John Banmen is one of the most prominent and important teachers of the Satir Model. He is on the co-authors of The Satir Model and is responsible for training many people around the world. John shares about first meeting and becoming friends with Virginia Satir. He shares his perspective of the value of Virginia’s work as well as his experiences working in China. In particular, he emphasized the spiritual and transcendent aspects of Virginia work. He also helped describe congruence and it’s importance as a central concept in Virginia’s teaching.
First learning how do we experience ourselves as well as the limited survival patterns that restrict our experience. Growth being ways that we can be in touch with who we really are and manifesting this authentic Self.
1:33 John begins a meditation Connect to your breathing.
Can you experience your body? What is your body telling you right now?
Can you be aware of your feelings?
Can you watch your thoughts? Presently, past, future?
Acceptance and awareness. How do you experience yourself at this moment?
John invites us to bring in a change, a positive energy of gratitude.
6:50 We begin our conversation. John meets Virginia In January 1970.
John’s training was Rogerian where he learned to not ask questions. John observed that Virginia asked many many questions.
10:25 John talked about the first workshop. They were supposed to learn about family therapy but the emphasis was on learning about oneself , one’s family of origin. “Getting your own act together.” as John put it. Virginia did a lot experiential activities such as sculpting of families. Participants experienced and learned about the difference between incongruent and congruent communication.
13:04 What John learned and inspired him in the first meeting? John witnessed Virginia helping to make changes every minute. There was an immediate change that was positively directional in terms of their relationship to themselves and others. Virginia’s work was very positive and humanistic.
15:00 John appreciated how Virginia was able to go beyond intellectual learning and to help people experience what was going on. She helped people transcend their immediate experience by feeling fully what was there and going deeper to a core sense of Self. She helped people discover what was getting in the way of being in tune with themselves and these could be feelings, perceptions and expectations.
16:40 How can I be congruent within myself and take responsibility for my life?
17:10 How did Virginia use her Self to make contact? She was fully present with others. You would experience her. You could feel her energy. She truly believes that we are unique, precious and loveable. We can have better and happier life.
Her belief in people helped people connect more deeply to themselves,and to life.
18:26 “I’ll help you light your candle” Virginia would bring her light candle and it inspired people to look for their own light inside of themselves.
19:24 How did Virginia become so positive? John suspects that her experience as a teacher has a big influence, but really it’s a mystery. But he describes that when he met her it felt good to be in her presence and that she was fully blossoming at that time.
21”42 Virginia came to Manitoba for 3 months to work at various levels of governemnt.
22:25 Vrigina did what could be called family reconstruction across 3 generations. How to deal with the person in the present based on impacts of the past. “Changing the environmental impact” of our existence so they could change it at an energetic level.
24:00 John differentiates four levels of Virginia’s work: information, process, meaning, energy level.
25:30 What is energy? “all life is energy” What is human energy and how can we be in touch with it? It could start with awareness, attitude, feelings, but deeper there is a flow of positive life energy. Operating at this level we can get in harmony with ourselves, others and the universe.
27:10 I ask John to reflect on Virginia’s work and it’s relevance to the current COVID pandemic.
John emphasizes ‘going inside’ and learning to become aware of one’s own reactions to what is going on (their thoughts and feelings)
29:00 Can we become aware of a deeper sense of life? Virginia has an idea that there was a greater energy than us as individuals. Some call it God, Being, Spirit, and we could connect to it. Viriginia believed in an inherent healing quality of people’s mind that was analogous to people’s ability to heal from physical injury.
32:50 First, become aware of how we experience ourselves. Most of the time we could find that we live in a negative way either too much in the past or too much in the future.
(How do I experience myself? How do I think? How do I feel? How do I move? What am I not thinking, feeling and doing? Where are my blind spots? What do I avoid? In terms of loving myself and others what do I do, what do I not know how to do, what am I afraid to do?
