Virginia Satir's five family roles

 

A healthy family life involves open and shared displays of affection and expressions of positive regard and love for one another. Compassionate, nurturing relationships play vital roles in developing well-adjusted psyches.

This was emphasised by the American psychologist Virginia Satir (1916-1988). Born to a farming family in Wisconsin, the fact that her father was an alcoholic gave her a strong awareness, from her childhood onwards, of the dynamics of caretaking, blaming and pleasing that were involved in family development, especially in families under stress. Originally trained as a teacher, Satir took a master’s degree in social work and developed the first formal family therapy training programme in the USA, which became known as the Satir Model.

When family members lack the ability to openly express emotion and affection, Satir suggested that personality roles tend to emerge in place of authentic identities. She noted five commonly played roles that individual family members are likely to adopt, especially in times of stress.

These are:

The blamer - he or she constantly finds fault and criticises other family members. They do this to hide their own feelings of unworthiness.

The computer - he or she is cold and unemotional, showing no affection. They use their intellect to stop them acknowledging their feelings.

The distractor - the person who stirs things up in order to shift the focus away from emotional issues. They believe that they will only be loved if they are seen as likeable and harmless.

The placator - the apologetic people-pleaser who is afraid of disapproval.

The leveller - the person who is an open, honest and direct communicator. Levellers maintain a healthy position and their inner feelings match their communications with other family members.

When family members adopt these roles, the family may continue to function, but at the expense of each individual’s authenticity. Satir maintained that it was important to accept one’s own self-worth as the means of casting aside a false identity. She believed that love and acceptance are the most potent healing forces for any dysfunctional family.

© John Welford

The bystander effect

In 1964 a 28-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in the street in Queens, New York. There were reputed to be 38 people who witnessed the attack, which lasted for more than half an hour, but nobody came to her aid.

The event entered the literature of psychology as the “bystander effect”, the theory being that people feel less responsibility to help strangers in trouble if there are plenty of other people in the area. There may also be the feeling that if nobody else is doing anything, the situation cannot be all that serious.

However, this theory has been questioned after research that has been done in the UK, The Netherlands and South Africa. This has shown that, in similar situations, people do intervene in 90% of cases. Sometimes only one person does so, but quite often more than one person tries to help.

The researchers also found that people are more likely to intervene the higher the number of other bystanders, which goes dead against the earlier theory. There was little difference as between occurrences in the three countries.

It would appear that people have a natural inclination to help others in trouble, which is reassuring!

© John Welford