The problems of society result less from an intrinsic "evil" in human nature than from our failure to stop repeating behavior patterns from the past. Change, says Virginia Satir, begins with learning to accept and understand the many parts of oneself. youtube 
YOUTUBE gW3KShRdKMo Virginia Satir, excerpt from Thinking Allowed DVD, ~5m
The event is never that which determines your fate. It's your coping with the event.
Death, sickness, all kinds of things happen to human beings. And the fate of what happens as a result is in the coping.
I know a lot of people who said "Well, if you lived right you wouldn't have those things to cope with." I don't think we know enough about that; how we can avoid things. And I don't think avoiding things is helpful anyway.
But it's the coping with these things that give us the kind of strength and give us our opportunities. So death is something to cope with. Now we all are going to die one day.
This is important to remember too. What I think reality is, is what I see. Okay? What I see is not the total reality. And here's where the back comes in.
You've got a back and everybody's got a back. But how many people have seen it? A lot of other people see your back, but you don't see it.
When you start putting things together like that, then you begin to get an awareness of the absurdity of thinking that all there is in the world is what you see in it.
Interviewer: Well you focus quite a lot in your lifetime on human potential; on dealing with people who come from tormented families; where there was abuse; where the parents didn't get along with each other. These are the kind of situations we tend to blame on our worst social problems: drugs and crime. You feel very hopeful that a person's life need not be conditioned by their past.
Well it's not only a matter of my feeling, but I've demonstrated that. Now let me give you a little metaphor.
Let's think that the human being has countless number of little jets—that there is a fountain inside. It has countless number of jets. If our energy were free to flow, if these jets were all open, that this would just put in fantastic energy.
But many of these jets are closed. We shouldn't do this. And we shouldn't do that. And who's going to hate us if we do this and that and something else?
As a result we we live half lives.
When we open those up... you know what happens to a fountain where only some of the jets will let water come out? Sometimes the water comes out in big gushes. It's very uneven because the central pressure to make the water come out is stopped by the holes that are stopped.
I believe that's our central place inside of us, with the energy. Opening up all of these holes—our feelings and our possibilities; when we allow that to happen then we become in a totally different place because we then can have harmony moving and we have the total force of the energy that's possible.
That's all I've done with people is open up. Allow themselves to remember that their feelings are not the parts of them that decide what should happen.
Feelings are like a temperature—a thermometer—to say where things are.
You move over to another part of yourself when you make decisions.
A lot of people have said if you go into your feelings that's going to be the basis of your decision. What is the important thing is that our feelings are like the juice that keeps us in a whole peace and gives us the ability to see better, to think better, to feel better.
They owned emotions. But an emotion that you have which is inside and you say "No. I don't have it" is one that splits your energy. Because it puts you into this kind of thing.
You cannot say that you aren't what you are.
Yes, you can say that. But that doesn't change it. If you're angry, for instance, and you say "Oh no. I'm not angry;" or you're feeling very excited about something you say "No. I'm not excited;" I see those are the kinds of emotional lies that that just steal our energy away.