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What You'll Find in This Month's Newsletter:
Celebrate Marshall: Celebrations and stories of how Marshall Rosenberg contributed to making our lives more wonderful.
Dozens of people from around the world share their gratitude for Marshall’s work and the profound influence he had upon the quality of their lives.This board was started shortly after he passed. You can add to the list if you feel so inclined-very touching.
"I would love to express my profound gratitude to Marshall for developing a process of communication that gave me my voice. Growing up in a family where my older sister was very vocal about her wants, needs and opinions, and how that wasn't…more." - Shoshana Wheeler
"I am grateful every day for the gift NVC has been in my life, and that I have had the privilege of learning from so many trainers, and from Marshall himself. One small event that I think I will always remember is a day in 2007 when I..." - amymcquillan
Do you wonder how to create healthy relationships grounded in mutual respect, compassion, and emotional safety? One effective approach — that works in both your personal and professional life — is called nonviolent communication (NVC) or collaborative communication.
What is nonviolent communication?
According to The Center for Nonverbal Communication, NVC is "based on the principles of nonviolence — the natural state of compassion when no violence is present in the heart. NVC begins by assuming that we are all compassionate by nature and that violent strategies — whether verbal or physical — are learned behaviors taught and supported by the prevailing culture.
NVC also assumes that we all share the same, basic human needs, and that all actions are a strategy to meet one or more of these needs. People who practice NVC have found greater authenticity in their communication, Increased understanding, deepening connection and conflict resolution."
Developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D., NVC liberates you from ancient patterns of power struggle, defensiveness, and suffering, which is why it has been adopted by Fortune 500 companies, governments, school systems, inmate rehabilitation programs, and social change advocates.
We have been educated from birth to compete, judge, demand, and diagnose — to think and communicate in terms of what is "right" and "wrong" with other people.
" Postpone result/solution thinking until later; it's through connection that solutions materialize - empathy before education."
~Marshall B Rosenberg
Article
10 Steps to Peace
By Gary Baran
10 Things We Can Do to Contribute to Internal, Interpersonal, and Organizational Peace
Spend some time each day quietly reflecting on how we would like to relate to ourselves and others.
Remember that all human beings have the same needs.
Check our intention to see if we are as interested in others getting their needs met as our own.
When asking someone to do something, check first to see if we are making a request or a demand.
Instead of saying what we DON'T want someone to do, say what we DO want the person to do.
Instead of saying what we want someone to BE, say what action we'd like the person to take that we hope will help the person be that way.
Before agreeing or disagreeing with anyone's opinions, try to tune in to what the person is feeling and needing.
Instead of saying "No," say what need of ours prevents us from saying "Yes."
If we are feeling upset, think about what need of ours is not being met, and what we could do to meet it, instead of thinking about what's wrong with others or ourselves.
Instead of praising someone who did something we like, express our gratitude by telling the person what need of ours that action met.
The Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) would like there to be a critical mass of people using Nonviolent Communication language so all people will get their needs met and resolve their conflicts peacefully.
2001, revised 2004 Gary Baran & CNVC. The right to freely duplicate this document is hereby granted.
Article
So many of our friends, family, colleagues and other loved ones suffer from memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer. I found this article to be very helpful for my own family.
You can’t control memory loss – only your reaction to it.
For people with dementia, their disability is memory loss. Asking them to remember is like asking a blind person to read. (Common questions like “Did you take your pills?” or “What did you do today?” are the equivalent of asking them to remember something.) A loss of this magnitude reduces the capacity to reason. Expecting them to be reasonable or to accept your conclusion is unrealistic. Don’t correct, contradict, blame or
insist. Reminders are rarely kind. They tell a person how disabled they are – over and over again.
People living with dementia say and do normal things for someone with memory impairment. If they were deliberately trying to exasperate you, they would have a different diagnosis. Forgive them…always. For example, your wife isn’t purposely hiding your favorite pair of shoes. She thinks she’s protecting them by putting them in a safe place…and then forgets.
