Living in 2021 with all of its illness, despair, and violence makes us long for a way of communicating with one another that could produce better outcomes for all of us.
We want a way to communicate that could allow all of us to have our needs be understood and met while meeting other people's needs as well.
I'm going to talk about a technique for communicating called nonviolent communication.
It was developed by an author named Marshall Rosenberg back in the late sixties, early seventies.
It helps us communicate in a way that expresses our feelings, expresses our needs, and respects the needs and feelings of other people.
Marshall Rosenberg wrote an entire book about nonviolent communication called Nonviolent Communication: The Language of Life. It's a great book with many interesting ideas, and I encourage you all to read it yourselves. Today, I'm going to talk about three of the main ideas for Marshall Rosenberg's book.
Nonviolent communication is a system for communicating that allows us to express our own observations, feelings, needs, and then make requests of other people to help us meet our needs and explain how, if they agree to those requests, that the consequences will help us meet our needs. I want to talk about the first three of those steps: making observations, relating those observations to our feelings, and then relating those feelings to our needs. In a subsequent entry, I'll talk about how we take those needs and turn them into requests.
Making Observations, Not Evaluations
The first main idea or technique in nonviolent communication is to make observations about other people or about situations or about the world, instead of evaluations. The idea is to separate observation from evaluation. Marshall Rosenberg, author of this book about nonviolent communication, thinks the root of many problems in our relationships and in society and in communication is that we leap to moralistic judgements instead of making observations and then talk about our feelings and our needs. He says the first key is when there's something in a situation that arouses an emotion in us or a need, that we make an observation about that situation, not a moralistic judgment.
Rosenberg gives seven different examples of the kinds of evaluations or moralistic judgments that we make instead of making simple observations. I want to go through some of these examples.
1. Evaluative Verbs. These are verbs that imply evaluation or moral judgment. Something like, "Doug always procrastinates." The idea of procrastination is a moral judgment about Doug. You could simply make an observation. "Doug doesn't normally study until the night before the exam." That's a strict observation that doesn't make a moral judgment about Doug's behavior.
2. Leaping to Conclusions. This is assuming our inferences are immediately correct. The example he gives here is something like, "Mary won't get her work in on time." This sort of draws a conclusion about Mary before the fact. You might say something like, "I don't think Mary is going to get her work in on time," or "I'm afraid Mary won't get her work in on time," or "Mary said she won't get her work in on time."
3. Prediction vs. Certainty. The example he gives is, “If you don't eat a balanced meal, your health will suffer.” That's a kind of prediction that you are acting like you know is true, instead of saying like, "If you don't eat a balanced meal, I'm concerned that your health will suffer."
4. Overgeneralization. Again, this is similar to leaping to conclusions, something like, "College students don't take care of their property," instead of saying something like, "The college students who live down the street, I haven't seen them shovel the driveway or rake the leaves all year long." It's just an observation instead of an overgeneralization about what all college students do.
5. Ability vs. Performance. The example he gives to the book is, "Hank is a terrible soccer player," when you might say something instead like, "Hank hasn't scored a goal all season."
6. Judgmental Adjectives. Something like, "Jim is ugly," instead of saying, "Ah, Jim's looks don't appeal to me." They might seem similar, but they're just slightly different and probably have different consequences.
7. Always and Never. This is an example that most of us will recognize, like, "You always," "You never." It's almost never the case that someone “never” does something or “always” does something. We're always exaggerating and making some sort of moral judgment about the person when we use those terms, and there are alternatives. Again, this involves sort of substituting a generalization with the specific. Saying, "You always cancel," you could say, "The last three times we made plans, you canceled." Or, "She's never there when I need her." You could say, "There've been several times recently when I needed her help and she was unavailable."
Now, you might think that these are subtle distinctions in language, and they are somewhat subtle, but I think you can also see that the evaluative language is going to put people on the defensive. When you make a moralistic judgment about a person, they're going to feel morally judged and that's going to put them on the defensive. It's going to be hard to move away from that.
Once someone gets defensive, the possibilities for having a constructive dialogue that allows both people to get their needs met shrink once someone goes on the defensive. Avoiding this evaluative morally judgmental language helps us to avoid putting people on the defensive and increases our chances of being successful.
“Always” and “never,” “frequently” and “seldom,” these words tend to put people on the defensive instead of letting people feel compassion. Separating observation from evaluation is the first principle in what Marshall Rosenberg calls the language of life.
Naming Our Feelings
The second technique for nonviolent communication sounds simple, but most of us aren't very good at it at all. Now, I could make another post about why we're so bad at expressing our feelings and why culturally, especially white men, are so bad at expressing our feelings. In fact, I've made a whole other post about how to be more emotionally available and how to express your feelings more effectively.
But here I don't want to talk too much about the societal causes of why we're so bad at talking about our feelings. I want to give some advice about how to get better at talking about our feelings and I want to describe what we do instead of talking about our feelings.
1. Deflecting. Rosenberg says we often talk about our thoughts, our opinions, or other people, instead of talking about our feelings. In fact, Rosenberg says there are certain phrases we use which are almost always an indicator that we're not talking about our feelings. These are phrases like, "I feel I ...", "I feel that," "I feel," and then insert someone's name ("I feel Bruce”), "I feel like," "I feel as if," "I feel it," or "I feel you."
If you start a sentence like this, you're probably not talking about your feelings. You're talking about your opinion, your thoughts, your judgements, another person or what behavior you'd like another person to start or stop doing.
