How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 151
Communication and Response Patterns
Communication is the most important factor in Satir's system and determines the kinds of relationships
people have with one another and how people adjust. She discussed response patterns to which people resort
as a reaction to anxiety.
These universal response roles or communication stances are:
Five roles: placater, blamer, super-reasonable, irrelevant, and congruent (or leveling) communicator.
The first four are mostly poses covering lack of self-worth.
1) the placater
2) the blamer
3) the computer
4) the distractor
5) the leveler
feelings are
: an individual who avoids conflict at the cost of his/her integrity
: a person who places blame on others and does not take responsibility for what is
happening.
: the super reasonable individual who denies his emotions
: takes irrelevant stances
: Communicates in a congruent way in which genuine expression’s of one’s
made in an appropriate context.
Leveling helps people develop healthy personalities; all the others hide real feelings for fear of rejection.
Satir divided families into two types: nurturing and troubled. Each type had varying degrees.
Her main objective for her clients was recognition of their type and then change from type or degree.
The counseling method of conjoint family therapy involves
1) communication,
2) interaction,
3) and general information for the entire family.
She used several techniques to reach her goals of establishing proper environments and assisting family
members in clarifying what they want or hope for themselves and for the family. Her method is designed to
help family members discover what patterns of communication do not work and how to understand and
express their feelings in an open, level manner.
Games
Simulated family games, systems games, and communication games are some of the methods she developed
to deal with family behaviour.
Some of Satir’s games are :
Growth model – assumes that an individual’s behaviour changes due to interactions with other people.
Medical model – purports that the cause of the problem is an illness of the individual.
Sick model – proposes that the individual’s thinking and attitudes are wrong and must be changed.
Filial therapy is a play therapy method based on the principles of child-centered therapy. The goals of
filial therapy are to reduce the child’s problem behaviours, to help parents gain the skills of childcentered therapist to use as the parents relate to their children and to improve the parent-child
relationship.
Strategic family play therapy is a form of counseling in which all family members and the counsellor
play.
Theraplay is a treatment method modeled after the healthy parent-child interaction in which parents are
involved first as observers and then as co-therapists.
151