Virginia Satir's Therapeutic Model Overview

So let's take a moment to look at the big picture and how Satir, just kind of the overview of how she conceptualized treatment. So Satir used a six-stage model of change that is very much based on cybernetic systems. So if you call back to grad school there, cybernetic systems are systems that use homeostasis. And self-correction to find balance, which is how she viewed the family system, and as well as from humanistic principles. And so what's interesting and what is classic, classic systems about Satir, she viewed herself as what they called perturbing the system, which, you know, we're going to use the family, but this also applies to individuals, which means you're not controlling how they change. Okay, you are shaking things up. kind of like a snow globe and letting everything resettle. Knowing that when systems get perturbed means their rules get shaken, the norms get shaken up, the normal behaviors, you know, what was a normal behavior, which included the symptom, when that gets shaken up and we get to consciously choose new behaviors, 99% of the time we choose a better behavior. So that's really what she's doing. She is not micromanaging how, when, and where people change or grow. So in the beginning, you're assessing what the status quo is. So the status quo is the family system or the individual that includes the symptom to maintain a sense of normalcy and balance. Then you're going to introduce a foreign element. So that's what the therapist says. She conceptualized what she's doing. I'm introducing a foreign concept, an element. It could be an intervention. It could be a reframe. It could be an emotional experiencing. But we're messing with the balance. of normalcy with the homeostasis. We're throwing something strange into the system. And that creates chaos because the foreign element creates a type of positive feedback loop. And the family is going to scramble or the individual is going to scramble to figure out how to manage this foreign element. And you're going to have to have a new behavior, a new response. And so what happens is... The foreign element shakes up the snow globe and as people decide, you know, figure out how to resettle, they have to consciously choose new behaviors and nine times out of ten they will choose a better behavior than what they were doing before. And so then you integrate some of these new possibilities that were created by this kind of shake-up of the system. You practice these new skills and then you create a new homeostasis. So it's a very classic systemic way of conceptualizing change. So let's look at the therapeutic relationship in this approach. So, and this is one of the things I think that stands out so much, is Satir's presence as a human being is like palpable in videos, you know, decades after they were recorded. Her hope, her enthusiasm, her love for her clients is like, it's in the room. And so this is the quality of presence. And she put people at ease. Now, this doesn't mean we all have to look like Satir, because if we're all, each of us is our authentic self, we're not going to look just like her, because she was authentically her, and each one of us has to be authentically ourselves too. But there is this quality of presence, this genuineness, this way of being where you are fully yourself. and fully present in the room with the client and really having hope for all of the people sitting in front of her that they can change. And again, it comes down to some very humanistic assumptions that all people are tending towards growth, right? And so she just wanted to create the environment where that felt nurtured. And so the more the therapist is congruent, the better they're going to be able to use this therapeutic warmth and their humanity and to make clients feel safe. And so when we're congruent and authentic, clients feel safer. And so they don't have to use all their communication stances to relate to us and we can get further, faster in treatment. She referred to how she worked with people is making contact. And what that means is that you're bringing all of who you are and you're making contact kind of with their authentic self. to use kind of humanistic language there. But that starts with us being our authentic selves, us being at peace with ourselves, accepting who we are, you know, the perfect and the imperfect parts, right? The whole mix of our humanity. And there is this paradox that the more you learn to accept your own humanity, the more you're able to truly, truly accept it in others without judgment. kind of understanding the paradox, I think, and the contradictions of being fully human. And so Satir's work, especially in her later years, she brought in a much more of a sense of spirituality and spirit, but you are really connecting with someone on all channels, mind, body, spirit. You are fully there, fully in the moment. You're not off like rattling in theory and such. You're not sitting there second year guessing. If you're feeling like an imposter, you are not making contact. So it's just really fully having this human experience and being in the present moment. So first the therapist works, if you're working with a couple or a family, to make contact with each person where they feel connected to you. And then you work in the therapy session with the various tools she's going to give us in the slides ahead to help them make contact. authentic connection with one another. Like all humanistic approaches, empathy is definitely emphasized, really relating to the, you know, understanding the client's subjective internal realities. But it does, empathy, remember, it doesn't mean the therapist is taking the client's side, that you're... avoiding inconsistencies. I think with newer clinicians, one of the things I noticed the most is I think that empathy means I just take this side. I don't confront them on anything. Like, no, even Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, who are very, very similar in how they interpreted humanistic principles, how they applied them in their work. They both have this warmth and kindness that comes from them a little bit different than Fritz Perls and Carl Whitaker, who were also humanistic, but they had more of an edge to them, right? So if you think of Satir, I always think of her as like family therapy's version of Carl Rogers. But both Satir and Rogers, read Rogers, just don't read the distilled version. I talk about this a lot in my chapter on Rogers in my counseling theory textbooks. They address inconsistencies. They do. And they do it with kindness and empathy. But being empathetic doesn't mean you don't point out where your clients are being inconsistent, where they're missing things, where they're, you know. blaming others or placating, whatever it is, you, you, the empathy doesn't mean you ignore or don't say anything that's going to make the client uncomfortable or is what you have first is that relationship. And that allows you to address these inconsistencies, you know, and making sure clients take responsibility for what they say, what they do, what their actions are. So you're still going to make clients uncomfortable. Even working with Virginia Satir's approach, But you're doing it from this really strong relationship of where there is this connection and people know that you have their best, you have their well-being at heart, but you are going to still have the hard conversations. And I think that's just so important. A lot of the folks, I think, who are drawn to Satira interpret that is, I never have to confront my clients because I have empathy. It's like, no, no, no, that's not what Satira Rogers said. So, you know, you can honor a person's lived experience, what they were really feeling without saying, you know, you're right to feel this way or, you know, make sense that you felt this way. Making sense is less, is a little softer. You know, you should feel this way. And then clients will ask, should I feel this way? I don't know where the rule book is on how people should feel. That's a very culturally defined. Any should is a culturally defined norm. So, but you can honor someone's reality. This is what you were feeling when this happened. And you don't have to. to, you want to be careful of saying that's right, that's normal, that's not normal to feel a certain way. Because everyone's lived experiences or lived experience, and you honor that and you recognize that you put it into words, but you can do that. And you can validate it in a at a certain level, but you want to be careful of taking the step of validating it in the sense of it's the right way. It's how people should or shouldn't feel. Then you've all whenever you put a should you wandered into culturally cultural norms. And so that's a very dangerous territory and not a very therapeutic one that's going to help you make change. Okay. So let's look at the viewing. So case conceptualization and satire therapy. So Satir's approach is unique, I think, in all of the counseling and psychotherapy and family therapy theories, in that she does have both a very solid assessment of family functioning as well as assessing individual functioning. And she does both of those quite well and has numerous interventions at work for both. So in looking at the family, we