What Stance Are You In? Virginia Satir’s Four Communication Stances Applied to Men
- Steven Keeler
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Virginia Satir spent decades watching what happens to human beings when they are overwhelmed, threatened, or under stress. What she observed was that people — across cultures, across circumstances, across wildly different presenting problems — tended to cope using one of four predictable positions.
She called them communication or survival stances. Not personality types. Not fixed identities. Stances — because a stance is something you move into, and something you can learn to move out of, most importantly when you are under stress.
Most men, when they read the physical symptoms of their own default stance, recognize themselves immediately. And that recognition is, it turns out, the beginning of building your character to be able to have any kind of feeling and remain connected anyway.
Why Stances Matter
Under stress, we don’t communicate. We react.
The stance you move into under pressure is not something you choose consciously. It was chosen for you — in childhood, in the conditions you grew up in, in response to what was safe and what wasn’t, what worked and what didn’t. The stance was adaptive then. It helped you survive a situation that genuinely required that kind of response. The problem is that it is still running, decades later, in situations that don’t require it — and it is preventing you from having what you actually want.
Awareness is the first step. You cannot change a stance you cannot see. Most men have been in their default stance so long it doesn’t feel like a stance — it feels like personality, like just how they are, like the truth of the situation they’re in. The work begins when it starts to feel like a choice.
All communications and relationships have three parts: self, other and context or relationship. Each of the four survival stances has a cost or a deficit to them as you will see.
Blaming: The Externalized Stance
The blaming stance externalizes. The cause of everything is out there — in what other people did, failed to do, should have done differently. The language is “you always,” “you never,” “it’s your fault.” The pointed finger, extended outward, is the physical image Satir used to demonstrate it.
Most people think of blaming as an aggressive stance, and it can be. But there is also a subtler form — the benevolent blamer, the one who externalizes his encouragement as readily as his criticism. “You can do it!” is still a blaming structure if the power to do or not do is located outside the speaker. “You can do it!” looks like encouragement. But the structure is identical to criticism — the speaker is still placing the locus of control outside himself, in the other person. He is the judge of what the other person is capable of. The other person’s success or failure is still being evaluated and determined from the outside.
The blaming stance, in other words, isn’t really about anger. It’s about where you locate agency. The benevolent blamer and the hostile blamer are running the same program — they’ve just pointed it in different emotional directions. An example:
A father watching his son play hockey.
When the son scores: “You did it! I knew you could!”
When the son misses: “You’re not trying hard enough.”
Both statements locate the son’s performance as something the father is monitoring, evaluating, and rendering judgment on. The son’s capacity, effort, and worth are things the father is tracking from the outside — and reporting back. The encouragement and the criticism are structurally the same move.
The body under chronic blaming: high blood pressure. Heart problems. Back and neck tension, the kind that accumulates in the muscles that keep the body upright and forward-oriented. Arthritis. The cardiovascular system bearing the cost of sustained external activation.
Blaming involves discounting/putting it all on someone else; not being connected to the other.
Placating: The Internalized Stance
Placating is the stance that says: nothing I feel matters. Whatever you need. I’m fine. Please don’t be upset. We say yes when we really mean no. We make ourselves smaller to keep the other comfortable. We want everyone to be happy.
It’s a collapse inward—a kind of ongoing surrender of the self in the hope that it will produce love, or at least the absence of conflict. The internal message is if I can just do enough, I might get to know I matter. I’ve heard many men say, “Yeah, but I’m killing myself at work for you.”
It is blame’s mirror image — instead of externalizing everything, it internalizes everything. The person using placating gives themselves away, relentlessly, often without knowing they’re doing it, because the alternative — asserting their own needs, their own feelings, their own presence — feels too foreign.
The body under chronic placating: ulcers. Heartburn. Constricted breathing. The digestive system bearing the cost of everything that was swallowed instead of said. Diverticulitis. The gut storing what was never expressed.
Men tend to read the placating stance as weakness — which is why it’s less recognized in men than in women, even when it’s operating. A man who placates doesn’t always look like he’s collapsing. Sometimes he looks like he’s being patient. Sometimes he looks like he’s being accommodating. The interior experience is grief — diffuse, chronic, the particular sadness of a person who has been disappearing in installments.
Placating involves discounting, even throwing away, the self and focusing on the other and the relationship or situation.
You cannot change a stance you cannot see. The first step is recognizing what you are doing — not judging it.
Super-Reasonable: The Cerebral Stance
The super-reasonable stance is the one most likely to be mistaken for maturity.
The person using SR has achieved emotional neutrality. They can tell you exactly what’s happening. They can analyze it, contextualize it, explain it, diagram it. What they cannot do istell you how they feel. Because from inside the SR stance, feelings aren’t happening. Only logic is happening. Only the rules matter.
The emotional signal — the body’s actual response to the situation — is being continuously overridden by the rational, left brain apparatus.
