1The worldview
Self-worth, stance, the other's response: the loop that replays that dinner
To see why that dinner keeps ending the way it does, start with someone who invited the whole family into the therapy room. The Satir model comes from Virginia Satir (1916–1988), an American social worker and pioneer of family therapy. In Chinese she has several spellings: 沙維雅 is the one commonly seen in Hong Kong, and 薩提爾, 薩提亞 and 沙提亞 appear too, all meaning the same person and the same approach. This page says Satir model throughout; in Hong Kong it is also called the 沙維雅 family therapy model. She was seeing whole families in the 1950s, and according to the biography published by her network, Avanta, in 1962 she directed the first formal family therapy training programme, at the Mental Research Institute in California.[4]
The approach starts from the belief that everyone has the inner resources needed to grow, that change is always possible, and that all behaviour is an effort at growth; people share basic needs to survive, to grow and learn, to make sense and order, and to be close to others. Satir is often quoted as saying, "The problem is not the problem; coping is the problem." What troubles us is often not the event but the way we habitually cope with it.[5,8]
At its centre are self-worth and congruence. Feeling not good enough or under threat, people switch on survival-style coping stances learned in childhood; when self-worth is steadier, people are more able to be congruent, speaking openly while taking account of themselves, the other person and the context. This congruence is not quite what Rogers means by the word in person-centred therapy; the difference is set out under neighbouring approaches below.[1,8,18]
Satir founded the Avanta Network in 1977, now called the Virginia Satir Global Network, which still trains and connects practitioners of her approach. After her death Banmen, Gerber, Gomori and others organised her teaching into a more systematic Satir model (published in 1991), which later developed into a briefer form, Satir transformational systemic therapy. The model reached mainland China around 2003, and there is now a good deal of training and practice in Chinese-speaking communities.[2,3,4,7,8]
So the dinner at the start is not a single loss of control but a loop: self-worth is threatened, so we protect ourselves with a stance; the stance draws the other person into a stance of their own, and their response often seems to confirm that we are not good enough. Most of the model's methods step in at one point of this loop.
