Satir Family Therapy Flashcards

Satir model offers a clinician of any theoretical orientation an efficient and effective means of conceptualizing how best to communicate and interact with a client. Satir describes four communication survival or coping stances: placator, blamer, superreasonable, and irrelevant.

The person manages interpersonal stress by recognizing the needs of others and the context but not the self.

The inverse of placators, the person manages interpersonal stress by recognizing the needs of self and the context but not others.

The person manages interpersonal stress by recognizing contextual rules but not more subjective needs of self and others.

This person manages interpersonal stress by not acknowledging contextual demands, personal needs, or the needs of others.

A person using this stance is able to simultaneously honor the needs of self and respect the needs of others while responding appropriately to context.

1. People tend naturally toward positive growth (humanistic principle).
2. All people possess the resources for positive growth (humanistic principle).
3. Every person and every thing or situation impact and are impacted by everyone and everything else (systemic principle).
4. Therapy is a process, which involves interaction between therapist and client; and, in this relationship, each person is responsible for himself/herself (systemic and humanistic principle)

• Power struggles: These can be within the family and couple or with extended family members.
• Parental conflicts: These can involve parents disagreeing about how to parent and care for children.
• Lack of validation: The family openly expresses little emotional support or validation.
• Lack of intimacy: There is minimal sharing of significant personal information and one’s emotional life.

Each person’s role is assessed in the family system to understand the function of the problem. Family roles:

• The martyr
• The victim or helpless one
• The rescuer
• The good child or parent
• The bad child or parent

A timeline that includes the major events in an individual’s or family’s life:

• Births and deaths
• Important family events: marriages, moves, tragedies, major illnesses, job loss
• Important historical events: wars, natural disasters, economic downturns

The emotional and nurturing relationships between each child, mother, and father. This should serve as a nurturing system for the child, when the child is experiencing difficulty, the therapist considers how the nurturing function of these relationships can be improved.

Practitioners use these to help clients transform their feelings about feelings to make lasting change.

The six levels of experience are as follows:

• Behavior
• Coping
• Feelings
• Perceptions
• Expectations
• Yearnings

In Satir Family Therapy, it is more useful to consider the specific aspects of the self that a client values and the aspects of which he or she is ashamed.

As self-compassion and self-worth rise, people become more realistic and tolerant of their own and others’ weaknesses while realistically assigning and assuming responsibility for their actions.

Therapists being authentically who they are, is one of the most essential interventions in Satir’s approach.

Therapists provide a role model for how to communicate congruently and also show the effects of increased self-actualization.

Refers to a series of connections both within the therapist and between the therapist and the client. Making contact involves the following:

1. Making direct eye contact with clients
2. Touching clients (e.g., shaking hands)
3. Sitting or standing at the same physical level so that eye contact is easy (i.e., leaning down to talk with children)
4. Asking each person’s name and how he or she prefers to be called