Personal Goals and Basic Principles of Her Therapeutic Work

Virginia Satir aimed to create conditions in which the client could freely realize their own potential.

She placed particular importance on balancing individual interests with maintaining the family system. Another key point for her was empowering clients to manage their problems.

To achieve these goals, she introduced several presuppositions into the therapeutic process:

1. Solution-Oriented Focus on the Present and Future

(instead of a problem-oriented focus on the past)

Virginia Satir always directed her clients' attention to the present and the future. She only addressed the past in order to build rapport, illustrate interaction patterns, or present past events in a new way so they could take on a more positive meaning in the present.

The following goal-oriented questions guided Virginia Satir’s work:

• "What do you want?"
• "How will you know when you have achieved it?"
• "What is preventing you right now?"
• "What do you need in order to get it?"

She also placed great importance on ensuring that these questions were not answered in a general or abstract way, but rather in a sensory-specific manner. With a positively formulated goal, the client has the opportunity to change something themselves; it is within their power to improve their situation. Only then is a goal useful and empowering for a person. As soon as a client named a positive goal, Virginia Satir focused entirely on achieving that goal. If a particular intervention did not work, she tried other options and interventions to reach the goal.

2. Positive Intentions

Virginia Satir assumed that everyone, no matter how negative their behavior may seem, had good intentions. This approach makes it possible to deal constructively with negative behaviors and look for alternative actions together, rather than arguing or blaming each other.

3. Action

Another reason for Virginia Satir's powerful effectiveness lay in her insistence on taking action. She was not satisfied when clients merely described their behavior or identified new behavioral alternatives verbally.

We only change when we fully experience events and perceptions. And because we prefer to display familiar behaviors, we must actively practice new behaviors in order to become familiar with them. We also only adopt new behaviors when we have concrete positive experiences with them—experiences that previously lay outside our imagination.

She herself was also very active during therapy. She made individual contact with each family member. When interactions were unproductive, she often interrupted them by physically positioning herself between the two parties, thus cutting off (visual) contact, and worked individually with each person. Afterward, she would leave her position, and the clients could re-engage in interaction.

4. Equality

Through the equality of all parties involved—both in the therapist-client relationship and among individual family members—several advantages emerge. Firstly, it becomes clear to all involved how struggles for dominance negatively impact and complicate communication. Secondly, the therapist avoids becoming entangled in the family hierarchy. Equality also emphasizes the commonalities among family members more than their differences. Conflicts and disputes usually stem from insufficient information and the perception of differences.

In contrast, understanding and compassion are based on complete information and the perception of commonalities. Therefore, it is very important to highlight similarities and minimize differences. Virginia Satir, for example, created equality by placing children on a chair so that they were at eye level with adults. She also often included herself in her clients’ problems by using the pronoun "we."

Another aspect of her teaching was her role flexibility. She believed that “everyone can become a teacher or student for one another.” This was evident in how she constantly checked with all parties to confirm whether she had understood a particular issue correctly and also invited corrections.