Virginia Satir

In 1941, she met a soldier at a bus station and within three weeks of their chance meeting, they were married.

He then left for Europe during World War II only to return after the war. Meanwhile, she adopted two children during his absence. Upon arriving, the two could not continue with their unison and filed a divorce in 1949.

In 1951, she married Norman Satir, a psychiatrist, who gave her the surname that would make her famous.

Virginia Satir was born to Oscar Alfred Reinnard Pagenkopf and Minnie Happe Pagenkopf. She was eldest of the five children.

By the age of three, she had taught herself to read. At the tender age of five, she dreamt of becoming a ‘children’s detective on parents’.

In 1929, the family moved to Milwaukee, where she attended high school. This was the time of the Great Depression and in order to lessen the financial burden of her family, she decided to take up a part-time job and a number of courses, so that she could graduate early.

In 1932, she received her high-school diploma and then attended Milwaukee State Teachers College, where she paid for her course by working in departmental stores and through babysitting.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from college in 1936 and the following year, in order to complete graduate level education, she enrolled to Northwestern University, Chicago, while teaching simultaneously at a public school in Williams Bay Wisconsin.

After completing her education, Satir launched her own autonomous therapy career. She met the first family in 1951 and four years later, she commenced working at the Illinois Psychiatric Institute, where she helped other therapists to focus on families rather than just individuals.

At the end of the decade, she co-founded the ‘Mental Research Institute’ in California and received a grant in 1962, wherein she was allowed to work on the first formal therapy training program. The following year, she was made the director of residential training.

In 1964, she authored her first book, ‘Conjoint Family Therapy’, which was established from the training manual she wrote for the students at the Mental Research Institute.

In 1970, she organized the group, ‘Beautiful People’, which later came to be known as ‘International Human Learning Resources Network’. Two years later, she penned the book, ‘Peoplemaking’.

In 1977, she founded the ‘Avanta Network’, which was recently renamed to ‘Virginia Satir Global Network’. The subsequent year, she was appointed to the ‘Steering Committee of the International Family Therapy Association’

Virginia Satir’s major works include her contributions to the theory of ‘family therapy’. She introduced and developed conjoint family therapy into the main course of therapy practices. She endorsed and developed the ‘right hemisphere’ intercessions such as comicality, trance, touch, voice tone and meditation.