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March 6 - March 13, 2025
I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave but because I know that I am dealing with human beings, and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does.
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.
Had we been raised speaking a language that facilitated the expression of compassion, we would have learned to articulate our needs and values directly, rather than to insinuate wrongness when they have not been met.
Communication is life-alienating when it clouds our awareness that we are each responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. The use of the common expression have to, as in “There are some things you have to do, whether you like it or not,” illustrates how personal responsibility for our actions can be obscured in speech. The phrase makes one feel, as in “You make me feel guilty,” is another example of how language facilitates denial of personal responsibility for our own feelings and thoughts.
The concept that certain actions merit reward while others merit punishment is also associated with life-alienating communication. This thinking is expressed by the word deserve as in “He deserves to be punished for what he did.” It assumes “badness” on the part of people who behave in certain ways, and it calls for punishment to make them repent and change their behavior.
Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgments rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing.
In NVC, we distinguish between words that express actual feelings and those that describe what we think we are.
Words like ignored express how we interpret others, rather than how we feel.
People are disturbed not by things, but by the view they take of them.
what others say and do may be the stimulus, but never the cause, of our feelings.
Connect your feeling with your need: “I feel … because I need …”
The basic mechanism of motivating by guilt is to attribute the responsibility for one’s own feelings to others.
Judgments of others are alienated expressions of our own unmet needs.
When we express our needs indirectly through the use of evaluations, interpretations, and images, others are likely to hear criticism. And when people hear anything that sounds like criticism, they tend to invest their energy in self-defense or counterattack. If we wish for a compassionate response from others, it is self-defeating to express our needs by interpreting or diagnosing their behavior. Instead, the more directly we can connect our feelings to our own needs, the easier it is for others to respond to us compassionately.
Unfortunately, most of us have never been taught to think in terms of needs. We are accustomed to thinking about what’s wrong with other people when our needs aren’t being fulfilled.
We accept full responsibility for our own intentions and actions, but not for the feelings of others.
Requests may sound like demands when unaccompanied by the speaker’s feelings and needs.
We can help others trust that we are requesting, not demanding, by indicating that we would only want them to comply if they can do so willingly. Thus we might ask, “Would you be willing to set the table?” rather than “I would like you to set the table.”
If we are prepared to show an empathic understanding of what prevents someone from doing as we asked, then by my definition, we have made a request, not a demand.
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.
Believing we have to “fix” situations and make others feel better prevents us from being present.
The key ingredient of empathy is presence: we are wholly present with the other party and what they are experiencing.
What will they think of me?’ must be put aside for bliss.”
We begin to feel this bliss when messages previously experienced as critical or blaming begin to be seen for the gifts they are: opportunities to give to people who are in pain.
people who seem like monsters are simply human beings whose language and behavior sometimes keep us from seeing their humanness.
One of the hardest messages for many of us to empathize with is silence. This is especially true when we’ve expressed ourselves vulnerably and need to know how others are reacting to our words. At such times, it’s easy to project our worst fears onto the lack of response and forget to connect with the feelings and needs being expressed through the silence.
It is tragic that so many of us get enmeshed in self-hatred rather than benefit from our mistakes, which show us our limitations and guide us towards growth.
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.
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.
We were not meant to succumb to the dictates of should and have to, whether they come from outside or inside of ourselves.
Whether it’s sadness, frustration, disappointment, fear, grief, or some other feeling, we have been endowed by nature with these feelings for a purpose: they mobilize us to pursue and fulfill what we need or value.
Anger, however, co-opts our energy by directing it toward punishing people rather than meeting our needs. Instead of engaging in “righteous indignation,” I recommend connecting empathically with our own needs or those of others. 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.
to whatever degree people hear blame, they have failed to hear our pain.
In a conflict, both parties usually spend too much time intent on proving themselves right, and the other party wrong, rather than paying attention to their own and the other’s needs.
When we submit to doing something solely for the purpose of avoiding punishment, our attention is distracted from the value of the action itself. Instead, we are focusing upon the consequences, on what might happen if we fail to take that action.
when we have a judgmental dialogue going on within, we become alienated from what we are needing and cannot then act to meet those needs.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