The body under chronic super-reasonable: dries up; skin becomes dry; no juice; sexual energy diminishes. A quality of aliveness that other people can feel diminishes. The person is present in every technical sense and somehow not quite there. Accidents become more likely as the body tries to insist that something is present the mind has decided to ignore. Self-injury, in small increments, accumulates. The body, deprived of the emotional signal it needs to orient itself, begins to navigate poorly.
SR is, for many men, the highest-status stance — the one that looks most like having it together. It is its opposite. It is the person holding the assembly together at the cost of the person inside the assembly.
SR discounts the self and other, only focusing on the context or situation and the rules.
Irrelevant: The Chaotic Stance
The irrelevant stance deflects. It distracts. It makes things not quite matter — not by denying them, but by perpetually redirecting before they can land. A person using irrelevance doesn’t disappear by leaving. They disappear by never quite arriving. They are in the room but the room never quite gets them.
What the irrelevant stance is protecting against: the awareness that if you actually showed up—fully, presently, seriously—something catastrophic might happen. So you keep moving. You keep the energy scattered. You stay out of range. You don’t connect.
The body under chronic irrelevance: vertigo. A quality of being literally off-balance. Tics. Asthma. The nervous system never quite settling. A propensity to hurt themselves — not deliberately, but through the accumulation of not quite being oriented to where they are.
The IR stance is the hardest to work with therapeutically because it resists contact. Every serious thing becomes a deflection. Every approach is met with something that disarms but doesn’t engage. The person inside it often doesn’t know why they can’t take things seriously — why things that clearly matter to others never quite land for them.
When using irrelevance we discount all three facets of communication/connection: self, other and relationship.
Congruence: The Fifth Option
Satir spent her career developing a solution to the above survival stances. She looked for a healing way for us to communicate and relate--even under stress. She developed a way for the self, other and relationship to all matter. She called this way of being congruence.
A congruent version would sound more like: “I love watching you play.” The father’s own feeling. Not a verdict on the son.
When we are congruent, the inside and outside match. If angry: look angry, say we are angry, we feel angry. Not performed anger. Not managed anger. Actual anger, expressed in the body, in the words, in the face — and then, crucially, available for what comes next.
Congruence is not the absence of difficult feelings. It is the presence of them, without armor. The person in congruence can be hurt and say so. Can be afraid and show it. Can be uncertain and sit with that uncertainty without making it someone else’s fault or pretending it isn’t happening or disappearing into analysis.
The body under congruence is grounded. The words and the feelings and the physical presence align. The other person can actually find you, because you are really, truly there.
If we are honest about it: this is not easy. It requires practice. It requires, first, the willingness to feel what is actually happening instead of immediately reaching for a way to avoid it. What I have noticed after thirty-five years of clinical work is that this unwinds gradually, through practice and dedication-through small and repeated choices to say what is actually happening inside rather than what seems safest to say.
For most men, that willingness is itself the work.
A Place to Start
Which Stance Are You In? A Self-Check
Read each group. Notice which one fits most often — not in your best moments, but under pressure, in the relationships that matter.
Blaming — When something goes wrong, your first move is to locate the cause in someone else — your language runs toward “you always” and “you never.” You also feel alone. Your body: chronic tension in the neck and shoulders, high blood pressure, heart strain
Placating — When conflict appears, you get smaller — you say yes when you mean no. You say fine when you aren’t. — You have a hard time naming what you actually need — your body: gut problems, heartburn, constricted breathing — the physical cost of what was swallowed instead of said
Super-Reasonable — under pressure, you go to analysis. Logic. The argument. — You can tell anyone exactly what’s happening. You cannot tell them how you feel about it. — You look like the most composed person in the room. You are also the least present. — Your body: dryness, diminished energy, a quality of not quite being there — and a tendency toward small accidents
Irrelevant — When things get serious, you deflect. Change the subject. Make it lighter. — You’re in the room but never quite arrive — People feel like they can’t quite get to you — and they’re right — Your body: vertigo, physical imbalance, a nervous system that never quite settles
A note on scoring: we know how to do all of them. Most men have a primary stance and a secondary one. This is the beginning of you starting to be accountable for what goes on inside you-which is a sacred pursuit.
A NOTE ON WHY THIS MATTERS
Men searching for “why do I get so angry,” “communication problems,” “how to connect better with my partner” are, often, living in an unexamined survival stance. Content that names the stances — clearly, without jargon — meets them in language they can actually use.
Steven Keeler, RCC (#13218), CCC (#5926), RCC-ACS, LMFT, LPC, MFLC, has worked with men, families, and military communities for 35 years. Bestselling author of Leap, But How Will I Live, Eat or Pay for Gas? and host of The Art and Science of Transformation podcast, listened to in 24 countries. Office in Coquitlam — virtual counselling across British Columbia. About Steven · Contact
