Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides)

by Marshall B. Rosenberg

This same administrator, however, was being confronted by angry citizens who would come to him with their passionate concerns and leave dissatisfied for not having been heard. Some of these citizens later confided to me, “When you go to his office, he gives you a bunch of facts, but you never know whether he’s heard you first. When that happens, you start to distrust his facts.” Paraphrasing tends to save, rather than waste, time. Studies in labor-management negotiations demonstrate that the time required to reach conflict resolution is cut in half when each negotiator agrees, before responding, to accurately repeat what the previous speaker had said.

Yeah this seems like best practice for almost any conflict. Like Rappaport's rules, I feel like it's the best clearly-definable and doable psychosocial technique out there... I wish more people would do it.

Suppose a mother comes to us, saying, “My child is impossible. No matter what I tell him to do, he doesn’t listen.” We might reflect her feelings and needs by saying, “It sounds like you’re feeling desperate and would like to find some way of connecting with your son.” Such a paraphrase often encourages a person to look within. If we have accurately reflected her statement, the mother might touch upon other feelings: “Maybe it’s my fault. I’m always yelling at him.” As the listener, we would continue to stay with the feelings and needs being expressed and say, for example, “Are you feeling guilty because you would have liked to have been more understanding of him than you have been at times?” If the mother continues to sense understanding in our reflection, she might move further into her feelings and declare, “I’m just a failure as a mother.” We continue to remain with the feelings and needs being expressed: “So you’re feeling discouraged and want to relate differently to him?” We persist in this manner until the person has exhausted all her feelings surrounding this issue.

I see, **empathy takes time**. I gotta take my time when doing this. I love the process he outlines... You listen until they've covered all their feelings. "We persist in this manner until the person has exhausted all her feelings surrounding this issue."

We need empathy to give empathy. At other times, it may be necessary to provide ourselves with some “emergency first aid” empathy by listening to what’s going on in ourselves with the same quality of presence and attention that we offer to others. Former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold once said, “The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is happening outside.”

The first thing I saw when I walked through the back door was my children entangled in a fight. I had no energy to empathize with them so I screamed nonviolently: “Hey, I’m in a lot of pain! Right now I really do not want to deal with your fighting! I just want some peace and quiet!” My older son, then nine, stopped short, looked at me, and asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” If we are able to speak our pain nakedly without blame, I find that even people in distress are sometimes able to hear our need. Of course I wouldn’t want to scream, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know how to behave any better? I just got home after a rough day!” or insinuate in any way that their behavior was at fault. I scream nonviolently by calling attention to my own desperate needs and pain in the moment.

Summary Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. We often have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, however, calls upon us to empty our mind and listen to others with our whole being.

We need empathy to give empathy. When we sense ourselves being defensive or unable to empathize, we need to (1) stop, breathe, give ourselves empathy; (2) scream nonviolently; or (3) take time out.

I swear this whole book is the best mental health advice I've ever seen. I wanna make an app where you practice gamified NVC with a bot and/or koko style and also report back how it's working for you in conflict

Milly proceeded to describe her week. “By now,” the principal related, “I was quite late for a very important meeting—still had my coat on—and anxious not to keep a room full of people waiting, and so I asked, ‘Milly, what can I do for you?’ Milly reached over, took both my shoulders in her hands, looked me straight in the eyes, and said very firmly, ‘Mrs. Anderson, I don’t want you to do anything; I just want you to listen.’ “Don’t just do something….”

when several members of the faculty learned to listen empathically and to express themselves more vulnerably and honestly. “The students opened up more and more and told us about the various personal problems that were interfering with their studies. The more they talked about it, the more work they were able to complete. Even though this kind of listening took a lot of our time, we were glad to spend it in this way. Unfortunately, the dean got upset; he said we were not counselors and should spend more time teaching and less time talking with the students.” When I asked how the faculty had dealt with this, the instructor replied, “We empathized with the dean’s concern. We heard that he felt worried and wanted to know that we weren’t getting involved in things we couldn’t handle. We also heard that he needed reassurance that the time spent on talking wasn’t cutting into our teaching responsibilities. He seemed relieved by the way we listened to him. We continued to talk with the students because we could see that the more we listened to them, the better they did in their studies.”

While we may easily empathize with our peers and with those in less powerful positions, we may find ourselves being defensive or apologetic, instead of empathic, in the presence of those we identify as our “superiors.” This is why I was particularly pleased that these faculty members had remembered to empathize with their dean as well as with their students.

It’s harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources.

We “say a lot” by listening for other people’s feelings and needs.

