Author: Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir, known as "everybody's family therapist" , spent her life peeking at,looking under, and poking into what goes on between and inside human beings. Her philosophy was that the human being is a miracle, always evolving and capable of growth, change, and new understanding. Her formal search began in 1930s when she started her professional life teaching handicapped and gifted children, which led her to look at their families for psychological, social , and therapeutic clues. She was interested in bringing the rich and useful concepts from human psychology to the general public in direct and clear ways. Her books, films and videotapes are presented from that point of view. She is the author of The New Peoplemaking ,Self Esteem and more. She published various articles and chapters in professional journals and anthologies.[1]

Virginia Satir Books

Excerpts

Your Many Faces

My eyes move to the right of the wheel and my stomach tightens into a painful knot a I read a list called: Rules for being a good person. There are no cobwebs or dust in this one. It reads, " I must always be right, clean, bright, sane, good, obedient, healthy, no matter what the cost or situation, for everyone counts more than me, and who am I to ask for anything for myself?. It seem s that throughout my entire life I have run into this in some form or another, and almost everywhere. I recognize it as the Universal Should List. I spent may years trying to make it work, but the best I could do was to succeed only some of the time. When I couldn't make it work, I felt very bad about myself. From Your Many Faces: The First Step to Being Loved. (page 10-11)

The beginning of new possibilities starts when you believe that there ar no fixed, permanent sets of roadways inside of you, that they are all capable of being resurfaced, reshaped, reconstructed, bypassed, and built anew. We come into this world at birth and leave at death. The time between these two points is our time to develop our own map. It will continue to unfold, if you allow yourself to explore your many parts and risk going into the unknown. Some people make up a detailed map at five and then spend their lives fitting into it. Others start out with a large space and proceed to follow the continual process of discovery, which shifts and changes the points on our map and the lines between them as we move, lo, listen, speak, sort, challenge, take in and let go. From Your Many Faces: The First Step to Being Loved. (page 10-11)

Reference:

1. Your Many Faces. Virginia Satir. 2009. Unitesd States. Celestial Arts.