The Satir System and the Value of Its Process for Families

This article introduces the Satir System (developed by American psychotherapist Virginia Satir). It is a valuable process for family development and how families pass on rules, morals, attitudes, and beliefs to their members. Satir explored family reconstruction through psychodrama interactions that addressed emotional conflicts across generations within a family. Understanding our family history is important for understanding who we are and how certain messages we learn come to be.

This system is also interested in power structures in families. Dependency, autonomy, and survival issues play roles in family hierarchies. Each of us learns how to survive and deal with our family to preserve the self. The methods of survival we learn and the stressors we experience have an impact on our behavior and our physical bodies.

Satir focused on “intrapsychic conflicts” and the internal struggles that people engage in with family members. One of the exercises Satir developed is called a Parts Party, where participants play roles that dramatize push and pull conflicts to change destructive ways of being into productive ways of being. The goal is to increase self awareness and find different ways of creating a reality that is desirable for growth. This may come in the form of insights, language or words, and other shifts in perception.

“Living Statues” is another exercise Satir developed, which helps to further explore the dynamics of families and their members to represent the spectrum of closeness and distance in these relationships. There is an emphasis on working through dysfunction by making different choices that are learned through the therapist interventions, such as by providing education on change, family pressures, and other informative topics.

A Satir System therapist may act like the director of a dramatic scene to assist the players with learning a new process for communicating feelings and the meaning they experience as members of their family. Stressors are experienced and understood differently by each family member. The key is to clarify this for one another so that changes can occur and continue to evolve.

By determining what family members see, feel, and communicate during stress, they can get reconnected and dissolve some of their resistance to change. This requires building trust, listening, and making new choices that create the possibility for letting go of protective defenses. This process involves action, reaction, and interaction between family members to open up an otherwise closed family system.

Sources

Brothers, B. J. (2013). Virginia Satir: Foundational Ideas. Routledge.