings (four sisters and three brothers) and their spouses, and in the fourth generation, I only included the number of children they have. I had a good relationship with her brother (my uncle) who passed away a few years ago, and I still have a good relationship with her sister (my aunt) who currently lives in Egypt. My mother has one older brother and one younger sister. I still have a good relationship with one, and the other one who still lives in our house has been violent towards me most of the time in the past years. My relationships with his other two sisters were different. His brother and two of his sisters passed away, one of which was hostile to me.

My father was the oldest of one brother and four sisters. The second generation includes my parents and their siblings (my uncles and aunts from both sides). I do not recall how my relationship with them was, but my mother told me that I was close to my grandfathers and closer to my grandmothers. The first generation includes my parental and maternal grandparents who passed away when I was a little child. My family genogram includes four generations. By making this genogram, I became fully aware of the conflicts and characteristics that my family members share, which helped me learn more about myself and how I became who I am today. Developing my family genogram was extremely painful for me because it brought painful memories and experiences I had throughout the past years of my life, but at the same time, I found it a challenging way to learn more about conflicts in my family and how and why such conflicts have developed. A genogram is an excellent way of illustrating family relationships, conflicts and intergenerational patterns and understanding family dynamics that drive and affect family members.

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