have the role of the symptoms. So this is very... classic systemic approach. All of the classic systemic approaches like the Milan school, the MRI approach, strategic, structural, satire, even Bowen, we're looking at the role of the symptom in maintaining the family homeostasis. So how does that depression, that anxiety, the conflict, whatever is the presenting issue? How has the family developed a sense of normalcy? How does that... Even if they don't like it, even if they don't like it, it's balancing something that's got a role in the system. Then you're going to look at just what are the dynamics like in this family? Are there power struggles? Are there teens fighting for power with their parents? Is there parental conflict? Are the two parents not agreeing on how to parent? Is there a lack of validation or intimacy, right? Either between the couple or between parents and kids, is no one able to talk about vulnerable feelings in this family? You know, is everyone kind of just go to their own room? So you're just looking at the general dynamics. And what Satir did is she looked a lot, and the way she did this often is by looking for family roles. And there are a lot of kind of classic roles that people play in a family system. There is the martyr who's always sacrificing themselves for others. You could say that many cultures will almost encourage the martyr role out of the mother figure in the house. So there can be the martyr. There can be the victim. So the victim is the one who's always like, you know, it's always me. I always have to sacrifice for others, but they're the ones who are victimized either by someone in the system, by a situation, by whatever it might be, but they tend to take a victim role. There's a rescuer who swoops in and saves the day, and that tends to be their role. You can have the good versus bad parent, the good versus bad child. Both of those are very, very common dynamics. And you'll see the good, bad parent, good, bad child in most families. And typically, though, you want that to shift around. As long as those roles don't stay constant, you're fine. And where the more rigid those roles become, like there's one parent who all the kids like in all circumstances, and there's one that all the kids don't like, that is not good. Or there's one kid who's chronically the problem child or the child with a problem right now. Again, that is not good. You will normally see a certain amount of those good, bad labels and roles like shift across time and context. But if they stick, that's really bad. One of the things Satir did do, and this is something, you know, like on a whiteboard you could do, or if you're on Zoom, you can just pull up a piece of paper, is to do a family life chronology. And so she would just kind of write out all of the major events, you know, when people were born, if there were deaths, there were major moves, changes of school, changes of jobs. But even just having this timeline pretty much could be very, very helpful in helping you get the story and assess what's going on. And when, you know, what were the major shifts in family dynamics over the years, how everyone responded. It also helps the clients put all those pieces together. And then the other thing that Satir did, which is pretty unique among all the family therapists, is she always looked at what she called the survival triad. This is where you get your survival stances from. But you look at each child and specifically analyze their relationship with each parent. Okay. So that particular survival triad, she would focus in on. Obviously, she looked at the larger system. But then she also clearly took time to think about how each child was connected to both. parents and what kind of triangle the three of them created. Because maybe the child's aligned with more with one parent than another. Maybe the parents are never aligned, you know, or there could be weak bonds with both parents. So you're looking at just how the child is connected and how that triangle functioned with each of the individual children in the system. So this is how she looked at the family functioning. And we move on to individual functioning. So you would be using this to understand an individual's experience while in relationship with others. So you could do this individually or with couples and families. And so what Satir talked about is the six levels of experience or the iceberg. And so she talked about how behaviors are, that's just what you see on the top. And there are all these five other layers that are below the surface that fuel those behaviors. And so helping individuals understand their intra-psychic experiences like depression, anxiety, sadness, and then to help couples and families understand each person's experience. And so we've got what's going on at the top. I guess you could say warring icebergs often, or they could be freezing each other out with all these layers underneath that make the behaviors make sense. And so when you look at these six layers, you have the behavior at the top, right? So that's what we're seeing. And then everything below behavior is what's below the surface. So you have coping. So those are your defenses or survival stances. So this is where the placating, blaming, super reasonable, irrelevant. Again, all of us can use all of these, but we tend to have our favorite. And then underneath those coping stances, you're going to have the feelings. So, you know, how did past experiences, you know, help us interpret what is going on? And then you have the perceptions, which are the beliefs, attitudes, values that informs one's sense of self. So this kind of correlates, if you're familiar with the unifying framework, this is kind of the more cognitive level, right? Then you have expectations, which are kind of a variation on that, but these are the strong beliefs about how life should go, how people should behave, how one should perform. And so, so these are all the shoulds. Satir didn't talk about this, but in the 21st century, you would add on to this. This is where a lot of our gendered, cultured, social class, religious, you know, beliefs and shoulds come from, are going to be in this expectation level. Family of origin and each family, as you well know, interprets their own cultures and subcultures differently and all those rules differently. But even within the same family system where everyone should have the same set of shoulds, boy, you just need to look at your siblings who should be the most likely like you. And often even within a family, those shoulds can vary dramatically. But this is where you some of those cultural elements can come in. And then finally, with yearnings. She talked about this kind of universal longings to be loved, accepted, validated, and confirmed. These are just a basic human need. And so if you think of secure attachment, that's where you can layer this on in here as well. And so this is the iceberg. And so Satir would use this to help couples, families communicate, understand each other better. And she would also use it with individuals to help them understand why they're acting the way they are. as well. Satir was certainly one of the leaders in talking about self-worth and self-esteem. And this is one of the things she always assessed. How does a person feel about themselves? And so looking at, you know, what the client values about themselves and as well as what they're ashamed of. And so kind of looking at it from both sides. So, um, Research indicates that self-compassion or acceptance of one's own strengths or weaknesses is a better indicator of actual happiness and self-esteem. I think we're all in the same ballpark here. So, and what's, what's I think very paradoxical, I don't know if it's paradoxical, but it's interesting or ironic is that as your self-compassion and self-worth rise, you actually become more tolerant than others. So if you meet someone who looks like they're all full of themselves, And they're totally disparaging of others. As a clinician, what that means is when you scratch below the surface, you go down in that iceberg, there's going to be a lot of feelings of unworthiness. And they kind of have this outer exterior. Because when you have sincere, I think, self-acceptance, compassion, self-worth, you kind of embrace the messiness of being human. And it's just so much harder to judge other people. So you will, I think that's the real harm lock, not just what they say about themselves, because people can verbally talk like they have a lot of self-esteem and self-worth, but I really look for how they relate to other people to really get a sense of how deep that goes. Virginia Satir was also one of the, I think earlier therapists to really look at the mind body connection. and how the emotional issues manifest in the body, either symbolically or functionally. And she also addressed some of the issues related to nutrition and exercise. So Satir and there are some other humanistic therapists, I think of Pearls, who really looked, you know, that sometimes if someone's shoulders are hunched that, you know, they wouldn't automatically mean that they feel burdened, right? But or beaten down, but they would they would use it as a possible clue for what might be going on with the client. And so so looking at how the person used