Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: We have been given an amazing gift called life, and enjoying it is a privilege and, in fact, I think, a responsibility.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: You are listening to exploring Satir's legacy the Virginia Satir podcast I'm your host, Michael Argumanis Harden, and together we will embark on the journey of self discovery, empowerment and meaningful connection.
Let's dive in.
Today's guest, Jean McClendon, is a licensed clinical social worker, licensed marriage and family therapist, and AAFT approved supervisor. Jean maintains a thriving multi service private practice in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and her journey in the Satir world and the field of family therapy is nothing short of extraordinary. What sets Jean apart is her nearly two decade mentorship by none other than the late Virginia Satir herself. Jean McClendon is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost practitioners and trainers of Satir's transformative model. Throughout her career, Jean has crisscrossed the globe applying the Satir growth model to diverse contexts, situations, countries and cultures. Her work has touched countless lives and she is celebrated as a Satir global network living treasure. In her consulting practice, Jean has lent her expertise to a wide array of industries, from family owned businesses to high tech corporations, hospitals to government agencies. She is a sought after guide for team and leadership development, conflict resolution, transition management, and change leadership. In today's episode, Jean discusses her belief that increasing self and system esteem can have a profound effect on the health, relationships, and performance of individuals, families and organizations. Her unique ability to grasp universal human needs and vulnerabilities makes her an effective agent for planned change in systems of all sizes and kinds. I invite you to join me in the conversation with Jean McClendon, a guardian of the Virginia Satir legacy, a champion of human potential, and an unwavering advocate for healthier relationships and thriving individuals.
Welcome, Jean McClendon. I'm so glad to have you on the podcast.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Thank you. I'm glad to be with you know.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: You are one of my first mentors in the satir world, and I am so blessed to know you.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: I was very sure that I wanted to be on your team and I wanted to support you from the very get go.
There's a way in which you exude your passion about the satir model and your energy with it, and so it was very easy for me to say, spain's got something.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much.
I've always felt your encouragement and it's blessed me to have that.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Good.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: First off, I really love hearing your stories, and I know that whenever I have somebody on the podcast that has actually been friends with Virginia Satir. I just want to hear some of your stories and just start off that way.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Well, the one I'm thinking about right now is I had Virginia come here to Chapel Hill to do a workshop. She was staying in our home, and our foster dog, who we later adopted, a Weimarana named Rebel, was apparently getting into trouble, and unbeknownst to us, but we kept beginning to get a call, and they'd leave a voice message saying, your dog is in our garbage and you need to keep your dog in. And in the end, it was like, I'm calling the police.
Well, we were kind of like the parents. It's probably not our dog, not rebel. And Virginia happened to be there, and this woman called, and she was very angry. Virginia said, this woman has got to meet Rebel. And I thought, I don't think this woman wants to meet Rebel at all. And Virginia says, well, we got to deal with this. So she said, get rebel. So Virginia, carol, and Rebel and I got in the car, and we drove to this woman's house, and Virginia said, we'll go knock on the door.
So I knock on the door and nobody comes. And I'm so relieved. And she. No, she's. You know, she's in there. You just keep knocking.
So the woman finally came, and Virginia got out of the car, and I spoke, and, you know, I'm sorry, but it's my dog, rebel, that's been in your garbage. And Virginia says, he's a very special dog, and he needs to hear from you that it's not okay.
To which she looked kind of strange.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: And I said, well, come on, rebel. And I had rebel sit. So I spoke for rebel, and I said, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to upset you with the garbage can. And the woman looks at me, then looks at Virginia, and Virginia says, he really is sorry. He doesn't want to upset you.
And so I can't remember exactly, but the woman, you know, I don't know, I guess I could put something on the can so he can't get to it. And I said, oh, that would be wonderful. I said, because he does get tempted with garbage. And anyway, the long story, the short we left with us thanking her for understanding that rebel needed correcting and he needed to understand the consequences of bad behavior and that we would love to hear from her if he ever did it again.
And what happened was that she did. She fixed the garbage can so he could not get in it.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: What a great solution.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: I know, but frankly, I would never have done it had Virginia not been there, kind of saying, you got to do this. You can't just ignore it. And rebel is going to keep doing it if you don't do something about it. As far as we know, he never got in the garbage again. And our belief is that she fixed it so he couldn't.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah, well, what a great way of honoring your neighbor and just paying attention to her concerns and having a yes.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: So. And Virginia was such a lover of animals and dogs and cats, so she had taken to rebel quite quickly.
