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As mentioned earlier, Satir was one of the earliest, and best-known, people whose ways of working acted as models for the analysis and development of many NLP principles and processes. She was a social worker who was particularly interested in family systems. She developed an approach to family therapy which she called ‘conjoint family therapy’ and taught the subject at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, in the first training programme in the country on family therapy.

One of Satir’s ways of working was with what she termed ‘parts parties’, where people would act out the characteristics of different facets of personality. A model which is associated with her is her analysis of five different personality elements, which have become known as ‘Satir categories’. She gave these categories the names of ‘Blamer’, ‘Placator’, ‘Distractor’, ‘Computer’ and ‘Leveller’. Each can be recognized through typical postures and modes of communication. These patterns are discussed in her book Peoplemaking, published in 1972.

Satir was very innovative and used games, exercises, audio, video, one-way mirrors and demonstrations in her work, approaches which have since become commonplace but were at that time novel techniques. She was the first Director of Training at the famous Esalen Institute, which was at the forefront of the Growth Potential movement. It is said that she was deaf until the age of ten, so, like Erickson, with some sensory impairment, she developed her observation skills to an extraordinarily high degree. Fritz Perls described her as ‘the most nurturing person known’. Satir died in 1988.