their body, how they held their body. as a clue to what's going on emotionally. And you'll see this kind of played out in the intervention that she called sculpting, that these body stances. So she did some of this, you know, having people, you know, try out different postures and stances and how they felt and to experiment with some of this, which is really very, very powerful. So now let's looking at how Satir approached goal setting. So So basically, as a humanistic approach, they're looking for growth. They're looking for realizing one's full potential. And so attending to both individual needs as well as couple family needs. And again, just like her assessment, she addressed both systemic family goals as well as individual goals. So even if you're working with an individual, you're looking at overall how are their relationships doing and vice versa. If you're working with a family, making sure the individuals are functioning well as well. So the relationally function focused goals are going to be around congruent communication. So the ability to really communicate authentically and respond authentically, responding to the needs of self, others, being appropriate to context. And for the family, yeah, you're also looking for a homeostasis where the symptom is needed for the family to maintain its sense of normalcy. So in terms of individually focused goals, these are still kind of along the lines of classic humanism. The overarching goal, like long-term goal here, is to promote self-actualization, fully being yourself and your potential, living an authentic and meaningful life. So you could write out, you know, goals to increase a sense of self-worth and self-compassion. You can reduce defensiveness or use survival stances as other types of examples of how you can use her. her goal setting with individuals. So now let's look at some of the interventions. And so we'll hit some of the high notes. There certainly are a lot that Satir did over the years. And that, you know, folks after her have continued to expand this set of interventions. So I'm just going to say it again. I said it before, I'm going to say it again, though, use of self. So being authentically who? who you are is just really important. And the quality of presence that you bring to the room is essential and that you're able to create a very safe relationship with the clients that you're working with. And so when my clients work with me, I, they, they see, they see the, they see, you know, I have my roles, I have my boundaries, but my quirky sense of humor, right. Um, is certainly present my way of being my way of being. authentic. I tend to be pretty transparent. Of course, there's certain places where you aren't supposed to be transparent as a therapist. So I do that. But when they're relating to me, they feel like they know me. And that makes people feel safe. When you are fully yourself, and I don't talk a lot, it's just my way of being in the room, that they feel like they can trust me. And so their defenses go down. And so we get a lot more work done a lot faster. Satir talked about the ingredients of an interaction. And so this is where detailing the internal communication, what's going on, you can pull from that iceberg, but helping, and she's got some other questions that she uses to help understand what am I seeing? What am I feeling? What am I thinking? To help people really understand what's going on in that interaction. Because like the iceberg, you see the tips of it, but she's going to go down. What are the, you know, what feelings were the feelings of vulnerability typically, right? and helping people understand what's going on within interaction. So here are some of the types of questions that she would use to walk clients through verbally. And you do with, if you've got multiple people in a room, you'd have them, you do it with both, with everyone there. And if you're just working with individual, you're still going to use this to understand how, because most people, individuals will come in and complain about people at work, at home, right? When they're talking about difficult interactions they had outside of session, you would still use these same types of questions. So what did you see and hear? So I call that getting the movie. I know my unifying framework, let's get the movie. What did I see and hear without any interpretation? What meanings did I make? How did you interpret it? What feelings did I have about the meanings that they made? And then you can have feelings about feelings. So how did you feel about being embarrassed, right? By what you saw and heard. So how did you second order feelings? So what did you feel in that moment? And then how do you feel about having that reaction? What defenses did you use? So you can look at the communication stances. What rules for commenting did I use? So what did I allow myself to say to this other person or do in response to whatever problematic interaction I encountered? And then what is their response to this, to the situation? So you use this again, you can kind of feel a little bit of the layers of that iceberg coming in. but you're helping people you know this is what upset them you know how did you make sense of it you know what were the feelings from that interpretation and you're going to keep moving down through that so she did a lot of what can be called communication enhancement um sometimes it's called coaching she actually did things that are sort of like role play and things that can be i've also seen in literature called as enactment but um helping to facilitate I think emotional expression is a lot of what she would focus on and helping people, especially in the room, a couple of families together, how to put difficult emotions into words, naming emotions, locating them in the body, finding a metaphor that really captures the sense. Again, very characteristic of humanistic approaches. Even if you're familiar with emotionally focused therapy and gestalt, they should all feel a little reminiscent. So where are you feeling it in your body and then coaching them to express it using the ingredients of an interaction, if that's helpful, or, you know, stances. And so there's a lot of coaching and trying to help people talk to one another to express in productive ways what they're feeling primarily. Then the most classic satire intervention, and I hope in graduate school, at least everyone got a chance to play with family sculpting. But family sculpting is... we were satir it started with her as i believe and if there's someone here who wants to correct my history they may uh in the comments feel free or in the q a correct my history on this but it started with her kind of explaining the stances of placating was you know she would have someone on their knees kind of looking up you'd have the blamer going like this um and so she would have people sculpt some or get into what it you know positions that represented placating blaming super reasonable right um and irrelevant. And so, and as she did this, realizing, wow, you can take a family, have them position them, sculpt them into how each person in the family sees the other people, how they see the configuration, who's aligned with whom, how are they perceived by others? And this is incredibly powerful. And so if you can, and I think you kind of have to experience to fully get it because it bypasses so much of our cognitive defenses that it's like a punch to the gut oftentimes where like I've had you know clients who's like there's almost like you know you can tell a parent or partner you know how um critical they make you feel how criticized you may be feeling from them right but when you put them in a position like this and they have they see you cowering like this or a child you know you position that what it feels like I will tell you, the message gets through in two minutes what would take 20 sessions in some cases, or never. There's something very powerful about representing a person's lived experience. And we said, you know, when you're doing with a family or a couple, everyone gets to, you know, sculpt the family in any way that they want. And there are lots of different ways that this can be done, how people experience it, what the goal would be like, different periods of time. And so it can be extremely, extremely powerful. I remember one time I had a kid who kind of put one parent outside the room. I was like, wow, okay. That showed a lot. So you can also include here deceased relatives can sometimes be represented in these sculptures. But it is a very, very powerful intervention that just bypasses a lot of cognitive defenses. So I hope you all get a chance to experiment with that at some point in your training. Satir was well known for her use of physical touch. to connect with clients, to reassure them. In today's environment, attorneys and lawyers have a lot to say about not touching clients because it can be misinterpreted, especially if you're working with someone who's experienced physical or sexual abuse. It can feel, you know, very uncomfortable. And so, you know, this is something you want to definitely be careful with, work with an experienced supervisor if you plan on using touch. Because there's a lot of different dynamics related to trauma history, culture, gender, you know, there's