That was a story that, of course, I won't ever forget.
And I think you may have heard this story about Virginia when she was doing supervision with a group of us in Virginia.
Colleague Joan Winder did a masterful and mammoth research project, comparing and contrasting the work of J. Haley, Murray Boyen, and Virginia and J. Haley and Murray's folks and their operations were in Virginia.
Virginia had to bring us into that area to work with the clients. But anyway, it was all being videotaped, and we go for our first supervision.
And I had never seen her at such a loss of words.
She literally stammered.
And I was beginning to fend, I'm sure my colleagues were too beginning to think, oh, my God. Because she could not, in the research, do the therapy herself. We were, if you will, to do her model for.
So here we are. Mama is stammering. It's our first supervision session, and she finally gets it out that she was shocked. We did not look at all like what she thought she would see in terms of the students that she had selected to do her work.
Well, we were pretty devastated. And so what she said, you know, you all look so stiff, you never got out of your chair.
I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. Well, we were pretty devastated because we really wanted her to be proud of us.
So the next time we are back in session with these families, and I'm thinking about one I was co therapy with. I swear, we looked like monkeys. We were mean. It was over the top reaction to disappointing Virginia that we were so stilted. So this time, it was like a lot of irrelevance, a lot of super reasonableness on the first round, and then a lot of irrelevance. And we settled down and were able to do some very good work. But it was interesting to see her deal with, frankly, how, I'm sure, disappointed she was.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: That story had a huge impact on me because I was training therapists at the same time as I heard that story in this a tier model.
And I had the same experience where some of my newer therapists were sitting in their seats and they were saying things that sounded like they could be experiential, but they weren't doing anything experiential. And I asked them in the midsection of the session what was going on, and they admitted they didn't want to seem silly in front of their clients. And it wasn't until they tried a few things that they realized, oh, my goodness, this is powerful. It's not silly. It's powerful.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know what? It's okay to be silly, too.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: I mean, Virginia's humor, so important in her work, and I think it is in mine, I think it's a part of enjoying my.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Well, you know, one of the things that I like doing in the podcast is one highlighting some of the stories that you can bring in, because we just didn't get to know Virginia satir like you did. But then the next thing is, you have been so very active in the satir world ever since. You've never left, that that's always been a part of your career.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: I was fortunate to meet Virginia right out of graduate school, and I knew she was my teacher then, so I was one of the youngest, if not the youngest, in the I learn community, the OBP conference, now one of the oldest. But it's just been so rich to use the model in different contexts, whether it's working in governmental agency or corporate setting, or family business or a family or couples. If it has to do with relationships, then this model has so much to.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Offer, and what very versatile.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: What doesn't have to do with relationship?
Is there anything?
I mean, the quality of our relationships affects our performance, our ability to be effective in the world and feel supported. And, of course, our relationships are not going to be all that good if our feelings of worth about ourselves are diminished. And so her idea of the core importance of self esteem and our sense of worth becomes so important. And, of course, there are folks who really do not understand what she was talking about when she talked about self esteem.
They believed it had to do with, I think, competence, ability, skill, how much money you could make, how good your grades were.
And that wasn't where she was coming from.
So helping people understand that there's something deeper than our behavior.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So, Jean, explain a little bit, because I think that I've run across a lot of people that mix that up as well. When she talked about self esteem, what was she really talking about?
[00:13:59] Speaker A: She was talking about our sense of value and worth and appreciation that we have a unique life force and how we manifest ourselves by way of whether it's work or communication or relationship or art or whatever, that's an externalized reflection of how we feel about ourselves.
So if I've got to hide myself, I'm not going to do great creatively. Probably if I feel somehow less than you, I will probably avoid you or placate you or be angry that you're up there and I'm down here.
So it just.
The energy of esteem and valuing of oneself penetrates all parts of our lives.
I think sometimes we, in teaching Virginia's model, forget to teach how self esteem and our value of ourself is central.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: I've always seen Virginia satir such an innovative person, and I see you the same way. You even take some of her model, and you've built on it and expanded it as your career has developed. And one of the things that you did was adding the heart to the self esteem maintenance kit, and I thought that was fantastic. And your explanation for that? I'd like for you to share that with the audience.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Well, it has evolved. I had people asking me early on when I began to really grab ahold of the self esteem maintenance toolkit gene. You're. You're really teaching that a lot. I mean, what's that about? And why have you gravitated to that part of Virginia's work?