I’m sure glad you had us practicing empathy with angry people that last time. Just a few days after our session, I went to arrest someone in a public housing project. When I brought him out, my car was surrounded by about sixty people screaming things at me like, ‘Let him go! He didn’t do anything! You police are a bunch of racist pigs!’ Although I was skeptical that empathy would help, I didn’t have many other options. So I reflected back the feelings that were coming at me; I said things like, ‘So you don’t trust my reasons for arresting this man? You think it has to do with race?’ After several minutes of my continuing to reflect their feelings, the group became less hostile. In the end they opened a path so I could get to my car.

Rather than put your “but” in the face of an angry person, empathize.

Vitality drains out of conversations when we lose connection with the feelings and needs generating the speaker’s words, and with the requests associated with those needs.

So true, and i didn't know this like at all until i had the circling authentic relating event with people telling me they got bored when i was talking but wasn't in my embodied emotions.

if an aunt is repeating the story about how twenty years ago her husband deserted her and her two small children, we might interrupt by saying, “So, Auntie, it sounds like you are still feeling hurt, wishing you’d been treated more fairly.” People are not aware that empathy is often what they are needing. Neither do they realize that they are more likely to receive that empathy by expressing the feelings and needs that are alive in them than by recounting tales of past injustice and hardship.

To bring a conversation back to life: interrupt with empathy.

I REALLY gotta try this. My habit is to inquire to increase clarity for the content of what they're saying and my understanding of the content. And that does work much of the time. But i need to have that tactic ready. Notably, for situations where there fundamentally can't be clarity in what they're saying , like when talking to my doorman Vinnie about politics--he doesn't HAVE coherent thoughts to express so my clarifying Qs didn't work, but he DID have emotional needs so this could have worked. Same if you talked to a QAnon conspiracist.

At the time, I was surprised to hear his response because he had been the one doing most of the talking! Now I am no longer surprised: I have since discovered that conversations that are lifeless for the listener are equally so for the speaker.

I once conducted an informal survey, posing the following question: “If you are using more words than somebody wants to hear, do you want that person to pretend to listen or to stop you?” Of the scores of people I approached, all but one expressed a preference to be stopped. Their answers gave me courage by convincing me that it is more considerate to interrupt people than to pretend to listen. All of us want our words to enrich others, not to burden them. Speakers prefer that listeners interrupt rather than pretend to listen.

I have a hard time believing that supposedly widespread preference

Summary Our ability to offer empathy can allow us to stay vulnerable, defuse potential violence, hear the word no without taking it as a rejection, revive a lifeless conversation, and even hear the feelings and needs expressed through silence. Time and again, people transcend the paralyzing effects of psychological pain when they have sufficient contact with someone who can hear them empathically.

A similar expression of internal demand occurs in the following self-evaluation: “What I’m doing is just terrible. I really must do something about it!” 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.

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.

Even if we are not initially conscious of it, the cause of anger is located in our own thinking. The third option described in Chapter 5 is to shine the light of consciousness on our own feelings and needs. Rather than going up to our head to make a mental analysis of wrongness regarding somebody, we choose to connect to the life that is within us. This life energy is most palpable and accessible when we focus on what we need in each moment. For example, if someone arrives late for an appointment and we need reassurance that she cares about us, we may feel hurt. If, instead, our need is to spend time purposefully and constructively, we may feel frustrated. But if our need is for thirty minutes of quiet solitude, we may be grateful for her tardiness and feel pleased. Thus, it is not the behavior of the other person but our own need that causes our feeling.

Anger, however, co-opts our energy by directing it toward punishing people rather than meeting our needs.

Brilliant.

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 … ”

Reflecting deeply that evening on this experience, I recognized how I had labeled the first child in my mind as a “spoiled brat.” That image was in my head before his elbow ever caught my nose, and when it did, it was no longer simply an elbow hitting my nose. It was: “That obnoxious brat has no right to do this!” I had another judgment about the second child; I saw him as a “pathetic creature.” Since I had a tendency to worry about this child, even though my nose was hurting and bleeding much more severely, the second day I felt no rage at all. I could not have received a more powerful lesson to help me see that it’s not what the other person does, but the images and interpretations in my own head that produce my anger.

Violence comes from the belief that other people cause our pain and therefore deserve punishment.

A worthy quote

When my consciousness is focused on another human being’s feelings and needs, I see the universality of our experience. I had a major conflict with what went on in his head, but I’ve learned that I enjoy human beings more if I don’t hear what they think. Especially with folks who have his kind of thoughts. I’ve learned to savor life much more by only hearing what’s going on in their hearts and not getting caught up with the stuff in their heads.

When we hear another person’s feelings and needs, we recognize our common humanity.

