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This is in keeping with another axiom of Ahimsa: It’s not what you do that counts, it’s the quality of your attention.
Society pays lip service to saints and their vow to serve God instead of themselves, but there’s a huge gap between the values we espouse and the way we actually live. Ahimsa closes this gap only by expanding a person’s awareness.
It’s not normal to live in a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are aimed at the enemy and terrorism is an acceptable religious act—they are merely the norm.
The Sufi poet Rumi once wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
Life-alienating communication, however, traps us in a world of ideas about rightness and wrongness—a world of judgments. It is a language rich with words that classify and dichotomize people and their actions. When we speak this language, we judge others and their behavior while preoccupying ourselves with who’s good, bad, normal, abnormal, responsible, irresponsible, smart, ignorant, etc.
When we speak this language, we think and communicate in terms of what’s wrong with others for behaving in certain ways or, occasionally, what’s wrong with ourselves for not understanding or responding as we would like. Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting.
Analyses of others are actually expressions of our own needs and values.
What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but not the cause.
Vague language contributes to internal confusion.
My theory is that we get depressed because we’re not getting what we want, and we’re not getting what we want because we have never been taught to get what we want. Instead, we’ve been taught to be good little boys and girls and good mothers and fathers. If we’re going to be one of those good things, better get used to being depressed. Depression is the reward we get for being “good.” But, if you want to feel better, I’d like you to clarify what you would like people to do to make life more wonderful for you.
Instead of offering empathy, we tend instead to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, on the other hand, requires us to focus full attention on the other person’s message. We give to others the time and space they need to express themselves fully and to feel understood. There is a Buddhist saying that aptly describes this ability: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”
it wasn’t until her interaction with the volunteer that this woman received what she was truly needing: connection with another human being who could hear her profound despair.
It is impossible for us to give something to another if we don’t have it ourselves. Likewise, if we find ourselves unable or unwilling to empathize despite our efforts, it is usually a sign that we are too starved for empathy to be able to offer it to others. Sometimes, if we openly acknowledge that our own distress is preventing us from responding empathically, the other person may come through with the empathy we need.
This is scary. And it’s very hard. And it’s so discouraging that when I am trying really a lot, I can still fail so terribly. But the good part of reality is that I’ve been seeing that it includes wonderful things, too.
Empathy lies in our ability to be present.
When we are internally violent toward ourselves, it is difficult to be genuinely compassionate toward others.
NVC’s most important use may be in developing self-compassion.
Conditioned to view ourselves as objects-objects full of shortcomings—is it any wonder that many of us end up relating violently to ourselves?
I’d like change to be stimulated by a clear desire to enrich life for ourselves or for others rather than by destructive energies such as shame or guilt.
If the way we evaluate ourselves leads us to feel shame, and we consequently change our behavior, we are allowing our growing and learning to be guided by self-hatred. Shame is a form of self-hatred, and actions taken in reaction to shame are not free and joyful acts.
Most of the time when we use this word with ourselves, we resist learning, because should implies that there is no choice.
Human beings, when hearing any kind of demand, tend to resist because it threatens our autonomy—our strong need for choice. We have this reaction to tyranny even when it’s internal tyranny in the form of a should.
Think for a moment of all the people you’ve heard say, “I really should give up smoking,” or, “I really have to do something about exercising more.” They keep saying what they “must” do and they keep resisting doing it, because human beings were not meant to be slaves. We were not meant to succumb to the dictates of should and have to, whether they come from outside or inside of ourselves. And if we do yield and submit to these demands, our actions arise from an energy that is devoid of life-giving joy.
A basic premise of NVC is that whenever we imply that someone is wrong or bad, what we are really saying is that he or she is not acting in harmony with our needs. If the person we are judging happens to be ourselves, what we are saying is, “I myself am not behaving in harmony with my own needs.” I am convinced that if we learn to evaluate ourselves in terms of whether and how well our needs are being fulfilled, we are much more likely to learn from the evaluation.
Self-judgments, like all judgments, are tragic expressions of unmet needs.
For example, if we find ourselves reacting reproachfully to something we did (“Look, you just messed up
again!”), we can quickly stop and ask ourselves, “What unmet need of mine is being expressed through this moralistic judgment?”
Mourning in NVC is the process of fully connecting with the unmet needs and the feelings that are generated when we have been less than perfect. It is an experience of regret, but regret that helps us learn from what we have
done without blaming or hating ourselves. We see how our behavior ran counter to our own needs and values, and we open ourselves to feelings that arise out of that awareness.
When our consciousness is focused on what we need, we are naturally stimulated toward creative possibilitie...
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We are compassionate with ourselves when we are able to embrace all parts of ourselves and recognize the needs and values expressed by each part.
I earnestly believe, however, that an important form of self-compassion is to make choices motivated purely by our desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, duty, or obligation.
With every choice you make, be conscious of what need it serves.
Thus, as adults, we easily trick ourselves into believing that life consists of doing things for reward; we are addicted to getting a smile, a pat on the back, and people’s verbal judgments that we are a “good person,” “good parent,” “good citizen,” “good worker,” “good friend,” and so forth. We do things to get people to like us and avoid things that may lead people to dislike or punish us.
The cause of anger lies in our thinking—in thoughts of blame and judgment.
When we judge others, we contribute to violence.
This may take extensive practice, whereby over and over again, we consciously replace the phrase “I am angry because they … ” with “I am angry because I am
needing … ”
Violence comes from the belief that other people cause our pain and therefore deserve punishment.
“Those were terrible things for me to say; those were racist remarks I made,” he would not have heard my pain. As soon as people think that they have done something wrong, they will not be fully apprehending our pain.
People do not hear our pain when they believe they are at fault.
Practice translating each judgment into an unmet need.
The four steps to expressing anger are (1) stop and breathe, (2) identify our judgmental thoughts, (3) connect with our needs, and (4) express our feelings and unmet needs.
analyses that imply wrongness are essentially tragic expressions of unmet needs.
If we really want to be of assistance to others, the first thing to learn is to translate any message into an expression of a need. The message might take the form of silence, denial, a judgmental remark, a gesture—or, hopefully, a request. We hone our skills to hear the need within every message, even if at first we have to rely on guesses.
Learn to hear needs regardless of how people express them.
People often need empathy before they are able to hear what is being said.
No matter what else is going on, we all have the same needs. Needs are universal.
As expressed so beautifully by Alice Walker in The Color Purple: “One day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.”
When parents opt to use force, we may win the battle of getting children to do what we want, but, in the process, are we not perpetuating a social norm that justifies violence as a means of resolving differences?