a lot of different pieces that can play into this. And so there's no single rule that everyone can use. But you will, it is something everyone notices when they watch the videos of Virginia Satir. And you can use also coaching clients to touch each other. So if you're working with a couple, that's generally much safer than you touching either partner. So let's look here, just telehealth applications. And so when I was doing my literature review for the fourth edition of Mastering Competencies in Family Therapy, where it was right after the pandemic. So I started doing research and I, you know, it was funny, the experiential approaches have the most research about them, because I think most people have the most questions about using experiential approaches with telehealth. And I would say. In general, compared to many other approaches, these tend to be more difficult, but I was very somewhat surprised, quite honestly. I was surprised to see how much was written about it and it can be adapted. So let's look at some of that. So it's because these approaches use a lot of, they focus on that emotion level, right? So you're looking at a lot of non-verbal communication. And so that is what's the most challenging on telehealth. Sometimes you can't even fully see their faces. You can't see half of their body expressions, right, or how they're responding. You try to get a couple or family on and wow, it really, it's like, how do you track it all? It's weird how you can track it so much better in the room compared to a screen, I think. But I think in the room you actually feel it. And so that's one of the things I have learned when I use more. emotionally focused type interventions that rely on non-verbals, like communication coaching, or what's called an enactment in structural or EFT, you're going to have to use a lot more verbal language to make up for the loss of non-verbal communication. And adapting some of that non-verbal. And certainly for sculpting, there was an article on how they were using drawings, viewing the whole family and having, you know, they still were sculpting online. I was like, wow, that is a dedicated clinician. So for example, one of the things I found in working with clients, I do a lot of couples work. And so one of the things I realized, and this, you know, I've always felt like you can feel the vibes in the room, right? We talk about, I'm in California, we talk about feeling vibes all the time. What was really interesting when I started doing couples therapy online during the pandemic is I realized there really are vibes in the room that you feel when someone's been triggered. And it's almost like there's this like delay in terms of when you see it on their face. And it's like at least a 5, 10, 15 second delay. But boy, not having that 5 to 15 seconds to de-escalate, to jump in and... Yeah. usually stop the other partner who's really triggering their partner because otherwise they escalate was really hard. So one of the things I ended up doing is, you know, I said with my couples who tended to escalate is I would say, raise your hand when you're triggered, because it's going to take me, you know, five to 15 seconds to figure it out online at best case scenario in some cases, because I cannot see the rest of your body language. I cannot feel your energy in the room. I won't know. So you have to, if we're going to do couples therapy, you're going to have to raise your hand when you, when you get triggered. Cause I can't tell online or I'm just too delayed. It's like this huge lag in reading their non-verbals because you have so, so many fewer and you just don't feel their energy in the room for whatever that, whatever that is. So then I would just, and actually it ended up being great because the clients had to take more responsibility for saying I'm triggered. They just. Raise their hand. It's another way to use nonverbals. I'm triggered. And so, and then I could, you know, take, you know, take evasive maneuvers to help stabilize the situation. Because if you let a couple get too triggered, they can, you know, escalate, and then you're wasting a lot of precious therapeutic time de-escalating everyone. So, you know, knowing how to work with all of this, having them signal to you using words or a nonverbal signal to help you make up for all the nonverbal communication that you are missing in the room compared to when it is in person. So kind of wrapping up here, looking at this. using this approach with diverse clients. So I will start by saying Satir has used, her approach is used all around the globe. And so there certainly have been global applications of using Satir's work and humanistic approaches in general. However, it's important to recognize that humanistic therapies of all kinds, they do have a set of embedded values. especially related to emotional expression. And, you know, their concept of clear, congruent emotional expression, a willingness to be vulnerable, these values aren't necessarily central in all cultures, subcultures, especially even when you start looking around gendered norms and such, right? So like if you even look in the United States, the gender norms for how men are expected to express themselves versus women, you know, very different cultured gender norms around those, even, you know, within the same culture. And then you can look at social class, education level. There are a lot of dynamics that play into all of this. And so you want to be very mindful when you're working with clients and every client is a diverse client. We all have multiple intersecting identities so that you want to be very cognizant. of what is appropriate for this particular client. What do they value? What is their family system norms? What are the cultural and various, multiple, sometimes typically contradictory cultural norms, right? And so you just want to be careful about not kind of mandating or shaming clients in terms of how they're expressing their emotions, how they're expressing their authentic self, whatever that means, of course. you know, we can deconstruct that one in a different video. But, and so what the mistake I sometimes see clinicians make is let's say they tend to be more of a feeling based person, which most mental health providers are. So I'd call that like a feelings type on the Myers-Briggs and they're routinely in touch with their emotions. They like expressing emotions. clearly and with enthusiasm, right? And so, but you may be talking to someone who comes from a, who might be a thinking type, let's say in the Myers-Briggs, right? They value rationality and they come from a culture or gender norms that where big, bold expression of emotions is just not their thing. And so expecting them to look like maybe how you like to look. express your emotions can be very unfair and can be very problematic. And so it's being careful and mindful about how your client is, you know, and helping them learn how to authentically express their emotions in a way that feels comfortable and right and authentic to them. And so you really want to be slow to make any judgments about how they're expressing. You don't even, um, Another thing I see is there's some clients who maybe use a little of that, you know, relevant, it could be called a relevant response where they make jokes or something like that, you know, and as long as those jokes are just kind of on their way, part of being their authentic self, I think there's a, there's a place for that, you know, and I think there's certain cultural norms or gendered norms where, you know, having some humor, especially, you know, if you can't, if I don't, I'm not laughing, I'm going to cry, right? And, and so sometimes crying is appropriate, but it's not our job to determine when that is necessarily and how. So being as flexible and open minded, I think, when you're working with clients to not pathologize how they prefer to speak, you know, express their emotions. And I think when they can get to places of vulnerability, authenticity, and allow that to be expressed in a way that is true for them. And And that works for them. And so I think one of the litmus tests is, you know, are they able to express their emotions in a way that really is functional in their lives, functional in their relationships? you know, produces the outcome of wellness, relational wellness, mental health that we're looking for, and try to, you know, be very open minded, because, you know, I think in the mental health field, we can get kind of really narrow and what we think healthy expression of emotion looks like. And so, you know, especially in terms of being vulnerable, and the more vulnerable emotions, I think we can all agree that yelling and screaming is generally not. helpful to relationships, but it's often in terms of how many tears are there? How crunched up is their face while they're speaking? And that can vary widely. So yeah, so being careful. And then also just knowing that these humanistic approaches trying to get people to be in their raw authentic cells when they have been mandated to treatment is often can be a huge ask of your clients. And so that, you know, knowing that when they are especially court mandated, the reports going to the courts, you know, how authentic can someone be? That's definitely a more delicate subject.

