A Mature Person according to Virginia Satir

The more I read of from Virginia Satir's Conjoint Family Therapy, the more I appreciate her ideas, to say nothing of her skills in practice. Her focus on communication is right up my alley; and her emphasis on self-esteem sets her apart from other old-school systems and structural theorists, who tend not to look at the intra-psychic.

Her description of functional and dysfunctional communication and relational patterns describes pretty bluntly how we can all get so anxious, angry, and generally muddled up just going through life.

Here a longish tidbit on what maturity is:

"A mature person is one who...is able to make choices and decisions based on accurate perceptions about himself, others, and the context in which he finds himself; who acknowledges these choices and decisions as being his; and who accepts responsibility for their outcomes.

The patterns of behaving that characterize a mature person we call functional because they enable him to deal in a relatively competent and precise way with the world in which he lives. Such a person will:

• manifest himself clearly with others.
• be in touch with signals from his internal self, thus letting himself know openly what he thinks and feels.
• Be able to see and hear what is outside himself as differentiated from himself and as different from anything else.
• Behave toward another person as someone separate from himself and unique.
• Treat the presence of different-ness as an opportunity to learn and explore, rather than as a threat or a signal for conflict.
• Deal with persons and situations in their context, in terms of “how it is” rather than how he wishes it were or expects it to be.
• Accept responsibility for what he feels, thinks, hears and sees, rather than denying it or attributing it to others.
• Have techniques for openly negotiating the giving, receiving and checking of meaning between himself and others.*
  

(*This description of maturity emphasizes social and communication skills rather than the acquisition of knowledge and recognized achievement, which in my view derive from the first two.)

We call an individual dysfunctional when he has not learned to communicate properly."

- Virginia Satir, Conjoint Family Therapy