For those of you wishing to apply NVC, especially in challenging situations of anger, I would suggest the following exercise. As we have seen, our anger comes from judgments, labels, and thoughts of blame, of what people “should” do and what they “deserve.” List the judgments that float most frequently in your head by using the cue, “I don’t like people who are … ” Collect all such negative judgments in your head and then ask yourself, “When I make that judgment of a person, what am I needing and not getting?” In this way, you train yourself to frame your thinking in terms of unmet needs rather than in terms of judgments of other people. Practice translating each judgment into an unmet need.

Many mediators define their role as a “third head” trying to think of a way to get everybody to come to an agreement. They are not at all concerned with creating a quality of connection, thus overlooking the only conflict resolution tool I have ever known to work. When I described the NVC method and the role of human connection, one of the participants at the Austria meeting raised the objection that I was talking about psychotherapy, and that mediators were not psychotherapists. In my experience, connecting people at this level isn’t psychotherapy; it’s actually the core of mediation because when you make the connection, the problem solves itself most of the time. Instead of a third head asking, “What can we agree to here?,” if we had a clear statement of each person’s needs—what those parties need right now from each other—we will then discover what can be done to get everybody’s needs met. These become the strategies the parties agree to implement after the mediation session concludes and the parties leave the room.

Many of us have great difficulty expressing our needs: we have been taught by society to criticize, insult, and otherwise (mis)communicate in ways that keep us apart. 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. And such verbal conflicts can far too easily escalate into violence—and even war. In order not to confuse needs and strategies, it is important to recall that needs contain no reference to anybody taking any particular action. On the other hand, strategies, which may appear in the form of requests, desires, wants, and “solutions,” refer to specific actions that specific people may take.

“needs literacy”

they were doing analysis, which is easily heard as criticism by a listener.

Yeah I'm noticing more and more that analyzing things logically can very often be heard as criticism, including by me. And especially by people who don't have the extensive experience/education/culture of intellectual analytical discussion that i have. This is exactly why I am working on using empathy over analysis. I suspect that an hour of empathy followed by 15min of analytical thinking will get me A LOT farther with someone than an hour of analytical thinking with 15 min of empathy mixed in.

Two factions in the same department were fighting over which software to use, generating strong emotions on both sides. One faction had worked especially hard to develop the software that was presently in use, and wanted to see its continued use. The other faction had strong emotions tied up in creating new software. I started by asking each side to tell me what needs of theirs would be better fulfilled by the software they advocated. Their response was to offer an intellectual analysis that the other side received as criticism.

Intellectual analysis is often received as criticism.

This is why Mr. Rojas's peer sharing group was so important at Collegiate... We probably would get on better in the world with more of that education if done well like NVC. Maybe openmindplatform.org could use a dose of this.

Sensing Others’ Needs, No Matter What They’re Saying To resolve conflicts using NVC, we need to train ourselves to hear people expressing needs regardless of how they do the expressing. 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. For example, in the middle of a conversation, if I ask the other person something about what they’ve just said, and I am met with “That’s a stupid question,” I hear them expressing a need in the form of a judgment of me. I proceed to guess what that need might be—maybe the question I asked did not fulfill their need to be understood. Or if I ask my partner to talk about the stress in our relationship and they answer, “I don’t want to talk about it,” I may sense that their need is for protection from what they imagine could happen if we were to communicate about our relationship.

The husband had finally acknowledged his need: to keep his family safe. The next step is to ascertain that the wife heard that need. This is a crucial stage in conflict resolution. We must not assume that when one party expresses a need clearly, that the other party hears it accurately. I asked the wife, “Can you tell me back what you heard to be your husband’s needs in this situation?”

People often need empathy before they are able to hear what is being said.

in the absence of present language, a request such as “I’d like you to go to the show with me Saturday night” fails to convey what’s being asked of the listener at that moment. The use of present language to hone such a request, for example, “Would you be willing to tell me whether you will go to the show with me Saturday night?,” supports clarity and ongoing connection in the exchange. We can further clarify the request by indicating what we may want from the other person in the present moment, “Would you be willing to tell me how you feel about going to the show with me Saturday night?” The clearer we are regarding the response we want right now from the other party, the more effectively we move the conflict toward resolution.

This is subtle and brilliant about planning... Like, what do you want from them IN THIS MOMENT... That's kind of all we can fully address, even though we probably want all kinds of outcomes in the future.