Okay, you are shaking things up. kind of like a snow globe and letting everything resettle. Knowing that when systems get perturbed means their rules get shaken, the norms get shaken up, the normal behaviors, you know, what was a normal behavior, which included the symptom, when that gets shaken up and we get to consciously choose new behaviors, 99% of the time we choose a better behavior. So that's really what she's doing.

She is not micromanaging how, when, and where people change or grow. So in the beginning, you're assessing what the status quo is. So the status quo is the family system or the individual that includes the symptom to maintain a sense of normalcy and balance. Then you're going to introduce a foreign element.

So that's what the therapist says. She conceptualized what she's doing. I'm introducing a foreign concept, an element.

It could be an intervention. It could be a reframe. It could be an emotional experiencing. But we're messing with the balance. of normalcy with the homeostasis.

We're throwing something strange into the system. And that creates chaos because the foreign element creates a type of positive feedback loop. And the family is going to scramble or the individual is going to scramble to figure out how to manage this foreign element. And you're going to have to have a new behavior, a new response. And so what happens is...

The foreign element shakes up the snow globe and as people decide, you know, figure out how to resettle, they have to consciously choose new behaviors and nine times out of ten they will choose a better behavior than what they were doing before. And so then you integrate some of these new possibilities that were created by this kind of shake-up of the system. You practice these new skills and then you create a new homeostasis.

So it's a very classic systemic way of conceptualizing change. So let's look at the therapeutic relationship in this approach. So, and this is one of the things I think that stands out so much, is Satir's presence as a human being is like palpable in videos, you know, decades after they were recorded. Her hope, her enthusiasm, her love for her clients is like, it's in the room.

And so this is the quality of presence. And she put people at ease. Now, this doesn't mean we all have to look like Satir, because if we're all, each of us is our authentic self, we're not going to look just like her, because she was authentically her, and each one of us has to be authentically ourselves too. But there is this quality of presence, this genuineness, this way of being where you are fully yourself. and fully present in the room with the client and really having hope for all of the people sitting in front of her that they can change.

And again, it comes down to some very humanistic assumptions that all people are tending towards growth, right? And so she just wanted to create the environment where that felt nurtured. And so the more the therapist is congruent, the better they're going to be able to use this therapeutic warmth and their humanity and to make clients feel safe. And so when we're congruent and authentic, clients feel safer. And so they don't have to use all their communication stances to relate to us and we can get further, faster in treatment.

She referred to how she worked with people is making contact. And what that means is that you're bringing all of who you are and you're making contact kind of with their authentic self. to use kind of humanistic language there.

But that starts with us being our authentic selves, us being at peace with ourselves, accepting who we are, you know, the perfect and the imperfect parts, right? The whole mix of our humanity. And there is this paradox that the more you learn to accept your own humanity, the more you're able to truly, truly accept it in others without judgment.

kind of understanding the paradox, I think, and the contradictions of being fully human. And so Satir's work, especially in her later years, she brought in a much more of a sense of spirituality and spirit, but you are really connecting with someone on all channels, mind, body, spirit. You are fully there, fully in the moment.

You're not off like rattling in theory and such. You're not sitting there second year guessing. If you're feeling like an imposter, you are not making contact. So it's just really fully having this human experience and being in the present moment.

So first the therapist works, if you're working with a couple or a family, to make contact with each person where they feel connected to you. And then you work in the therapy session with the various tools she's going to give us in the slides ahead to help them make contact. authentic connection with one another. Like all humanistic approaches, empathy is definitely emphasized, really relating to the, you know, understanding the client's subjective internal realities. But it does, empathy, remember, it doesn't mean the therapist is taking the client's side, that you're...

avoiding inconsistencies. I think with newer clinicians, one of the things I noticed the most is I think that empathy means I just take this side. I don't confront them on anything.

Like, no, even Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, who are very, very similar in how they interpreted humanistic principles, how they applied them in their work. They both have this warmth and kindness that comes from them a little bit different than Fritz Perls and Carl Whitaker, who were also humanistic, but they had more of an edge to them, right? So if you think of Satir, I always think of her as like family therapy's version of Carl Rogers.

But both Satir and Rogers, read Rogers, just don't read the distilled version. I talk about this a lot in my chapter on Rogers in my counseling theory textbooks. They address inconsistencies. They do.

And they do it with kindness and empathy. But being empathetic doesn't mean you don't point out where your clients are being inconsistent, where they're missing things, where they're, you know. blaming others or placating, whatever it is, you, you, the empathy doesn't mean you ignore or don't say anything that's going to make the client uncomfortable or is what you have first is that relationship. And that allows you to address these inconsistencies, you know, and making sure clients take responsibility for what they say, what they do, what their actions are. So you're still going to make clients uncomfortable.

Even working with Virginia Satir's approach, But you're doing it from this really strong relationship of where there is this connection and people know that you have their best, you have their well-being at heart, but you are going to still have the hard conversations. And I think that's just so important. A lot of the folks, I think, who are drawn to Satira interpret that is, I never have to confront my clients because I have empathy. It's like, no, no, no, that's not what Satira Rogers said.

So, you know, you can honor a person's lived experience, what they were really feeling without saying, you know, you're right to feel this way or, you know, make sense that you felt this way. Making sense is less, is a little softer. You know, you should feel this way. And then clients will ask, should I feel this way? I don't know where the rule book is on how people should feel.

That's a very culturally defined. Any should is a culturally defined norm. So, but you can honor someone's reality. This is what you were feeling when this happened.

And you don't have to. to, you want to be careful of saying that's right, that's normal, that's not normal to feel a certain way. Because everyone's lived experiences or lived experience, and you honor that and you recognize that you put it into words, but you can do that.

And you can validate it in a at a certain level, but you want to be careful of taking the step of validating it in the sense of it's the right way. It's how people should or shouldn't feel. Then you've all whenever you put a should you wandered into culturally cultural norms.

And so that's a very dangerous territory and not a very therapeutic one that's going to help you make change. Okay. So let's look at the viewing. So case conceptualization and satire therapy. So Satir's approach is unique, I think, in all of the counseling and psychotherapy and family therapy theories, in that she does have both a very solid assessment of family functioning as well as assessing individual functioning.

And she does both of those quite well and has numerous interventions at work for both. So in looking at the family, we have the role of the symptoms. So this is very...

classic systemic approach. All of the classic systemic approaches like the Milan school, the MRI approach, strategic, structural, satire, even Bowen, we're looking at the role of the symptom in maintaining the family homeostasis. So how does that depression, that anxiety, the conflict, whatever is the presenting issue? How has the family developed a sense of normalcy?

