Читать книгу Theory and Practice of Couples and Family Counseling - James Robert Bitter - Страница 48

They came from very different backgrounds. One was born and raised on a farm in Wisconsin. Her name was Virginia Pagenkopf. She was the daughter of first-generation German Americans at a time in America when Germans were not well received. Early on, she was fascinated by the power and functioning of parents in family life, and she resolved at the age of 5 to be a children’s detective on parents.

The other woman was born 40 miles from New York City on the Hudson in a community of painters, composers, and writers. Her name was Lynn, and she was the daughter of Ruth Reeves, an artist renowned for her work in fabric design.

Virginia started her education in a one-room schoolhouse, worked her way through high school and college, and became a teacher and even a principal for a short period of time. Eventually she would enter graduate school in social work at Northwestern University and complete her degree at the University of Chicago, although the experience of graduate school was neither nurturing nor rewarding for her.

Lynn went to progressive schools and lived in a family in which literature, art, music, and politics were prized. When she first encountered psychology in college, it was like entering an alien world with a foreign language. She wanted to be a writer and not escape into teaching—“the” career for women. She was accepted at Radcliffe University, where she would eventually graduate summa cum laude with a degree in English literature.

Virginia married a man named Gordon Rodgers in 1941. He was a dashing young soldier on his way to war. When the war was over, they, like many such couples, would discover that they had grown far apart. Early in their marriage, Virginia would suffer an ectopic pregnancy, which would result in a hysterectomy. Gordon and Virginia divorced in 1949. In 1951, Virginia married Norman Satir and adopted the name by which she would be known for the rest of her life, Virginia Satir. Their marriage would last until 1957.

Lynn married Ted Hoffman, a man who would begin teaching at Bard College in the theater department but who moved so often that the family had to adapt to his new and better positions in Oxford, England; Berkeley, California; Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh; and again to California at Stanford University. After a year at Stanford, Ted would get a grant that would require him to travel around the country in support of regional theaters while Lynn Hoffman was home with the children, occasionally editing papers for psychologists who were not such good writers. The distance between Ted and Lynn widened emotionally, eventually resulting in divorce.

Virginia began seeing young adolescents in private practice after she received her master’s degree. She remembered talking to a young woman, and as the counseling progressed, she began to wonder whether this young woman had a mother. Sure enough, she did, and when Virginia invited the mother to join them, the young woman became quiet and nonresponsive, returning to earlier levels of functioning. After working with the mother and daughter for a while, Virginia wondered whether maybe there was a father involved, and again there was. When he joined the family in counseling, both women became quiet, again regressing to earlier levels of functioning. This was the beginning of Satir’s family work with its emphasis on self-esteem, nurturing triads, and congruent communication. In time, Satir would meet with Murray Bowen in Washington, DC, and later join Don Jackson, Jay Haley, Jules Riskin, and others at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California.

It was during her time at MRI that Satir completed the rough draft of her first book, Conjoint Family Therapy (Satir, 1964/1983). Lynn Hoffman remembered that some clarity was needed in the middle part of the manuscript, and she was called to see whether she could help bring the book to a conclusion, which she did. Lynn noted one of her first impressions of Virginia:

It is safe to say that Mrs. Satir does impress people. She is physically imposing. She glitters with jewelry and she likes bright, clear colors. She has a look which fits (forgive me, Virginia) the stock image of the “sexy blonde” in America, with earth mother overtones. And she is warm. She genuinely likes her patients and her sympathy is not cloying or overdone. (Hoffman, 2002, p. 4)

While the men at MRI were fascinated by and engaged in the application of systems theory and cybernetics to family practice, Virginia continued to blend the reframing and positive orientation of MRI’s developing model with her own humanistic orientation. Lynn would often watch through one-way windows as Virginia would weave her magic with families. The men at MRI never fully appreciated what Virginia was able to do: “One psychiatrist I spoke to told me that they felt about Satir as they would about a little girl who ran out of the house without any clothes on” (Hoffman, 2002, p. 6).

Virginia would later depart MRI, and for a while she became the first director of training at the Esalen Institute in California’s Big Sur region. She felt free there to experiment and develop her approach. With the advent of her book Peoplemaking (Satir, 1972, 1988), a book that would eventually be published in 27 languages, Virginia became an international figure. Her work with large groups of people would take her all over the world.