The Nonviolent Communication (NVC) movement and American Buddhism grew up on the same block. In the 1960s, as Buddhist thought began to take root in the wider culture, Marshall Rosenberg left his psychology practice behind to create NVC, finding fertile ground in the peacemaking initiatives of the era. Rosenberg’s approach to communication is based on the view that all human beings share the same fundamental needs, and that our
actions are attempts to meet those needs. Conflict occurs at the level of our strategies (our ideas about how to meet our needs).
In a 2002 article for Tricycle, longtime Buddhist practitioner and contributing editor Katy Butler described her experience training at the Center for Nonviolent Communication, remarking how NVC’s “emphasis on peacemaking, mindfulness, and nonjudgmental awareness complements Buddhist practice,” and noting that a number of American Buddhists had already discovered the overlapping values.
Now, a new book has brought the two practices together. Buddhist teacher and NVC trainer Oren Jay Sofer’s Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication serves as a field guide for communicating skillfully and ethically by integrating mindfulness and NVC practices into our personal lives. The book is packed with advice and exercises to help readers break old habits of thought and speech and
communicate more clearly and authentically.
Tricycle discussed the debut book with Sofer and Sharon Salzberg, one of the co-founders of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS). Salzberg and Sofer explained how the work extends IMS’s project of making the dharma accessible in the West, the ways that NVC aligns with Buddhist teachings on right speech, and what we can do to bring the lessons of mindfulness into our relationships.
The book is titled Say What You Mean. Is that the heart of the matter—that people talk about something else because they’re either afraid or unaware of the thing that they actually want to say?
Oren Jay Sofer (OJS): A lot of the times, it’s not so much that we don’t say what we mean but that we don’t know what we mean. Often we’re not fully aware of what we want to communicate or why. In order to know what we mean, we have to slow down, listen, and look.
Meaningful conversation depends on our ability to be present, which is why contemplative practice and mindfulness are such essential assets for communication. We tend to think of communication as an external skill, but it depends on the level of clarity we have about our own experience and our ability to bring positive qualities like kindness, patience, courage, and balance to what’s happening inside. So if we want to have
better relationships with other people, we need to have a relationship with ourselves. We can ask ourselves, “How do I really feel? Why is this important to me? What do I want this person to know, or what would I like from them?” And then inquire, “Am I being clear?” Thesse are some of the foundations for satisfying relationships.
Oren was trained, in part, at IMS. Sharon, do you see this work as an expansion of your work?
" How I choose to look at any situation will greatly affect whether I have the
power to change it or make matters worse."
~Marshall B. Rosenberg
Article
Understanding and Healing From Bullying, Giving and Receiving
by Sarah Peyton
I have been sitting here for 20 minutes, too ashamed of my own memories to even begin to write. It’s easy enough to write about having been bullied. In first grade, every day while waiting for the bus after school, a sixth grade girl would gather her friends around me in a circle so that the playground attendant couldn’t see what was happening, and she would punch me once, viciously, in the solar plexus. Then they would all dissipate and I would be left in
pain, already dreading the next day. And I would try not to cause any trouble about it all, and be nice to that girl, because she was really big and really scary, and maybe I was lucky that it was just one punch, and contained to just that moment in time, when I had another hour’s bus ride both mornings and evenings with her.
But it is much harder to remember, and to write about, the way my little brother took the emotional brunt of me trying to make sense of being targeted, how I turned from being a reliable source of warmth and care for him to being mean gratuitously, in order to “toughen him up,” because I couldn’t stand seeing his innocence as the vulnerability in myself that I blamed as the cause for my being targeted. I wanted to somehow save him from the incomprehensible
horror that I was experiencing. I was six. He was three. We were both so tiny. It makes me weep hot, angry tears of mourning and impotent anger to even ask myself to write about this. And because my shame has been so great, and has prevented me from clear understanding, it was not until working on these paragraphs that I see that my bullying of my little brother has a clear link in time to me being bullied myself. In this moment, it seems like something I have always known, but that I lost the
causal link in my self-blame.
