VIRGINIA SATIR-HUMAN VALIDATION PROCESS



Virginia Satir-Human Validation Process



Virginia Satir-Human Validation Process

Introduction

Virginia Satir, the creator of Satir Systemic Brief Therapy, was born in Wisconsin in 1916. Her career as a therapist spanned forty-five years until her death in1988. She dedicated her life to helping people grow and heal. She has been sited as "one of the most influential modern psychologists and a founder of family therapy." Virginia Satir's vision was to help guide people to reach their full potential. As a therapist she developed process-oriented systems to lead people to tap into their internal resources to create external changes. She believed that people's internal view of themselves, their sense of self-worth, was the underlying root of their problems. Satir's systems were all based around looking clearly and congruently inward at oneself to view how we originally learned to cope with our world. She believed that the problem was not the problem but how one coped with the problem was the problem. Satir developed and named four stances for viewing how one copes or originally learned to survive. Her systems included family mapping, family reconstruction, the iceberg model, the parts party, a self-mandala of universal human resources, and sculpting in which a person can express, define and explain their inner landscapes.

Analysis

Six Stages of Change

Virginia Satir believed change was possible. Her focus was on connecting her client or the family she was working with, at the level of yearnings, expectations, perceptions, and feelings. Working from this level would result in a sharing, acceptance, and respect as a matter of individual choice. Through the processes described previously, the client or family would learn the steps to becoming more congruent with each other. This work would provide an internal shift for the individual or family members that would fundamentally affect each person's self-worth. Change then would be an internal shift that would bring about an external change. "To transform the survival stances into congruent communication, or to effect any other change, we need to examine the concepts of discovery, awareness, understanding, and new applications." (Satir et al., 1991, p.86)

Satir delineated six stages in the process of change. The first is the client's status quo or existing state. For an individual or a family system this is the place of familiar patterns of expectations and reactions. Dysfunctionally balanced individuals or family systems will continue to cope by placating, blaming, being super-reasonable, or being irrelevant until something drastic happens. The second stage is the introduction of a foreign element; the something drastic that signals the need for change is recognized. When an individual or family system is faced with something drastic they seek help. The incident and the therapist they seek, both become the foreign element. This is the stage where expectations, barriers to change, and communication stances are examined using the processes described previously. Resistance can be very strong at this stage. Reframing resistance, looking at the positive resources that an individual's communication stance has provided, leads to a place of acceptance and ...