Enriching your Relationship : A concept in the tradition of Virginia Satir in the light of empirical research

The Enriching Your Relationship with Yourself and Others (Enriching) program is an experiential and psych-educational brief intervention program based on the skills of Virginia Satir which has been applied to a broad spectrum of populations including parents with special needs children in Hong Kong, Muslim women university students in Amman, Jordan, African-American and Hispanic gang counselors in Los Angeles, California and Syrian-American women dealing with the trauma of war. The premise of the program is that the skills that Satir used therapeutically could be modified and taught to the general public to enrich their lives. The skills include: Making Contact, Validating, Becoming Aware, Opening to Greater Understanding and Acceptance, Making Conscious Choices and Changes and Reinforcing Positive Changes. Over the years, the Satir Process (Loeschen, 2002), although widely recognized as effective by those using it, has been criticized for lack of theoretically and empirically based structure without a clear guide to clinical application (Brubacker, 2006; Nichols & Schwarz, 2008). In the era of evidence-based psychology of the twenty-first Century, the Enriching program is reviewed with the integration of a wide range of empirical literature related to Contemporary theoretical and psychotherapeutic approaches