Forgiving parents – Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir (26 June 1916 – 10 September 1988) was an american psychotherapist, known especially for her approach to family therapy. She is also known for creating the “Virginia Satir – Change Process Model”, this model was developed through clinical studies. Her entire work was done under the umbrella of “Becoming More Fully Human”.

From the possibility of a nurturing primary triad of father, mother, and child she conceived a process of Human Validation.In the mid-1970s her work was extensively studied by the co-founders of Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who used it as one of the three fundamental models of NLP.[8] Bandler and Grinder also collaborated with Satir to author Changing With Families for Science and Behavior Books, which bore the subtitle ‘A Book About Further Education for Being Human’.

AVANTA is an international organization that carries on her work and promotes her approach to family therapy.Steve Andreas, one of Bandler and Grinder’s students, wrote Virginia Satir: the patterns of her magic (1991) in which he summarized the major patterns of Satir’s work, and then showed how Satir applied them in a richly annotated verbatim transcript of a videotaped session titled, “Forgiving Parents.”. In this session, Satir works with a woman who hated her mother, and had difficulty connecting with others as a result. Using a variety of role-plays, including a “family reconstruction,” this woman came to see her mother as her “best friend,” as detailed in a 3 1/2 year follow-up interview.