How does that... Even if they don't like it, even if they don't like it, it's balancing something that's got a role in the system. Then you're going to look at just what are the dynamics like in this family?

Are there power struggles? Are there teens fighting for power with their parents? Is there parental conflict? Are the two parents not agreeing on how to parent?

Is there a lack of validation or intimacy, right? Either between the couple or between parents and kids, is no one able to talk about vulnerable feelings in this family? You know, is everyone kind of just go to their own room? So you're just looking at the general dynamics. And what Satir did is she looked a lot, and the way she did this often is by looking for family roles.

And there are a lot of kind of classic roles that people play in a family system. There is the martyr who's always sacrificing themselves for others. You could say that many cultures will almost encourage the martyr role out of the mother figure in the house. So there can be the martyr. There can be the victim.

So the victim is the one who's always like, you know, it's always me. I always have to sacrifice for others, but they're the ones who are victimized either by someone in the system, by a situation, by whatever it might be, but they tend to take a victim role. There's a rescuer who swoops in and saves the day, and that tends to be their role.

You can have the good versus bad parent, the good versus bad child. Both of those are very, very common dynamics. And you'll see the good, bad parent, good, bad child in most families. And typically, though, you want that to shift around. As long as those roles don't stay constant, you're fine.

And where the more rigid those roles become, like there's one parent who all the kids like in all circumstances, and there's one that all the kids don't like, that is not good. Or there's one kid who's chronically the problem child or the child with a problem right now. Again, that is not good.

You will normally see a certain amount of those good, bad labels and roles like shift across time and context. But if they stick, that's really bad. One of the things Satir did do, and this is something, you know, like on a whiteboard you could do, or if you're on Zoom, you can just pull up a piece of paper, is to do a family life chronology.

And so she would just kind of write out all of the major events, you know, when people were born, if there were deaths, there were major moves, changes of school, changes of jobs. But even just having this timeline pretty much could be very, very helpful in helping you get the story and assess what's going on. And when, you know, what were the major shifts in family dynamics over the years, how everyone responded. It also helps the clients put all those pieces together.

And then the other thing that Satir did, which is pretty unique among all the family therapists, is she always looked at what she called the survival triad. This is where you get your survival stances from. But you look at each child and specifically analyze their relationship with each parent.

Okay. So that particular survival triad, she would focus in on. Obviously, she looked at the larger system. But then she also clearly took time to think about how each child was connected to both.

parents and what kind of triangle the three of them created. Because maybe the child's aligned with more with one parent than another. Maybe the parents are never aligned, you know, or there could be weak bonds with both parents. So you're looking at just how the child is connected and how that triangle functioned with each of the individual children in the system. So this is how she looked at the family functioning.

And we move on to individual functioning. So you would be using this to understand an individual's experience while in relationship with others. So you could do this individually or with couples and families. And so what Satir talked about is the six levels of experience or the iceberg.

And so she talked about how behaviors are, that's just what you see on the top. And there are all these five other layers that are below the surface that fuel those behaviors. And so helping individuals understand their intra-psychic experiences like depression, anxiety, sadness, and then to help couples and families understand each person's experience. And so we've got what's going on at the top.

I guess you could say warring icebergs often, or they could be freezing each other out with all these layers underneath that make the behaviors make sense. And so when you look at these six layers, you have the behavior at the top, right? So that's what we're seeing.

And then everything below behavior is what's below the surface. So you have coping. So those are your defenses or survival stances. So this is where the placating, blaming, super reasonable, irrelevant.

Again, all of us can use all of these, but we tend to have our favorite. And then underneath those coping stances, you're going to have the feelings. So, you know, how did past experiences, you know, help us interpret what is going on? And then you have the perceptions, which are the beliefs, attitudes, values that informs one's sense of self.

So this kind of correlates, if you're familiar with the unifying framework, this is kind of the more cognitive level, right? Then you have expectations, which are kind of a variation on that, but these are the strong beliefs about how life should go, how people should behave, how one should perform. And so, so these are all the shoulds.

Satir didn't talk about this, but in the 21st century, you would add on to this. This is where a lot of our gendered, cultured, social class, religious, you know, beliefs and shoulds come from, are going to be in this expectation level. Family of origin and each family, as you well know, interprets their own cultures and subcultures differently and all those rules differently.

But even within the same family system where everyone should have the same set of shoulds, boy, you just need to look at your siblings who should be the most likely like you. And often even within a family, those shoulds can vary dramatically. But this is where you some of those cultural elements can come in. And then finally, with yearnings. She talked about this kind of universal longings to be loved, accepted, validated, and confirmed.

These are just a basic human need. And so if you think of secure attachment, that's where you can layer this on in here as well. And so this is the iceberg. And so Satir would use this to help couples, families communicate, understand each other better. And she would also use it with individuals to help them understand why they're acting the way they are.

as well. Satir was certainly one of the leaders in talking about self-worth and self-esteem. And this is one of the things she always assessed.

How does a person feel about themselves? And so looking at, you know, what the client values about themselves and as well as what they're ashamed of. And so kind of looking at it from both sides. So, um, Research indicates that self-compassion or acceptance of one's own strengths or weaknesses is a better indicator of actual happiness and self-esteem.

I think we're all in the same ballpark here. So, and what's, what's I think very paradoxical, I don't know if it's paradoxical, but it's interesting or ironic is that as your self-compassion and self-worth rise, you actually become more tolerant than others. So if you meet someone who looks like they're all full of themselves, And they're totally disparaging of others. As a clinician, what that means is when you scratch below the surface, you go down in that iceberg, there's going to be a lot of feelings of unworthiness.

And they kind of have this outer exterior. Because when you have sincere, I think, self-acceptance, compassion, self-worth, you kind of embrace the messiness of being human. And it's just so much harder to judge other people. So you will, I think that's the real harm lock, not just what they say about themselves, because people can verbally talk like they have a lot of self-esteem and self-worth, but I really look for how they relate to other people to really get a sense of how deep that goes.

Virginia Satir was also one of the, I think earlier therapists to really look at the mind body connection. and how the emotional issues manifest in the body, either symbolically or functionally. And she also addressed some of the issues related to nutrition and exercise. So Satir and there are some other humanistic therapists, I think of Pearls, who really looked, you know, that sometimes if someone's shoulders are hunched that, you know, they wouldn't automatically mean that they feel burdened, right? But or beaten down, but they would they would use it as a possible clue for what might be going on with the client.

And so so looking at how the person used their body, how they held their body. as a clue to what's going on emotionally. And you'll see this kind of played out in the intervention that she called sculpting, that these body stances. So she did some of this, you know, having people, you know, try out different postures and stances and how they felt and to experiment with some of this, which is really very, very powerful. So now let's looking at how Satir approached goal setting.