I can write about the horrifying time when all the girls but two in my fifth grade class told me that they weren’t going to talk to me any more, and about how I lived out the rest of that year in social isolation. Thank god it was spring, and there weren’t that many months of school left. I was the target of bullying and it’s okay for me to talk about that. But I don’t mention that one of the two who didn’t bully me was a full-time social outcast who I only
spoke to once during my entire grade school career. How did she even survive among us? Where were the adults? Why didn’t someone save her? Why didn’t someone save us?
And I almost never speak about the next year, when I and two girlfriends made a frenzied attack on a boy we all had a crush on and physically beat and harmed him, punching him, pulling his hair, terrifyingly turning into pitiless harpies, and leaving our regular personalities behind. These are the memories that leave me unable to say “I would never do that,” about crowd behavior, looting, rioting, or bullying. I don’t have any moral high ground to stand on.
But, at the same time, I need to take a stand against us as humans targeting other humans. And I need to take a stand for support for every one of us as we try to heal and transform our world. There are neurophysiological effects of peer bullying in childhood. I have mentioned before that we can now actually find the aftereffects of abuse in the structures of our brains, and peer bullying, like parental verbal abuse, reduces volume in the areas that help us
interpret our social world, process our emotional responses, perceive meaning in language and self-express. Only peer bullying happens twice as much as parental verbal abuse, so it is more common and its aftereffects receive even less attention and validation than familial trauma.
We live in a world where we are starting to be able to track and isolate the aftereffects of our actions, and to begin to acknowledge the complexity of our social interactions. I believe bewilderment is still the most common response that we have to how to begin to take a stand, to take action, to do the education, interventions and support that need to happen to transform our world. And bewilderment is most often an aftereffect of trauma – our systems shut
down in shock and horror and overwhelm. As we resolve our bewilderment, our lens becomes wider. We stop targeting individuals as worthy of blame, and paradoxically become capable of supporting them in change. The terrifying 11 year-old girl who punched me lived in a home with a terrifying father who beat his children. I harmed my brother to try to keep him from harm. The 5th grade girl who led the charge to exclude me lived in a family where the children were being sexually abused. I targeted a
boy that I liked because I did not know how to like someone. We all needed support. Our families needed support. Both bullies and targets need to be held differently.
Our bullying of individuals lives on in larger human patterns of racism, ageism, sexism, and other –isms, moving through us into manifestations of hate crimes and genocide. It is always our unsupported left hemispheres, acting from its belief that people are just objects and don’t actually matter. We still have very little idea how to begin to transform systems, but in order to move forward, we each need to resolve our own bewilderment, and do our own
healing, so that our brains are sharp and present and willing to take action to connect and to begin to shift and mitigate the harm that trauma does in our world. We need a combination of zero tolerance of bullying, from childhood through adulthood, and support for both sides of the conflict. We need to act personally, and be open to taking action to effect systemic change. And to do this, we need to be able to recognize the patterns of abuse and bullying.
On the journey of peaceful parenting, how we communicate and what we communicate with our children is important. But in the middle of our many crazy parenting situations, how can we keep our knee-jerk emotions from running away with our interactions? It can be a real challenge as a parent.
I have found Nonviolent Communication, or NVC, to be incredibly insightful and one of many great tools for communication for parents. The author of NVC is Marshall Rosenberg, who originally did research with Carl Rogers. The foreword to his book, Nonviolent Communication, is by Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who calls NVC a natural extension of his grandfather’s philosophy of nonviolence.
The basic idea is that when we feel frustration, anger, sadness or other similar feelings, that they are the result of unmet needs. A common example for parents is when we don’t get enough sleep. During the day, we have a “short fuse” and the everyday challenges of life seem significantly more difficult. The solution is not to blame or shame our children, rather we need to get more sleep. Rest and sleep were unmet needs.
