Changing with Families - A Book About Further Education For Being Human

About This Book and Us

The process of writing this book was an opportunity for the three of us to change, to grow and to integrate parts of our experience of doing family and individual therapy. We came to understand explicitly how the communication skills we use in those contexts applied to the writing of this book together. We took three very different models of the world — three different types of backgrounds — and, finding a way to use our common skills to communicate with each other, we were able to put onto paper the knowledge we had gained. So we want to tell our readers some of the ways which we found delightful and useful to communicate, not only with families in the context of therapy, but also with each other in the process of writing this book. The very same patterns which we identify in this volume as patterns of effective communication with members of a family in the context of a therapy session are precisely the patterns of communication which we used to write this book together. We believe that our ability to be congruent in our communication is a skill we carry with us throughout our lives — both in our communication in therapy and in our other inter-personal relationships as well. It gives us great pleasure and is a continuing delight to find ways of being more effective in communicating with ourselves, with our colleagues in writing this book, and, hopefully, in communicating to you some of the excitement and joy we have experienced in the process of communication. For us, communication means experience — the ability to be in touch with what we are feeling, to see clearly what is available at a given point in time, and to hear with precision the sounds of life.

These skills, which we are constantly developing in ourselves, were the essential ingredients in the writing of this book. We want to emphasize that our desire in creating this book is to offer people-helpers some of the tools, patterns, ways of developing new choices with families which, up to this point in time, we have used only among ourselves. We invite and encourage each of you — as we will continue to do — to use these skills as an opportunity to find new possibilities for communication for yourselves and for the families with whom you work. We believe there are entire worlds of ways of being effective and creative — entirely new dimensions about human communication in our lives which we have yet to discover. Deeply,

Richard Bandler

John Grinder

Virginia Satir