Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir, known as “everybody’s family therapist”, spent her life peeking at, human being looking under, and poking into what goes on between and inside human beings. Her philosophy persons are a miracle, always evolving and capable of growth, change, and new understanding.

Her formal search began in 1930s when she started her professional life teaching handicapped and gifted children, which led her to look at their families for psychological, social , and therapeutic clues. She was interested in bringing the rich and useful concepts from human psychology to the general public in direct and clear ways. Her books, films and videotapes are presented from that point of view. She is the author of The New People making ,Self Esteem and more. She published various articles and chapters in professional journals and anthologies.[1]

Virginia Satir Books

Excerpts

Your Many Faces

My eyes move to the right of the wheel and my stomach tightens into a painful knot a I read a list called: Rules for being a good person. There are no cobwebs or dust in this one. It reads, ” I must always be right, clean, bright, sane, good, obedient, healthy, no matter what the cost or situation, for everyone counts more than me, and who am I to ask for anything for myself?. It seem s that throughout my entire life I have run into this in some form or another, and almost everywhere. I recognize it as the Universal Should List. I spent may years trying to make it work, but the best I could do was to succeed only some of the time. When I couldn’t make it work, I felt very bad about myself. From Your Many Faces: The First Step to Being Loved. (page 10-11)

The beginning of new possibilities starts when you believe that there ar no fixed, permanent sets of roadways inside of you, that they are all capable of being resurfaced, reshaped, reconstructed, bypassed, and built anew. We come into this world at birth and leave at death. The time between these two points is our time to develop our own map. It will continue to unfold, if you allow yourself to explore your many parts and risk going into the unknown. Some people make up a detailed map at five and then spend their lives fitting into it. Others start out with a large space and proceed to follow the continual process of discovery, which shifts and changes the points on our map and the lines between them as we move, lo, listen, speak, sort, challenge, take in and let go. From Your Many Faces: The First Step to Being Loved. (page 10-11)

My declaration of Self Esteem

This is a among one of the greatest self esteem affirmations written by Virginia Satir who believed that all human beings are good at the core. She believed that a healthy family life involved an open and reciprocal sharing of affection, feelings, and love. Satir made enormous contributions to family therapy. This inspirational poem is about self worth . We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us. She said.

I AM ME

In all the world, there is no one else exactly
like me. Everything that comes out of me is authentically me.
Because I alone chose it. I own everything about me
My body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice, all my actions.

Whether they be to others or to myself . I own my fantasies,
My dreams, my hopes, my fears. I own all my triumphs and
successes, all my failures and mistakes.

Because I own all of Me, I can become intimately acquainted with me. By so doing
I can love me and be friendly with me in all my parts. I know
there are aspects about myself that puzzle me, and other
aspects that I do not know . But as long as I am
Friendly and loving to myself, I can courageously
and hopefully look for solutions to the puzzles and for ways to find out more about me

However I look and sound, whatever I say and do, and whatever
I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically
Me – If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought
and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is
unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new for that
which I discarded

I can see, hear, feel, think, say, and do
I have the tools to survive, to be close to others, to be
productive to make sense and order out of the world of
people and things outside of me

I own me, and therefore I can engineer me – I am me and I am ok.© Virginia Satir, 1975.

Virginia Satir: Becoming More Fully Human (excerpt) 

Reference:

1. Your Many Faces. Virginia Satir. 2009. United States. Celestial Arts.