And I really didn't know. I just kind of had followed my nose. But I did know at my head level that there was something missing. And I believed it was the heart. And certainly Virginia's connection between her heart and her head were so vibrant.
And so I just figured she didn't think that her students would need to be reminded of that, the power of the heart. But I continued to be asked, what is this about? Why are you grabbing a hold of that thing? And I can tell you that when Virginia would teach, she taught the self esteem maintenance toolkit primarily in meditation form.
So it was filled with metaphor and the visual stimulation of that. Yes. No medallion that was so bejeweled, and it had this color and that color. And I was kind of like, well, let's get on with the real stuff, Virginia.
We don't need to be playing around with this, and we don't need to be in a meditation for an hour.
But apparently I did. And so I continued to be asked, and I said, jesse Carlott said, well, can I interview you? I said, sure. We never got around to it, but I was in Azerbaijan with Laura and Dotson, and I had taught the self esteem kit there, and she asked me, did, how did you decide? How did you come to be so interested in this part of the model?
And huge tears started dropping out of my eyes. It was like, wow. I know.
I mean, it's been a few years now, but now I know why I've been doing this. And it was that I, in a certain way, had to rebuild my self esteem. When Virginia died, she believed in me, as she did everybody. But I felt it personally. She saw in me things that I couldn't see, didn't know, couldn't feel, wasn't sure of.
And so when she died, it was like, oh, who am I?
Do I really have that kind of value and worth and whatever?
So that's why I believe I gravitated to that. I had to rebuild my own sense of who I was.
And much like a child has to separate from their parents, she was my professional mom, and I wasn't ready to separate from her.
At 78. Now she died at 72. It's, like, way too early.
It's come clearer to me that I avoided, for whatever reason, saying what the truth is for me about what the heart represents, and it's love.
The ability to love and the ability to receive love.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: So important.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Yes. I think it's life giving or life denying. And I remember being in Egypt, teaching there, and I was with people who were the most generous and appreciative, grateful in their expression.
And I realized that my heart didn't have the space to receive, to fully receive the gratitude these people expressed to me.
And I realized I had an incompetent heart.
I really needed to develop the competence in my heart to receive as well as give. So in the beginning, I would put the heart, and it was on a piece of paper or something, and it was called feelings.
But now it's love.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: I think that's such an important distinction, and I think it's really important for everybody that's listening to hear this as well, because I believe we all have that longing to be loved and to love others.
And you're normalizing. Something that I think everybody needs to also hear is that our hearts can be incompetent, that they need some growth and development and strength, because we don't always naturally get training to love well and to receive love well. So that is somewhere that people can focus on in growing.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so.
And it can make a huge difference in our lives.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: Well, I so appreciate you bringing that focus to the self esteem maintenance toolkit. It gives everybody the opportunity not to take it for granted.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: I've been to one of your trainings and it was such a wonderful developmental experience, and one of the things that you really focus on as well is the family maps and family reconstruction. Can you talk a little bit about that and the importance of those things?
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Well, I am visually oriented.
So when you start giving me your story about where you grew up and who is important or who is important in your life, family mapping, for me, it's like, that's my co therapist.
I think it's a way of sharing the process in that I'm not taking notes down here writing. I mean, my notes are right out there for us to return to. And it's been interesting. I had one client who told me that if she had to see that family map again, she would not continue therapy with me.
And she had so much loss on that map and she did not want to deal with it.
And I never brought it out again.
It was too much.
But it's usually very affirming for people. I find myself doing it fast, and so it's a bit scribbly and it's not formulaic, really, other than I tend to put the maternal side on the right and the paternal on the left. And I'm just trying to capture the essence of who these people are and what these relationships were like and any major events.
So they look kind of messy, but life is messy. And so often people will say, well, yeah, that kind of captures it.
That kind of captures. Yeah, that's the way it looks.
So, yes, family mapping. I say, if you've trained with me and you don't have a flip chart or an easel in your office, you didn't train with me.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned the woman who was grieving. It was painful to see all those things. That takes me back to what you were saying about the self esteem maintenance kit and your own experience of having to just develop the worth that you experienced after the death when there's been so much loss and this woman was faced by looking at her family map and seeing so much loss, what a big impact that had on her feelings of self worth. And it was a reminder.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Yes. So let's say you asked me about that and you said, family reconstruction. I don't do classic family reconstructions.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Can you make the distinction, what is the traditional family reconstruction and what do you do? What's the difference?
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Well, in the older days, there was a lot of history taking as prep with the star, and they lasted forever.