In the late 1970s, Joan Winter, director and founder of the Family Institute of Virginia, received a grant from the Virginia Division of Justice and Crime Pre- vention to assess the effectiveness of different family counseling models with families involved in the criminal justice system. Her study compared the approaches of Bowen, Haley, and Satir. Because she wanted to test the effectiveness of the model as opposed to the individual skills of the founders, these pioneers of family counseling were allowed to bring and consult with a team of practitioners, but none of the founders could participate in the conduct of the counseling. More than 150 families were referred to each group. Several measures of effectiveness were taken. Although the Bowen model was extremely effective in terms of promoting change in the system, the Satir group was the most effective at engaging families in counseling (more than 90%), maintaining contact with families until termination, and increasing self-esteem among family members. Haley’s group came in last in all categories.

When I met Virginia in 1979, she had just formed a training group that she called AVANTA, a group of family and group practitioners with whom she would meet every year, some of whom would also join her in running monthlong Process Communities in Crested Butte, Colorado. John Banmen, Jane Gerber, and Maria Gomori led the advanced Process Community training. Today John Banmen is the leading Satir scholar in the world.

In the last year of her life, when she was quite sick with cancer, Virginia named Jean McLendon as director of training for AVANTA. Jean was one of the leaders of the Satir group in Joan Winter’s study and a perennial facilitator in Satir’s Process Communities; she is still the leading Satir practitioner in the United States. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she is the director of the Satir Institute of the Southeast.

Lynn formed a working relationship with Jay Haley at MRI that would last for years. The two of them became true scholar-practitioners, and both of them would eventually move to the East Coast of the United States. Haley worked with Minuchin for a while in Philadelphia before moving to Washington, DC, and establishing a family institute with Cloe Madanes.

Like Satir, Lynn completed a graduate degree in social work and eventually joined the Ackerman Institute in New York. There she worked with Peggy Papp and Olga Silverstein in what was called the Brief Therapy Project. Central to their work were strategic interventions based on paradoxes. In spite of its similarity to the structural-strategic model she had learned, this project required additional attention to language and metaphor. She worked there as part of a team, and though it remained strategic in nature for a long time, Lynn gradually moved in a different direction. Her work evolved into and adopted postmodern approaches to family counseling. In later years, when she reinterviewed families from her strategic period, a number of them would tell her that they simply chose to ignore the paradoxical directives that were given to them.

Lynn entered into postmodern thinking partly because of the influence of Harold Goolishian, who would cofound with Harlene Anderson what is often called linguistic therapy (Anderson & Goolishian, 1992). Lynn’s work in teams also incorporated the therapeutic dialogues associated with reflecting teams based on another neo-strategic model developed by Tom Andersen (1991). It is safe to say that no one has developed and grown more across the spectrum of family counseling than Lynn Hoffman, from her initial meetings with Satir, to her work with Haley, to the team processes at the Ackerman Institute, and finally to her current postmodern approach. In all of her transformations, she did not just perform family counseling, she wrote about it and developed its language, thoughts, and orientations.

Hoffman would later look back on her work with Virginia Satir and see the seeds of her eventual postmodern approach:

Most early family therapy has been aimed at locating a cause for the problem, but Satir went in a different direction from the start. She gave all her attention to leading families out of the shadow of blame, coming as close as anyone did in those days to inventing a no-fault type of practice. She also showed me what a therapy that created possibilities rather than correcting pathologies might be like. She was a skillful weaver who asked the family to join her in making handsome, useful textiles from the most unlikely threads. (Hoffman, 2002, p. 9)

Satir developed many unique interventions for working with families and groups, including sculpting, ropes, parts parties, family reconstruction, ingredients of an interaction, and the human mandala. The process of sculpting was more fully developed by Bunny Duhl, who with her former husband Fred Duhl had formed the Boston Family Therapy Institute: Both were early members of Satir’s AVANTA Network. Many of Satir’s interventions were initiated on the spur of the moment to help families with whom she worked; all of her interventions were experiential in nature.

Virginia Satir and Lynn Hoffman were two women who set out to learn, to understand, and to make a difference with the families they served. They were given few advantages in the field, but they took advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves. I was lucky to meet and work with Virginia. I feel I have come to know Lynn through her writings. As new practitioners start their careers, I cannot help but wonder what they will learn, how they will grow and develop, and what they might contribute to the ever-changing and dynamic field of family practice.