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5 unusual facts about Virginia Satir


Virginia Satir

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.

In 1932, she received her high school diploma and promptly enrolled in Milwaukee State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.) To pay for her education she worked part-time for the Works Projects Administration and for Gimbels Department Store and further supplemented her income by babysitting.

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".

By the time Satir's father decided to overrule his wife, the young girl's appendix had ruptured.

Wilbur Hot Springs

Dr. Miller was a San Francisco psychologist who had left teaching at the University of Michigan in order to study in California with Virginia Satir, the founder of family therapy, and with Fritz Perls, the originator of Gestalt Therapy.


California Social Work Hall of Distinction

Through 2013, there have been 82 honorees inducted into the California Social Work Hall of Distinction, including Dana W. Bartlett, Emory Bogardus, Barbara Lee, Biddy Mason, Virginia Satir, Judith Wallerstein, and Mariko Yamada.

Haven Institute

Some notable ones have been Virginia Satir, Erv and Miriam Polster, Paul Reps, Carl Whitaker, Paul Lowe, James Bugental, Thomas Szasz, Bill O'Hanlon, Maria Gomori and Joanna Macy.

Personality systematics

Family systems therapy received an important boost in the mid-1950s through the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson and colleagues – Jay Haley, Donald D. Jackson, John Weakland, William Fry, and later, Virginia Satir, Paul Watzlawick and others – at Palo Alto in the US, who introduced ideas from cybernetics and general systems theory into social psychology and psychotherapy, focusing in particular on the role of communication.

Systemic Constellations

The Systemic Constellation process is a trans-generational, phenomenological, therapeutic intervention with roots in family systems therapy (Psychodrama of Jacob Moreno, Virginia Satir, Iván Böszörményi-Nagy), existential-phenomenology (Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger), and the ancestor reverence of the South African Zulus.


see also