Living Nonviolent Communication: Practical Tools to Connect and Communicate Skillfully in Every Situation by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD

A church community I care about has been going through a lot of conflict lately. I noticed in their church newsletter that a group of congregants were looking into nonviolent communication training as a way to help the community get better at speaking and listening to each other healthily and productively. I had heard the term, “nonviolent communication” before. Some members of my previous church had spoken about it as a possible help for some issues we were going through, but we hadn’t followed through with any programs in that case, and I knew nothing more about it.

Rosenberg studied as a clinical psychologist receiving his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. During the civil rights era he developed the principles of nonviolent communication working with demonstrating college students and administrators and resolving conflicts around school desegregation. The techniques he developed led him to an extraordinary life’s work including peace negotiations in some of the most conflicted situation worldwide: in Africa, the mid-East, and Ireland, among others. He founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984 as a means of furthering his work through teaching and through certifying trainers in the method. He died in 2015.

The method is simple, although it requires communication strategies and skills that don’t come naturally in our adversarial culture. The idea is simply that every person, following Maslow, has clear and common needs. That people find satisfaction in helping other people achieve their needs, when we can do so without abandoning our own autonomy. That if we are able to clearly articulate our needs and if we can discern the underlying needs of the other person, we will be able to find a mutually agreeable resolution to our conflict.

Communication is the key: speaking clearly and listening closely without blaming or criticizing. Rosenberg breaks this down into four steps. We begin by observing. This is a neutral, objective, understanding of what is actually going on, in the environment and within our own bodies. He asks us to focus on the present. He says, “What I’ve found over the years is the more we talk about the past, the less we heal from it.” Instead he uses the framing question, “what is alive in you right now?” Even if what is alive now is a feeling left over from a previous incident, what’s important is to focus on the present feeling not re-telling the story from the past. Rosenberg writes, “Most people think you have to understand the past to get healing and that you have to tell the story to get the understanding. They mix up intellectual understanding with empathy” (p. 67).

Next is identifying our feelings, and naming them. This step follows observation because Rosenberg believes that how we feel is not be caused by what other people do, but rather, “that how we feel is a result of how we interpret the behavior of others” (p. 110). As one person names their feeling the other person listens empathetically. Empathy differs from sympathy. Sympathy is when we feel in ourselves what the other person is feeling, or their feeling evokes a similar feeling in ourselves. Sympathy is self-directed. Empathy stays with the other person. “With empathy, we’re with the other person’s feelings. That doesn’t mean we feel their feeling. We’re just with them while they are feeling those feelings” (p.69)

Third is to connect the feeling to an unmet need. Rosenberg looks at the derivation of the word emotion and concludes, “The natural function of emotions is to stimulate us to get our needs me” (p. 104).

And then, once we have clearly identified what we need we can make a request of the other person of what they might be willing to do to help us meet our need. Rosenberg gives several examples of where people screw up this last step by asking for what they don’t want rather than what they do want. For instance the wife who asks her husband to stop spending so much time at work and then the husband obligingly leaves work early to go bowling with friends when what the wife really wanted was for him to spend more time at home with the kids.

Rosenberg is clear in that last step that people do not respond well to demands. He says in his chapter on raising children, but it applies to other situations also, that our guiding question should not merely be, “What do we want the child to do differently?” but should also be, “What do want the child’s reasons to be for acting as we would like them to act?” (pp. 128-129).

I like that Rosenberg begins his work by creating connections. This seems important in working on resolving conflict within a community like a congregation. He writes, “I begin by guiding the participants to find a caring and respectful quality of connection among themselves. Only after this connection is present do I engage them in a search for strategies to resolve the conflict” (p. 2).

In a chapter on the special case of the emotion of anger he summarizes the principles of nonviolent communication as thus, “A discussion of anger easily supports a better understanding of NVC, because it touches on so many key NVC distinctions. Living from your heart, making judgment-free observations, getting clear about your feelings and needs, making clear requests, and supporting life-enriching connections …” (p. 95).

This particular book (Rosenberg has several) focuses on practical situations between individuals: raising children, husbands and wives, adult children and parents. I’d love to have a book showing how non-violent communication can be applied when the conflict is between groups of people. The book is filled with transcripts of role-plays taken from his workshops, usually with Rosenberg playing the part of one person in the conflict. It’s impressive to see him use the techniques and the success he is able to achieve. It’s almost magic. But it’s also clear that though the techniques are easy to learn, putting them to use in our own lives or as mediators for others, takes unusual consciousness and skill and practice. For that, I appreciated one more pice of Rosenberg’s wisdom:

“In the middle of the rat race, it’s very important for me to know how to choose to make use of the three words I probably have said to myself more than any three words in the past forty years: take your time. Those three words give you the power to come from a spirituality of your own choosing, not the one you were programmed for” (p. 79).

Amen.