Not forever literally, but a couple of days.
Steve Young continues. As far as I know, doing the classic. And I went to one of his about three or four years ago, and I thought, I'm not enough of a historian.
I don't have the patience. I don't care to have that level of detail because I don't feel like I need it. And I lose my sense of curiosity. And that's important in our work is because it's an exploration.
So for me, I can scratch out a family map very quickly and get people into sculpts and have people interact and move from viewing an experience in what I call the negative family of origin trance state. That is the time when the family was under stress. People were disconnected.
They didn't feel valued. There were just a lot of. So I can help that person have compassion for the struggles of being in that dynamic. And we all have it.
All of us have times in our family when it just really wasn't working well for our hearts.
And we have the positive.
And so I help move them into the positive, where they have enough self worth and support that they can share what that experience was with a mother or a father or a brother or whatever. And they can move to congruence and have the experience of empowerment, if you will, to speak their truth to the people who were so big and powerful in their lives. I don't think Hugh Grottz and I used to do what I call the personal development workshop. And we would bring the community together. We did it in December, and we always went to a place at the beach so people could have nature as a support for this process. So we'd build a community one night. The next morning, he would do a sculpt or a mini M-I-N-I reconstruction, and I would do one. And then we'd divide the group. And he would do two in the morning and two in the afternoon. And I did two in the morning, two in the afternoon. So we're doing eight mini reconstructions a day for about three days. I can't remember. It's three days, four days, and then come back as a community. And I knew that it was worth three to five years of therapy. I also know that there's probably nothing that I ever did that was more important in my training than Maria Gamori. Michelle Baldwin and I went to the Haven Gabriola, where Virginia was doing. I don't remember was a two day or a month or whatever. But anyway, we were kind of tag alongs, and we'd meet with Virginia and talk about what she had done during the day. And kind of hang out with each other. And during the day, we were part of the reconstructions.
So I played the mother, the sister, the aunt, the grandmother, the child, in every kind of almost imaginary family you could put yourself into.
And it's like, I really believe there's a mouthful that I said to Virginia way before then, in my first month along with her, I came to her room and I said, I think I got it, because she had been blowing my mind for days. And she said, yeah. And I said, yeah. I said, it's really all about the universality of emotionality.
And she said, yeah, like, duh.
But the experience of the reconstruction and being in all those different families and different roles, it's like you really get it about being human.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And how do you see that impacting a client when they get to be a part of a reconstruction of their own life?
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Well, I think that it's powerful because they are supported to feel compassion for themselves.
I mean, they know in their head, my parents did the best, they knew how, they did the best they could.
And thankfully, a lot of people have come to that, but it's often in the head, and the compassion for themselves is missing.
So having that compassion for myself means that when I flub up and I fall back into a defensive place, I understand the root system of that. I understand how important it was that, in fact, I could avoid or I could be irrelevant or I could placate or I could blame.
Thankfully, those are useful stances depending on the context.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: So I think it enables people to be more forgiving and wiser. And also, it's like that was where I was in that context. This context is different.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: Yeah. That's one of the things that I've been able to see. Our clients, if they experience something that was pretty traumatic or just really upsetting at age five, revisiting it with an adult wise mind is so different.
It's almost like they relive those moments as a five year old until they can see it with a different mind.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Yes, I agree. Anyway, reconstructions are not easy because of the people that you need. Now, Bill Barron, who you did not get to know, but he did a lot with family reconstruction and family reconstruction groups. So my hope is that we'll do that here because it's such an amazing experience.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: Anywho, we're in infancy stage, Satir global is in middle age, and so we have a lot to learn and share, and I look forward to.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Well, on the Satir global front, one of the things that people might not remember or people that don't know that are just getting into the satir world is you're a past president, so you've had a lot of impact in satir global over the years.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Well, I will tell you that I take credit for it getting formed.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:32:51] Speaker A: So I'll tell you that story.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: Please do.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: So I met a month long early on with Virginia, and as I told you, my mind had been blown. And we are nearing the end of the month. I think it's about three and a half weeks, and I'm going through separation anxiety. It's like, this has been the most wonderful community I've ever been in in my life. I've learned so much, and now it's coming to an end. It's like, oh, my gosh. So I go to Virginia, and I say, I have a wonderful idea.
And she said, well, what is it? I said, well, we now have a shared language. We have powerful, shared experiences.
If we would have another month long, think about what we could do.
And she turned around. She was putting on her makeup. She turned around, and she said, jean, I've shot my wad at the end of a.
