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During the past fifteen years, it has been a rare pleasure and an honor to have built models of some of the best communicators of the last generation, including people such as Moshe Feldenkrais and Milton H. Erickson. But most of all, it has been a pleasure to have started out by modeling Virginia Satir, the originator of conjoint family therapy, master therapist, master teacher, and most of all, master communicator.
I remember many, many years ago, sitting in my driveway in Soquel, California, working on a car. Looking up from the frustration of difficulty with the engine, I saw a very unusual person. She walked down my driveway and up to me, unlike most of the people I have met in my life, who were unsure of themselves, uncertain, or nervous, especially when they were in unfamiliar surroundings. Virginia Satir possessed none of these qualities. She was equally at home on a stage, with a family, with a schizophrenic, or in just about any context in which she had the ability to communicate, something she did so exquisitely.
Virginia also demonstrated the difference between caring about the work one does and caring about the prestige that one gets from such work. During the past fifteen years, I have met many other therapists who were famous—famous for intellectual work, or famous for things that they may or may not have done in years past. In contrast, Virginia was a worker. I never knew her to have a bad day, to be “off,” to do anything but give a hundred percent—all the time. Some people criticized her for her lifestyle, but I'm not one of them. I envied her energy and her willingness to commit fully to everything she did. As long as I knew her, she persevered and demonstrated an abundance of both heart and skill.
What Steve Andreas has set out to do in this book is something like what I attempted to do over fifteen years ago. When I set about writing The Structure of Magic, I had just spent a month with Virginia in a place called Cold Mountain Institute. I was struck by how powerful a communicator she was, and how successful she was in her own work. I was also impressed with how little other people were able to learn to do what she did. They would imitate her tonality or her jargon, but rarely did they take the time to learn and to imitate her skill. This isn't because people are bad, or because—as Virginia put it—“we are all slow learners,” but because they did not realize how precise she was in her communication. Although Virginia communicated—as she said, “highly intuitively”—that did not change the fact that she was precise about every word she chose, every gesture and movement she made. Virginia understood that communication came from the full range of experience, and that it was linked to people's pasts, from before they were born. And that it set a course and a direction for the future of not just individuals, but for entire families.
There was a time when Virginia had to hide the fact that she did family therapy. She said she was just “interviewing” families before she did therapy. Fortunately for all of us, those days are gone. Virginia created an opportunity for us all to explore and grow and change in new and exciting ways. Those freedoms are available to all of us as professional communicators, for some of us as psychotherapists, and for some of us just as people who want to learn to be able to do more in life at every opportunity. Virginia serves as a powerful model of someone who lived her life to the fullest. Yet at the same time that she did things for herself, she also did things for an abundance of others. Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people's lives will be changed because this woman gave her all to every piece of work she did.
In the transcript that Steve Andreas has analyzed here, he has taken to heart not only Virginia's caring attitude toward people, but the specific ways in which she achieves the outcome she seeks. The most powerful thing you can learn from this transcript is that Virginia never wavers from what she sets out to do. And what she sets out to do is what the client asks her to do. She tries everything she can, and everything she does relates directly to the client's desired state.
The terminology and the way in which Steve studies Virginia are perhaps different from how most people would, and perhaps similar to the way in which I would approach a study of her. But I think what this book offers the sincere student of Virginia Satir is more than just an attitude. It offers a profound example of how tenacious, persistent, and resourceful Virginia was, and at the same time, how precise and methodical. If Virginia was one of the people you ever envied in your life, or would ever want to emulate, rather than emulating her tonality, style, and jargon, or the kinds of things she said, I think it is time we got serious enough to emulate her skill. And that requires that we sit down and break it into pieces, and find out what this genius was doing, so that we can do the same kind of work with the same kind of tenacity and heart.
Steve, I think you have done a beautiful job. For those of you about to read this book, read on and learn. The wisdom of Virginia Satir will be worthy of study for centuries to come. I think this book stands as a real tribute to what she did and what she cared about. And although this is different from her own teaching style, as Virginia said, “We are all slow learners, but we are all educable.”
—Richard Bandler
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