SATIR Transformational Systemic Therapy

John Banmen

249 pages, 6 x 9 in.,
ISBN 978-0831400927
$29.95

Virginia Satir's approach to therapy helped people change at a deep level, and this book sheds light on how that works. Most of these chapters first appeared in one of the best-selling issues ever of the journal Contemporary Family Therapy. A special edition devoted to current applications of the Satir model of family therapy, it offered international perspectives on various issues, from congruence to positive psychology, and from Family Reconstruction to spirituality.

Cross-cultural counseling, treating suicidal youth, and working with survivors of sexual abuse also feature here, as does the therapist's use of him- or herself as part of this systemic approach to counseling.

Critiquing, developing, and adapting the Satir model characterize chapters in this book. In his preface, John Banmen describes the evolution of that model over the past twenty years. As director of training at the Satir Institute of the Pacific, he is well qualified to know. His work takes him from Canada to Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, the United States, and Europe. Among his contributing authors from those countries, almost all practice and train others to use Satir's systemic therapy.

The book's foreword is by Dr. William C. Nichols former president of both the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy and of the International Family Therapy Association. In it, he details how he initiated the special journal edition and how it came together. A comprehensive overview of this book also appears in his foreword, where he writes that many therapists regarded Virginia Satir". . .one of the few persons who generally would be recognized in the field simply by utterance of her first name. . . ” After she died, “the expressions were uniformly those of bereavement, loss, affection, and respect.” Readers who do not already share such feelings may experience several glimpses of them as they enjoy this book.