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

Two great social workers

I have been reading, this week, the work of two great social workers – Virgina Satir and Clare Winnicott. Virginia Satir is well known in the field of family therapy; Clare Winnicott is not well known, but she played an important role in the development and publishing of her husband Donald’s theories. It is interesting to me that both women had pivotal roles in the development of therapy, but they are both outshone in academia – Satir to a lesser extent, but she does not seem to have devoted as much energy to promulgation of her method – or, perhaps, her method has been more difficult to promulgate (the Virginia Satir Global Network, form Avanta, seems to come close, but I'd never heard of them before I investigated).

What is the explanation for this? Neither contributed to the “literature” to the extent that others did. C. Winnicott seems to have been more involved in the practical world of child welfare than in academia, and she appears to have been content to support the publication of her husband’s writing.

Satir became well-known for her practice, having been featured as a “Wizard” by Bandler and Grinder’s Neurolinguistic Programming, and her videos circulate in widely among family therapy professionals. For this reason it surprises me that we don’t hear more about “Conjoint family therapy,” as we do about, say, Minuchin’s Structural Therapy (which seems to be the universal practice in child welfare agencies in NYC, based on my limited experience).

Is it right to group these two women, in part because they are women, and in part because they are both social workers? Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss more of their work as I continue to read through Satir’s Conjoint Family Therapy and explore the texts on a website about Clare Winnicott.

Meanwhile, any discussion or comments would be great. I’ll leave with a quote by Winnicott, MSW, from her article “Communicating with Children” (1977), that seems particularly relevant to social work involving children and the delicate balance of roles:

Perhaps the most valuable gift that we bring to work with children is our own capacity to remain vulnerable, while accepting our professional discipline and role. (Communicating with Children, 1977).*

More later of what I learned from her on talking to children, and other similarities I see in the perspectives of these two great social workers.

*Winnicott, Clare. (1996) Communicating with Children. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 66(2).