Said, literally, that's what she said. I shot my wad at the end of a month. And I said, wow. Well, then that really would be interesting to see what could happen.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: And I said, I would be willing to coordinate it if you're interested. And she said, yes.
So the plan was, we were going to the hacienda in Mexico, and she would invite the people, and she put me in contact with. I don't know if you ever knew about Vince and Jane Sweeney.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I've heard their names.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So she said, you need to get up with Jane and Vince, and Joan Winter was up there and see what y'all come up with. Well, in that meeting, which I actually have on tape, Nancy McDonald, I don't know how she got it, one day, came and gave me a tape of this meeting where there was a thrust towards, we're going to meet and we're going to go out into the world in triads and do things in various organizations, or we are going to be internal, and we're going to do all of our work with each other.
And I wanted the external, and the guy in Mexico never wrote back. Never wrote back. So I wrote Virginia, and I said, if you want this model, I can do it here, because I had the connections with agencies and stuff that we could use, but I can't pull that off anywhere but here.
And crossing the.
I don't know that we even had email then maybe just letters or phone calls. She said, I've got Anne Narin. Anne is going to set it up here in California.
And that's what we mean. We got in triads and we went and worked. Each of us had a client system to work with.
It was fabulous, just fabulous. So anyway, from there came Humana, for which we got a legal letter saying, know, it's like that name is registered. So from Humana became Avanta.
[00:36:36] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:36:36] Speaker A: And then when I was president, I really worked hard to get the name changed from Avanta to Satir Global.
Two reasons. One is the global nature to which we wanted. And secondly, I thought Virginia's name needed to be in the name of the organization.
I think it was, but it wasn't necessarily welcomed by everybody. And there's some people who still will refer to it as Avanta. But anyway, yeah, I have been in this organization deep from the get go on the founding board.
I've grown up with it. It's been like my professional family.
And the other thing I take credit for is bringing the it folks in.
So I was doing what I called a year long performance development program down here, and we met three times in the year. And because I did the chain shop, which was a seven day leadership program with Jerry Weinberg, people would do our week long, and then they would want to know what's next.
So they did the personal development workshop, they did the year long performance development workshop, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I remember the first year that a woman from Florida in the performance year long, and there were it management folks and therapists, and she got up in the first temperature reading and basically said she was disappointed. She thought this was a program for therapists.
She would not have come had she known that she was going to be training with it people.
And I looked around, I could see my it friends just kind of cringing because they already felt uncomfortable.
[00:38:45] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: So I say to Eileen that she was the best gift I ever gave to satir global.
And it was not easy, the two culture. And yet I knew from my own experience with the year long program, everybody was enriched by, and you'll appreciate this, I had three different groups, small groups. One was clinical, one was organizational, and one was personal.
And people could divide into whichever one they wanted.
And so I go in, and there's this it young man in the clinical development program, which was generally people giving supervision consultation cases. So afterwards, I asked him, I said, I was curious about why you were in the clinical supervision. And he said, well, I have some teenage boys in my Sunday school class, and I thought I needed help with them.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: So versatile. Well, Gene, I have been so blessed to have you as a friend and as a mentor. And I know that you carry a lot of Satir's wisdom with you, but you also have so much wisdom yourself. And I'd like to give you this moment to just send the listeners off with a message that you would love for them to have going forward into their week.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: I would say to you that we have been given an amazing gift called life, and enjoying it is a privilege and, in fact, I think a responsibility.
My challenge to myself and to us is let's enjoy it. We've been given such an incredible gift, and the planet, the plants, the animals, everything about it, just magical. And I know there's hurt and there's pain and there's conflict and there's war, and we have to deal with that, but find time for enjoyment.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: Thank you, Jean, so much. And thank you for joining us on this podcast.
[00:41:18] Speaker A: You're very welcome.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: As we conclude this episode of the Virginia Satir podcast, I want to leave you with a reminder that the journey of self discovery and transformation is ongoing.
Virginia Satir's wisdom continues to inspire us to nurture healthier relationships, foster open communication, and embrace personal growth. Remember, you hold the power to create positive change in your life and the lives of those around you. Well, that's it for today's episode. See you next week. Thanks for listening to the Virginia Satir podcast. Be sure to, like, subscribe and give us a review wherever you listen to the podcast and share this with a friend. Also, for more information on Virginia Satir, you can go to satirglobal.com or liveconnectedtherapy.com. Until next time, be kind to yourself and to others, and remember, you are a miracle. Bye.
