Changing with Families
A Book About Further Education for Being Human

by Richard Bandler, John Grinder, and Virginia Satir

(Out of Print)

Family therapy is the most complex arena for human challenge. To meet this ever-evolcing challenge, the authors combined their talents as teachers and therapists to present what they call the minimum model for family therapy -- the core set of skills that a people-healer needs for effective, creative family therapy. Changing with Families describes the basic communication patterns that therapists need to recognize and respond to, and then presents a basic strategy for the family therapy session.

The process of writing this book was, for the three of us, an opportunity to change and grow and integrate parts of our experience of doing family therapy and individual therapy. We came to understand explicitly how the communications skills we use in those contexts applied to writing the book together. Taking three very different models of the world, three different types of background, we found a way to use those same communication skills to communicate with each other and then to translate the communication we found effective among the three of us onto paper. So, we wanted to tell those of you who are reading this book that this book contains some of the ways which we found delightful and useful to use to communicate not only with families in the context of therapy, but also with each other in the process of writing. The very same patterns that we identify in this book as patterns of effective communcation with members of a family in the context of a therapy session are precisely the patterns of communication that we used to write this book. And it gives us great pleasure, and is a continuing delight, to find ways of being effective in communicating with ourselves, and with our other colleagues in writing this book. Hopefully, we'll communicate to you some of the excitement and joy we have in the process of communication. For us, communication means experience -- the ability to be in touch with whate we are feeling -- to be able to hear with precision the sounds of life. Thse skills, which we are constantly developing in ourselves, were the essential ingredients in writing this book. Bandler, Grinder, Satir

Copyright 2000 Science and Behavior Books