So So basically, as a humanistic approach, they're looking for growth. They're looking for realizing one's full potential. And so attending to both individual needs as well as couple family needs. And again, just like her assessment, she addressed both systemic family goals as well as individual goals. So even if you're working with an individual, you're looking at overall how are their relationships doing and vice versa.

If you're working with a family, making sure the individuals are functioning well as well. So the relationally function focused goals are going to be around congruent communication. So the ability to really communicate authentically and respond authentically, responding to the needs of self, others, being appropriate to context.

And for the family, yeah, you're also looking for a homeostasis where the symptom is needed for the family to maintain its sense of normalcy. So in terms of individually focused goals, these are still kind of along the lines of classic humanism. The overarching goal, like long-term goal here, is to promote self-actualization, fully being yourself and your potential, living an authentic and meaningful life. So you could write out, you know, goals to increase a sense of self-worth and self-compassion.

You can reduce defensiveness or use survival stances as other types of examples of how you can use her. her goal setting with individuals. So now let's look at some of the interventions. And so we'll hit some of the high notes.

There certainly are a lot that Satir did over the years. And that, you know, folks after her have continued to expand this set of interventions. So I'm just going to say it again. I said it before, I'm going to say it again, though, use of self.

So being authentically who? who you are is just really important. And the quality of presence that you bring to the room is essential and that you're able to create a very safe relationship with the clients that you're working with. And so when my clients work with me, I, they, they see, they see the, they see, you know, I have my roles, I have my boundaries, but my quirky sense of humor, right. Um, is certainly present my way of being my way of being.

authentic. I tend to be pretty transparent. Of course, there's certain places where you aren't supposed to be transparent as a therapist.

So I do that. But when they're relating to me, they feel like they know me. And that makes people feel safe. When you are fully yourself, and I don't talk a lot, it's just my way of being in the room, that they feel like they can trust me. And so their defenses go down.

And so we get a lot more work done a lot faster. Satir talked about the ingredients of an interaction. And so this is where detailing the internal communication, what's going on, you can pull from that iceberg, but helping, and she's got some other questions that she uses to help understand what am I seeing?

What am I feeling? What am I thinking? To help people really understand what's going on in that interaction. Because like the iceberg, you see the tips of it, but she's going to go down. What are the, you know, what feelings were the feelings of vulnerability typically, right?

and helping people understand what's going on within interaction. So here are some of the types of questions that she would use to walk clients through verbally. And you do with, if you've got multiple people in a room, you'd have them, you do it with both, with everyone there. And if you're just working with individual, you're still going to use this to understand how, because most people, individuals will come in and complain about people at work, at home, right?

When they're talking about difficult interactions they had outside of session, you would still use these same types of questions. So what did you see and hear? So I call that getting the movie.

I know my unifying framework, let's get the movie. What did I see and hear without any interpretation? What meanings did I make? How did you interpret it?

What feelings did I have about the meanings that they made? And then you can have feelings about feelings. So how did you feel about being embarrassed, right? By what you saw and heard. So how did you second order feelings?

So what did you feel in that moment? And then how do you feel about having that reaction? What defenses did you use?

So you can look at the communication stances. What rules for commenting did I use? So what did I allow myself to say to this other person or do in response to whatever problematic interaction I encountered?

And then what is their response to this, to the situation? So you use this again, you can kind of feel a little bit of the layers of that iceberg coming in. but you're helping people you know this is what upset them you know how did you make sense of it you know what were the feelings from that interpretation and you're going to keep moving down through that so she did a lot of what can be called communication enhancement um sometimes it's called coaching she actually did things that are sort of like role play and things that can be i've also seen in literature called as enactment but um helping to facilitate I think emotional expression is a lot of what she would focus on and helping people, especially in the room, a couple of families together, how to put difficult emotions into words, naming emotions, locating them in the body, finding a metaphor that really captures the sense. Again, very characteristic of humanistic approaches. Even if you're familiar with emotionally focused therapy and gestalt, they should all feel a little reminiscent.

So where are you feeling it in your body and then coaching them to express it using the ingredients of an interaction, if that's helpful, or, you know, stances. And so there's a lot of coaching and trying to help people talk to one another to express in productive ways what they're feeling primarily. Then the most classic satire intervention, and I hope in graduate school, at least everyone got a chance to play with family sculpting.

But family sculpting is... we were satir it started with her as i believe and if there's someone here who wants to correct my history they may uh in the comments feel free or in the q a correct my history on this but it started with her kind of explaining the stances of placating was you know she would have someone on their knees kind of looking up you'd have the blamer going like this um and so she would have people sculpt some or get into what it you know positions that represented placating blaming super reasonable right um and irrelevant. And so, and as she did this, realizing, wow, you can take a family, have them position them, sculpt them into how each person in the family sees the other people, how they see the configuration, who's aligned with whom, how are they perceived by others?

And this is incredibly powerful. And so if you can, and I think you kind of have to experience to fully get it because it bypasses so much of our cognitive defenses that it's like a punch to the gut oftentimes where like I've had you know clients who's like there's almost like you know you can tell a parent or partner you know how um critical they make you feel how criticized you may be feeling from them right but when you put them in a position like this and they have they see you cowering like this or a child you know you position that what it feels like I will tell you, the message gets through in two minutes what would take 20 sessions in some cases, or never. There's something very powerful about representing a person's lived experience. And we said, you know, when you're doing with a family or a couple, everyone gets to, you know, sculpt the family in any way that they want. And there are lots of different ways that this can be done, how people experience it, what the goal would be like, different periods of time.

And so it can be extremely, extremely powerful. I remember one time I had a kid who kind of put one parent outside the room. I was like, wow, okay.

That showed a lot. So you can also include here deceased relatives can sometimes be represented in these sculptures. But it is a very, very powerful intervention that just bypasses a lot of cognitive defenses. So I hope you all get a chance to experiment with that at some point in your training.

Satir was well known for her use of physical touch. to connect with clients, to reassure them. In today's environment, attorneys and lawyers have a lot to say about not touching clients because it can be misinterpreted, especially if you're working with someone who's experienced physical or sexual abuse.

It can feel, you know, very uncomfortable. And so, you know, this is something you want to definitely be careful with, work with an experienced supervisor if you plan on using touch. Because there's a lot of different dynamics related to trauma history, culture, gender, you know, there's a lot of different pieces that can play into this. And so there's no single rule that everyone can use. But you will, it is something everyone notices when they watch the videos of Virginia Satir.

And you can use also coaching clients to touch each other. So if you're working with a couple, that's generally much safer than you touching either partner. So let's look here, just telehealth applications.