How are we educated about how to experience ourselves more fully (others and life more fully)?
33:30 John asks “How I help you to be in charge of how you experience yourself? How can you take charge of your unmet expectations, your feelings, attitudes and thoughts? In order to be in charge, we need to look at change.
John describes the process of connecting to a more positive attitude or linking to higher or deeper energy and change attitude, expectations, feelings and behavior.
We can change our feelings by elevating them to a higher level of vibration. For example, getting in touch with gratitude as in the meditation at the beginning.
An example of expectations, something happened that should have happened or that should not have happened. If something was unmet, I would react. Virginia Satir taught, “Can you accept without liking?” This can be very difficult. We can choose to let go, accept or create a new expectation.
Perceptions would go through a similar process. Creating new ideas for ourselves.
37:00 Tim comments that attitudes or mindsets like acceptance and gratitude or higher-order perspectives or ways of thinking that transcend the individual’s needs and considers others and the context.
38:30 John describes the Self as a natural energy that have basic yearnings. Just as trees have basic needs, humans have them too.
We get our yearnings met through our experience. Virginia hoped that we would be responsible for meeting our yearnings.
What does it mean to meet your own yearnings?
I take charge of my feeling of my needs, of my saying and asking. I take charge of how I manage myself, who I ask.
I don’t leave it up to others.
Symptoms are a manifestation that we are not meeting our yearnings.- John Banmen
40:30 Virginia would not say how did that person make you feel. She would ask “What did you see and hear from them that you took in and created the feeling of sadness?”
Yearnings are foundational energy within people trying to manifest through people and in relationships.
42:42 John shares his personal journey of moving from Manitoba to BC and then becoming a professor at the University of British Columbia and then reconnecting with Virginia Satir in 1980. Virginia started doing process communities in 1981 which were 30 day training programs.
48:00 Virginia emphasized the development of congruence which would enable them to perform well across any role. John describes congruence: To be in harmony with your basic life energy, the universal Self, and your personal self and your experience (feeling, perceptions, and expectations) and then being in harmony with others. John makes the point that being in tune with your feelings would not be congruent because congruence incorporates a larger energy that transcends the individual.
53:51 John asks the question, “As a human how can we be in touch with who we really are?” Virginia would use the phrase to be fully human.
John continues to describe the experience of the process community. People could practice at being more congruent, in charge, positive, and have a different experience of themselves.
There were three levels : Virginia working with the whole group, the 3 main trainers working with groups of 30, and then all the triads working together in the evening.
56:00 They would look at how they were coping in a survival way and this would mark a state of being out of harmony with the Self (incongruent). From here, participants would work towards congruence and being in harmony with their Self.
57:30 How can we create a context of safety so we can look at our coping patterns lovingly?
Virginia modelled in her own way of being, loving, caring, curious, and accepting. Her energy helped open people up to do their work.
59:20 Tim asks John how Virginia’s energy impacted him personally and professionally. John reflects that he tried his best to be congruent, to look at what was going on in him and what was coming out of him. “How can I be?” and “how can I apply?” what I am learning were seemingly two questions that became one. There was a constant introspection, a process as Virginia called it, of taking a look and being in charge,
We discuss how recipes don’t work in working in this kind of way. That there was a kind of wisdom to Virginia that empowered her to work fluidly and unpredictably and yet very effective. Tim reads from the Tao Te Ching to paint a picture of this wisdom that transcends intellectual knowing.
1:03:35 John feels that our emphasis on understanding the psychological component means we can overlook the spiritual nature of Virginia’s work. This life energy is beyond thought, beyond the body, non-dualistic. Beyond our emotional and mental capacity, lies a layer of life experience that Virginia was accessing.
1:05:50 John explains the various level by which you can analyze and understand the Satir model. John describes a spiritual transformation; to be one.
We are more than our thoughts and feelings.
Here are some affirmations or a short meditation that can help you reflect on the core energy within you:
I am a positive expression of life.