Unmet needs can also be emotional or what in NVC is called “trans-personal.” When your child seemingly ignores every word you say, you feel anger bubbling up. Your child isn’t trying to make you angry. They are fulfilling their own needs like humor, play or exploration. It is simply that your needs and their needs don’t align for that moment. This is natural and happens all the time. So, how can we communicate in ways that
connect with the heart and lift each other up?
Host Timothy Regan welcomes Nonviolent Communication leader and teacher Miki Kashtan, who presents her clear and liberating guidance on how to deal with the reality that we have more than someone else. It’s hard to face the truth of our privileges and unearned advantages, and when we do face them, there are at least 4 negative traps that we humans fall into.
Miki describes these 4 traps, and provides positive responses for each of them, and she offers processes that can free our thinking and our creativity so we can participate in a world beset with painful divisions in life-giving ways. Listen...
"It is our enemies who provide us with the challenge we need to develop the
qualities of tolerance, patience and compassion."
~Dalai Lama
Podcast
Seeing Humanity in Every Protest Sign: A Practice Session
Host Timothy Regan practices what he preaches as he works live on the air to apply the language and understanding of Nonviolent Communication to the many signs that people carried during the January 2019 Women’s March across the nation.
These signs are passionate, funny, offensive, poignant, and certainly filled with the care and life of those who made them. They are raw expressions of humanity, and each has a rich and beautiful story behind it. Every person at these marches showed up because of a call within them to express themselves at this important time in history. Wouldn’t the makers of each sign appreciate someone trying to grasp the meaning of their
sign?
This episode includes a description of the 6 elements of human honesty according to Nonviolent Communication. Timothy then practices with these powerful elements to appreciate and deepen his understanding of the human experience behind every sign.
A violent act is defined as an action that is intended to do harm to another person or group of people. Bullying, name calling, defensiveness, sarcasm, and even ignoring are all forms of communication that are intended to hurt or blame others. Much of the way we talk to and about each other is violent communication. Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a method of communication developed to foster empathy and connection in high conflict situations. NVC focuses
on the integration of 4 areas: consciousness, language, communication and means of influence.
David Roland tells the story of how he met Karren and the hope they both shared. He sings the song he wrote for her when she
faced great uncertainty. Told with humor and searing honesty this is a moving account of the intersection of two lives.
Nonviolent Communication 3rd Edition on Sale for $4.95 (regular price $19.95).
We are offering this book heavily discounted with the hope that you may buy one or more to gift to someone you care about and/or people who might share it with others.
Please help us share NVC for about the cost of a cup of coffee.
In the upcoming monthly book specials, we will be featuring our five new 2019 books.
Words That Work in Business 2nd edition – now available
The Healing Power of Empathy-coming soon
Collaboration in the Workplace-coming soon
Dementia Together-Fall 2019
NVC3 Spanish – Fall 2019
What is Violent Communication?
If "violent" means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate—judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without
listening, criticizing others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry, using political rhetoric, being defensive or judging who's "good/bad" or what's "right/wrong" with people—could indeed be called "violent communication."
What is Nonviolent Communication?
Nonviolent Communication is the integration of four things:
• Consciousness: a set of principles that support living a life of compassion, collaboration, courage, and authenticity
• Language: understanding how words contribute to connection or distance
• Communication: knowing how to ask for what we want, how to hear others even in disagreement, and how to move toward solutions that work for all
• Means of influence: sharing "power with others" rather than using "power over others"
Nonviolent Communication serves our desire to do three things:
• Increase our ability to live with choice, meaning, and connection
• Connect empathically with self and others to have more satisfying relationships
• Sharing of resources so everyone is able to benefit.
94% of over 1,000 Amazon NVC3 reviews are 4 or 5 stars (mostly 5)
We hope you find value in our monthly newsletters. We would love to receive ANY feedback or suggestions you may want to share. Please let others know about our newsletter to help spread NVC, if you are willing :)