They went back and forth, with the partner repeating, “I do listen,” and the woman countering, “No, you don’t.” They told me they’d had this “conversation” for twelve years, a situation that is typical in conflicts when parties use vague words like “listen” to express strategies. I suggest instead the use of action verbs to capture something that we can see or hear happening—something that can be recorded with a video camera. “Listening” occurs inside a person’s head; another person cannot see whether it is happening or not. One way to determine that someone is actually listening is to have that person reflect back what had been said: we ask the person to take an action that we ourselves can see or hear. If the other party can tell us what was just said, we know that person heard and was indeed listening to us.

Yup... This is why I ask this so much from my partner. And why Rappaport's Rules are so crucial.

Non–action language, such as “Give me the freedom to grow” often exacerbates conflict. In this instance, the husband heard himself being judged as domineering. I pointed out to the wife that it wasn’t clear to her husband what she wanted: “Please tell him exactly what you’d like him to do to meet your need to have your choices respected.” “I want you to let me—,” she began. I interrupted that “let” was too vague: “What do you really mean when you say you want somebody to ‘let’ you?” After reflecting for a few seconds, she arrived at an important understanding. She acknowledged that what she really meant when she said things like “I want you to let me be” and “I want you to give me the freedom to grow” is for her husband to tell her that no matter what she did, it was okay.

When she got clear as to what she was actually requesting—for him to tell her something—she recognized that what she wanted did not leave him much freedom to be himself and to have his choices respected. And maintaining respect is a key element in successful conflict resolution.

In Chapter 8, we discovered the importance of not hearing “no” as rejection. Listening carefully to the message behind the “no” helps us understand the other person’s needs: When they say “no,” they’re saying they have a need that keeps them from saying “yes” to what we are asking. If we can hear the need behind a “no,” we can continue the conflict resolution process—maintaining our focus on finding a way to meet everybody’s needs—even if the other party says “no” to the particular strategy we presented them.

The mediator’s role is to create an environment in which the parties can connect, express their needs, understand each other’s needs, and arrive at strategies to meet those needs. The objective is not to get the parties to do what we want them to do.

Emergency First-Aid Empathy As mediator, I stress my intention for both parties to be fully and accurately understood. Despite that, as soon as I express empathy toward one side, it is not unusual for the other side to immediately accuse me of favoritism. At this time, what’s called for is emergency first-aid empathy. This might sound like “So you’re really annoyed, and you need some assurance that you’re going to get your side on the table?” Once the empathy has been expressed, I remind them that everyone will have the opportunity to be heard, and their turn will be next. It is then helpful to confirm they are in agreement with waiting by asking, for example, “Are you feeling reassured about that, or would you like more reassurance that your opportunity to be heard will come soon?” We may need to do this repeatedly to keep the mediation on track.

We also need to “follow the bouncing ball”: being conscious of where one party left off so we can return to what that party said after the other party has been heard. This can be challenging, especially when things get heated. In such situations, I often find it helpful to use a white board or flip chart to capture the essence of what was spoken by the last speaker who had opportunity to express a feeling or need. This form of visual tracking can also serve to reassure both parties that their needs will be addressed because so often before we have a chance to fully draw out one party’s needs, the other will be jumping ahead to express themselves.

In order to get things moving—and to stay on schedule—I had to speed up the mediation process. To keep them from spending time telling the same stories over and over, I asked one of the brothers if I could play his role; then I would switch and play the part of the other brother. Use role-play to speed up the mediation process. As I was going through my role-play, I joked about wanting to see if I was playing the part right by asking if I could check in with my “director.” Looking over at the brother whose part I had been playing, I saw something I wasn’t prepared for: he had tears in his eyes. I guessed that he was experiencing deep empathy, both with himself from my playing his role, as well as for his brother’s pain, which he had not seen until then.

As an example, a woman was suffering heavily from a conflict with her husband, particularly from the way he was directing anger toward her. First, I listened in a way that supported her to clearly express her needs and to experience being received with respectful understanding. Then, I took on the role of her husband, and asked her to listen to me as I expressed what I guessed to be the husband’s needs. The needs of the conflicting parties having been clearly conveyed in this role-play, I asked the woman to share the recording with her husband for his reaction. Because I had, in this case, been accurate in guessing the husband’s needs, he experienced huge relief when listening to the recording. With the increased trust that came from hearing himself understood, he later agreed to come in so we could work together until the two of them found ways of meeting their needs in mutually respectful ways. When the hardest thing about resolving a conflict is getting the parties together in the same room, the use of recorded role-plays may be the answer.

We refrain, however, from mentioning our own needs regarding the person’s behavior until it is clear to them that we understand and care about his or her needs. Otherwise people will not care about our needs nor will they see that their needs and ours are one and the same.

Yesssss i read this 2020-10-28 and used it that night with my partner!

We avoid judging or analyzing the conflict and instead remain focused on needs.