And so when I was doing my literature review for the fourth edition of Mastering Competencies in Family Therapy, where it was right after the pandemic. So I started doing research and I, you know, it was funny, the experiential approaches have the most research about them, because I think most people have the most questions about using experiential approaches with telehealth. And I would say.

In general, compared to many other approaches, these tend to be more difficult, but I was very somewhat surprised, quite honestly. I was surprised to see how much was written about it and it can be adapted. So let's look at some of that.

So it's because these approaches use a lot of, they focus on that emotion level, right? So you're looking at a lot of non-verbal communication. And so that is what's the most challenging on telehealth. Sometimes you can't even fully see their faces.

You can't see half of their body expressions, right, or how they're responding. You try to get a couple or family on and wow, it really, it's like, how do you track it all? It's weird how you can track it so much better in the room compared to a screen, I think. But I think in the room you actually feel it.

And so that's one of the things I have learned when I use more. emotionally focused type interventions that rely on non-verbals, like communication coaching, or what's called an enactment in structural or EFT, you're going to have to use a lot more verbal language to make up for the loss of non-verbal communication. And adapting some of that non-verbal.

And certainly for sculpting, there was an article on how they were using drawings, viewing the whole family and having, you know, they still were sculpting online. I was like, wow, that is a dedicated clinician. So for example, one of the things I found in working with clients, I do a lot of couples work.

And so one of the things I realized, and this, you know, I've always felt like you can feel the vibes in the room, right? We talk about, I'm in California, we talk about feeling vibes all the time. What was really interesting when I started doing couples therapy online during the pandemic is I realized there really are vibes in the room that you feel when someone's been triggered.

And it's almost like there's this like delay in terms of when you see it on their face. And it's like at least a 5, 10, 15 second delay. But boy, not having that 5 to 15 seconds to de-escalate, to jump in and...

Yeah. usually stop the other partner who's really triggering their partner because otherwise they escalate was really hard. So one of the things I ended up doing is, you know, I said with my couples who tended to escalate is I would say, raise your hand when you're triggered, because it's going to take me, you know, five to 15 seconds to figure it out online at best case scenario in some cases, because I cannot see the rest of your body language. I cannot feel your energy in the room. I won't know.

So you have to, if we're going to do couples therapy, you're going to have to raise your hand when you, when you get triggered. Cause I can't tell online or I'm just too delayed. It's like this huge lag in reading their non-verbals because you have so, so many fewer and you just don't feel their energy in the room for whatever that, whatever that is.

So then I would just, and actually it ended up being great because the clients had to take more responsibility for saying I'm triggered. They just. Raise their hand. It's another way to use nonverbals.

I'm triggered. And so, and then I could, you know, take, you know, take evasive maneuvers to help stabilize the situation. Because if you let a couple get too triggered, they can, you know, escalate, and then you're wasting a lot of precious therapeutic time de-escalating everyone.

So, you know, knowing how to work with all of this, having them signal to you using words or a nonverbal signal to help you make up for all the nonverbal communication that you are missing in the room compared to when it is in person. So kind of wrapping up here, looking at this. using this approach with diverse clients.

So I will start by saying Satir has used, her approach is used all around the globe. And so there certainly have been global applications of using Satir's work and humanistic approaches in general. However, it's important to recognize that humanistic therapies of all kinds, they do have a set of embedded values.

especially related to emotional expression. And, you know, their concept of clear, congruent emotional expression, a willingness to be vulnerable, these values aren't necessarily central in all cultures, subcultures, especially even when you start looking around gendered norms and such, right? So like if you even look in the United States, the gender norms for how men are expected to express themselves versus women, you know, very different cultured gender norms around those, even, you know, within the same culture.

And then you can look at social class, education level. There are a lot of dynamics that play into all of this. And so you want to be very mindful when you're working with clients and every client is a diverse client.

We all have multiple intersecting identities so that you want to be very cognizant. of what is appropriate for this particular client. What do they value?

What is their family system norms? What are the cultural and various, multiple, sometimes typically contradictory cultural norms, right? And so you just want to be careful about not kind of mandating or shaming clients in terms of how they're expressing their emotions, how they're expressing their authentic self, whatever that means, of course.

you know, we can deconstruct that one in a different video. But, and so what the mistake I sometimes see clinicians make is let's say they tend to be more of a feeling based person, which most mental health providers are. So I'd call that like a feelings type on the Myers-Briggs and they're routinely in touch with their emotions.

They like expressing emotions. clearly and with enthusiasm, right? And so, but you may be talking to someone who comes from a, who might be a thinking type, let's say in the Myers-Briggs, right?

They value rationality and they come from a culture or gender norms that where big, bold expression of emotions is just not their thing. And so expecting them to look like maybe how you like to look. express your emotions can be very unfair and can be very problematic.

And so it's being careful and mindful about how your client is, you know, and helping them learn how to authentically express their emotions in a way that feels comfortable and right and authentic to them. And so you really want to be slow to make any judgments about how they're expressing. You don't even, um, Another thing I see is there's some clients who maybe use a little of that, you know, relevant, it could be called a relevant response where they make jokes or something like that, you know, and as long as those jokes are just kind of on their way, part of being their authentic self, I think there's a, there's a place for that, you know, and I think there's certain cultural norms or gendered norms where, you know, having some humor, especially, you know, if you can't, if I don't, I'm not laughing, I'm going to cry, right?

And, and so sometimes crying is appropriate, but it's not our job to determine when that is necessarily and how. So being as flexible and open minded, I think, when you're working with clients to not pathologize how they prefer to speak, you know, express their emotions. And I think when they can get to places of vulnerability, authenticity, and allow that to be expressed in a way that is true for them. And And that works for them. And so I think one of the litmus tests is, you know, are they able to express their emotions in a way that really is functional in their lives, functional in their relationships?

you know, produces the outcome of wellness, relational wellness, mental health that we're looking for, and try to, you know, be very open minded, because, you know, I think in the mental health field, we can get kind of really narrow and what we think healthy expression of emotion looks like. And so, you know, especially in terms of being vulnerable, and the more vulnerable emotions, I think we can all agree that yelling and screaming is generally not. helpful to relationships, but it's often in terms of how many tears are there? How crunched up is their face while they're speaking? And that can vary widely.

So yeah, so being careful. And then also just knowing that these humanistic approaches trying to get people to be in their raw authentic cells when they have been mandated to treatment is often can be a huge ask of your clients. And so that, you know, knowing that when they are especially court mandated, the reports going to the courts, you know, how authentic can someone be?

That's definitely a more delicate subject.

Transcript for:Virginia Satir's Therapeutic Model Overview

Transcript for:
Virginia Satir's Therapeutic Model Overview