I am goodness manifested.
I am alive. I am whole. I am one.
1:08:20 John hopes that we can bring Virginia’s work can be used therapeutically but he sees that her work transcends this application and is a deeply spiritual teaching.
1:08:45 John’s hope and wish for the Satir Model is beyond a family therapy but a life model; how to be alive. He feels that her work teaches us to be, not just how to think and to feel.
1:11:00 We discuss the difference between using technique to simply shifts states of mind as opposed to Virginia’s seed model which had as its aim the expression of each individuals unique life force.
There is the energy, the yearnings that actuate potential
(the yearning for love, the yearning to live, to contribute, for peace)
There are guiding beliefs that help point us in the right direction that is wisdom
(you can only connect with one person at a time. We are hallucinating our experience. Perception is reality. The way we cope is what is important not how can we not have problems.
I can take responsibility for my experience and yearnings. I can comment on the form from you which I see and what that brings up in me)
In life, I need to risk hurting and being hurt if I am honest with what I feel, need, yearn for; if I wish to risk loving and being loved.
Then there are behavioral skills that act as guidelines for the concrete expression of that attempt to meet a yearning.
1:13:00 John shares about his work after Virginia died. They started work in Hong Kong, then in Taiwan then later in Canton. Psychoanalysis was the main psychological practice in China. They were eager to learn other western psychotherapy models.
1:16:00 John felt that sharing that each person has a Self was a major contribution that fueled the motivation of students in China towards Virginia’s work. Their emphasis on personhood and of having value. “We helped them ground themselves in themselves” John explained.
1:20:00 John felt that politically that the model fit within China’s cultural values because it taught greater responsibility. Their emphasis was also on teaching competency and that would empower them to be more helpful to others.
1:23:00 Tim asks what transformation occurred with the introduction of the idea of a Self. John begins in awareness, awareness of parents’ learnings and coping patterns. They would look at family dynamics and dominance hierarchies. They would sculpt the survival defensive patterns. They would then look at congruence, experientially as a transformational state.
It was very powerful for parents to see themselves with their parents in a survival state often placating to them. They would reflect on their feelings and experience in being in these patterns. How would they like to be? What relationship would you like to see happen?
Virginia would often sculpt congruence as two people on their feet making eye contact at the same height (often using stools and chairs to help).
1:29:00 How can I be on my own two feet? How can I be aware of my survival coping patterns? Tim makes the point that our survival coping patterns aren’t necessarily learned. They are forms adapted from basic instinctual energies of fight, flight and freeze.
1:30:25 Helping the Chinese to be happy, healthy and successful with a goal of 65 Million which is the tipping point to create a nation-wide transformation. The Chinese see happiness as a birthright which is alignment with the type of workshops and trainings which John is responsible for.
1:33:00 John describes what he means by happiness as being congruent: peace within, peace between and peace among.
1:35:00 The Chinese have a concept of Chi, energy, which is how John understands and teaches the Satir model. He has been given the feedback that Virginia’s work helps people understand their culture and Chi even more.
1:36:00 What has been most impactful is the creation of experiences (experiential), not just philosophical or intellectual understanding.
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (Translated by Jonathan Star)
Verse 15
The masters of this ancient path
Are mysterious and profound
Their inner state baffles all inquiry
Their depths go beyond all-knowing
Thus, despite every effort
We can only tell of their outer signs--
Deliberate, as if treading over the stones of a winter brook.
Watchful, as if meeting dangers on all sides
Reverent, as if receiving an honored guest
Selfless, like a melting block of ice
Pure, like an uncarved block of wood
Accepting, like an open valley
Through the course of Nature
Muddy water becomes clear
Through the unfolding of life
Man reaches perfection
Through sustained activity
That supreme rest is naturally found
Those who have Tao want nothing else
Through seemingly empty
They are ever full
Through seemingly old
They are beyond the reach of birth and death