Satir workshops

Virginia Satir believed that all levels of human interaction need congruent communication in which intentions align with verbal and non-verbal messages.

Facilitating ingredients of an interaction

In Ingredients of an interaction, Virginia Satir distinguishes several states of internal processing in any significant interaction. These states can be used concurrent as well as sequential, though in my experience the details are not easily linearly unravelled when abstracted afterwards.

• Centering: track your own, and partner(s) breath and dance, and smooth in the dance, gradually adjusting breath, tone and stances for centering together, then slow down the dance to the likely required dance levels and dimensions.
  
• Connecting: What you yourself, and a receiver heard and/or saw.
• Accepting: What meaning(s) I or a receiver of a message made from what was seen and/or heard.
• Feeling: What feelings were invoked by its possible meanings.
• Transforming feelings: What feelings were invoked by becoming aware of these feelings.
• Perceiving: What the usual reaction of a receiver is to this particular message, to protect him or herself from these shadow feelings.
• (Re) Perceiving: Discovering and expressing what a receivers tonal rules are for sharing.
• Offering freedom by adding choices: Making choices for a congruent response.

We practice these states with a map on the floor, making it easy to externalise the internal interactions.

I have adapted the usual Satir ingredients floor-map to open and hold space for exploration of and reflecting on possible attractors in a system.