Virginia Satir's Family Therapy: Its Goals and Uses

Virginia Satir's Family Therapy, Co-Founder of Palo Alto MRI and in charge of the training of students in this institution for many years, she had a great influence on systemically oriented interventions that appeared in the second half of the century XX.

In this article we will analyze the main characteristics of the therapy proposed by Satir, we will describe her Growth Model and we will briefly review her biography and her work.

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Virginia Satir Biography

Virginia Satir was born in Neillsville, Wisconsin in 1916. During the Great Depression, her family moved to Milwaukee, leaving the farm where they lived so that Virginia, her eldest daughter, could study at high school. She subsequently graduated in Education from Milwaukee State Teachers College and worked as a teacher for a few years.

Later Satir trained as a social worker; in 1951 she began to dedicate herself to this work, which would constitute the core of her professional activity. She soon after she began working at the Illinois Psychiatric Institute. During this period, Satir's preference for family intervention (versus individual treatment) was already well established.

In the late 50s Satir co-founded the Mental Research Institute, commonly abbreviated as "MRI", in the city of Palo Alto, California. Other therapists who played a prominent role in the creation of this institution were Don Jackson, Paul Watzlawick, Chloe Madanes, Salvador Minuchin, R. D. Laing and Irvin Yalom.

The MRI was for several decades the fundamental nucleus of American family therapy, especially when it comes to systemic counseling. Satir directed the training of the students, so the influence of her ideas in this therapeutic model was very significant.

Virginia Satir died in 1988. In addition to their contributions as a family therapist and as a social worker, summarized in the book "Conjoint Family Therapy" (1964), Satir left a series of inspiring publications with a poetic tone through which she tried to help other people to develop more as beings humans.

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Objectives of the Satir Growth Model

Satir's work was derived from her personal values ​​and beliefs, which had a spiritual character and self-transcendent with notable similarities to the approaches of the humanistic psychological current. This author of her defined five general objectives in her Growth Model, the name she gave to her theory of psychotherapy.

1. Increase self esteem

For Satir the concept "self-esteem" refers to our deep perception of ourselves and includes consciousness. According to her approach, high self-esteem is related to the identification of the self with spiritual energy.

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2. Enhance decision-making

In this sense, one of the goals of Satir's family therapy is the empowerment of patients so that they can make their own decisions in pursuit of achieving a state of psychological and physical health. Personal significance would be related to the experience of freedom of action.

3. Adopt personality responsibility

Satir argued that fully experiencing our self allows us to take responsibility for it and truly know ourselves. Such events would contribute in a central way to the human development of individuals.

4. Achieve self-consistency

Personal congruence is defined as the harmony between an individual's experience and his "life energy", related to the transcendence of the self. In this sense, aspects such as authenticity and sincerity are important, both on the part of the client and the therapist, who should serve as a model.

Principles of your family therapy

Five fundamental therapeutic principles have been identified in Satir's intervention methods; we will focus on them in this last section. These keys must be present throughout the treatment, since they are necessary elements for therapeutic change.

1. Experiential methodology

This characteristic mainly involves two aspects: the full perception of the personal experience and the re-experiencing of significant events from the past as part of the therapy. Satir highlighted the importance of a hypothetical body memory as a useful tool for therapeutic change.

2. Systemic character

Although systemic therapies are usually understood as basically focused on the family relationshipIn reality, the concept "systemic" also refers to other interpersonal contexts, to the interaction between the past and the present and even to the organism itself as a whole.

3. Positive directionality

Satir stated that the therapist must help clients to perceive the world in a positive way, to achieve physical and psychological health and to develop their maximum human potential. For this, it is necessary to generate a new interpretive framework for the experiences and to promote the use of personal resources instead of in psychopathological aspects.

4. Focus on change

Satir's family therapy focuses on personal and interpersonal transformation. To this end, this author highlighted the usefulness of deep self-reflection questions at the individual level.

5. Therapist self-congruence

The congruence between the behavior and the therapist's self is a necessary condition for the therapist to be able to help other people to achieve their own. The client perceives this congruence through tools such as humor, metaphors, self-disclosures and creative behaviors in general.