How to Make a Life Timeline
Your life is composed of a complex history of decisions, events and relationships, each of which plays a role in you becoming who you are today. Creating a life time line can be an opportunity to better understand yourself and this personal history and for engaging constructively with others. Here are a few steps for getting started.
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Instructions
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Separate out your key relationships, personal achievements, important events (marriage, the birth of a child, etc.) and intellectual and emotional milestones, and list these under separate headings. This will allow you to begin to visualize your life history as multidimensional so that you can illustrate the connections.
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Draw a thick horizontal line on a sheet of graph paper, making sure to leave enough room for each stage of your life. You might want to adapt the visual language of so-called "genograms" for use here. These symbols typically include the following:
- Square: male
- Circle: female
- Triangle: pregnancy
- Crossed-out Box: death
- Squiggly Line: abusive relationship
- Double Line: emotionally intimate relationship
- Broken Line: estranged relationship -
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Depending on the context of the exercise, you will need to choose how much of your life history you disclose. If it's an exercise between you and your therapist, you would probably choose to focus on your emotional history and relationships. A less intimate setting may call for a greater focus on external events (travel, work history, marriage, etc.).
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Connect the symbols to the main time line with short vertical lines. As you do this, try to be open to discovering connections between events across time as well as between the different levels of your experience. You may discover, for instance, that the loss of a sibling in childhood had an impact on a later relationship you have with your own child. This can be illustrated, for instance, by using the symbol for "death," a connecting dashed line, and then the symbol for "estranged relationship." Or you might realize that an emotional development paralleled a personal achievement, and you can indicate this symbolically as well.
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Tips & Warnings
When you're done, be sure to take some time to think about your time line and share it with a close friend or confidante. No matter what your experience has been, you're likely to see your life's journey through new eyes.