2. Interpretations Instead of Feelings. Rosenberg also talks about how we often confuse evaluations about ourselves for talking about our feelings. An example he gives is, "I feel inadequate as a guitar player," instead of saying something like, "I feel frustrated that I haven't made more progress. I feel sad when I think about how much time I've spent trying to play guitar and yet I haven't improved. I feel disappointed in myself for not improving faster." These are feelings, instead of, "I feel inadequate," which is really a judgment about yourself.
Rosenberg gives a long list of words that we use as if they were feeling words, which really aren't. These include, "I feel unimportant. I feel misunderstood. I feel ignored." These are almost all about how other people are treating us. Like, "I feel like you think I'm important. I feel like you are not paying attention to me. I feel like you misunderstand me." These are not really feeling words. He calls these interpretations.
Here's a bunch of other interpretation words he says are not feeling words and if we're tempted to use them, we should search more deeply for real feelings
NOT Feeling Words: Abandoned, abused, attacked, betrayed, cheated, coerced, interrupted, manipulated, neglected, overworked, unwanted, appreciated, unappreciated, rejected, put down.
You could see that almost all of these are descriptions of how we think other people are treating us that might make us have feelings like sadness, despair, anger, something like that. But they themselves are not really feeling words. There are lots of lists of feeling words on the internet and I'll link to one here. One problem for people who struggle to talk about their feelings, especially for many men, is they actually lack a vocabulary for talking about their own feelings.
Core Feelings: Sadness, anger, fear, joy, happiness, awe, surprise.
These are the kinds of essential feelings, and then slight elaborations on all of those feelings. You want to try to get to those feelings rather than descriptions of how other people are treating you.
Rosenberg says that we should not say that other people are responsible for our feelings, nor should we take responsibility for other people's feelings. He says we're responsible for our own behavior. We're responsible for our own intentions. But feelings and emotions, arise out of people's appraisal of a situation or their interpretation of a situation. Since we don't control other people's appraisals or other people's interpretations, we can't be the direct cause of their feelings so we shouldn't take responsibility for them, nor should we put responsibility on other people for how we feel.
He says one technique for getting around blaming other people for how we feel is to follow every expression of feeling with the phrase, "Because I." You might say, "I feel sad because I," "I feel angry because I," "I feel excited because I." The "because I" is your replacement for statements which might blame the other person for making you feel a particular way. But saying, "Because I" puts the responsibility back on us and then this "Because I" statement will relate to our unmet or met needs, which are actually producing these emotions.
Rosenberg says we have to get beyond these evaluations and moral judgments to the root of our feelings, which he thinks are needs, either needs, which are being met or needs which are unmet. He thinks moral judgments are alienated expressions of our needs. Instead of saying exactly what we need, we just call people names and tell them that they're bad people. Instead of telling them, "I need more time with you. I need more intimacy. I need more honesty. I need more connection," or something like that, we tell them that they're bad people. He's trying to get us away from making these moral judgments and back to stating our own needs, that if they were met would produce more positive emotions.
Identifying Our Needs
Another principle in nonviolent communication is to distinguish between our needs and strategies for getting those needs met. It's actually okay to think about strategies for getting our needs met, but that comes next. That's the next step. That's about making requests. We can talk about specific behaviors that other people can do that would help us get our needs met. But for the time being, you just want to talk about your needs. Don’t confuse them with the behaviors you need other people to do.
You say, "Well, I might need companionship or empathy or love or respect." But instead of saying that, we might say, "I need you to speak to me in a different way." This is really our need for respect, but getting people to speak to us in a different way is the way of getting that need met. We have to distinguish between our needs and the strategies for getting them met.
Just like with emotions, we often don't have a very good vocabulary or language for talking about our own needs. We're sort of alienated from our own needs. We may have been taught at an early age that we should ignore our own needs or that our needs weren't important or relevant and that other people shouldn't have to meet them. Therefore, we're alienated from our own needs. We can't even express them. The same way many of us are alienated and cut off from our own feelings, we don't have a vocabulary for talking about them.
Again, Marshall Rosenberg is very helpful in listing what he thinks are core needs of most human beings. Of course, this isn't a perfect list or a totally complete list or the master list of all human needs. You can elaborate on that, but this is a pretty good list.
Common Needs: Sustenance, protection, safety, empathy, understanding, honesty, clarity, celebration, play, rest, creativity, love, belonging, community, autonomy, independence, meaning, purpose.
This is a pretty good list of some of our core needs and we can imagine how the failure to meet these coordinates will bring about in us strong emotions. A lot of the essence of nonviolent communication is thinking both for ourselves and other people, our emotions and their connections to unmet needs, and then developing language where we can ask people to engage in behaviors which help us meet our needs.
Rosenberg says there are three stages in our emotional development or in our emotional maturation as it relates to our ability to express our needs.
Stage 1: Emotional Slavery. Here, we feel like we're responsible for other people's needs. Some of us never get out of that. We just get into codependent situations where we feel like we have to take care of other people's needs to the exclusion of our own needs.
Stage 2: The Obnoxious Stage. This is where we decide we're not going to attend or care about other people's needs. We're not going to meet other people's needs. Getting our own needs met is paramount.
Stage 3: Emotional Liberation. Finally, many of us might be lucky to reach this stage where we recognize, yes, it's valid to meet our own needs, but we can only do so in a way that respects and attempts to simultaneously meet the needs of other people, or at the very least respects the fact that other people have needs that are equally valid to our own. In this state of emotional liberation, we know that it's valid to get our own needs met and we can express our own needs. We know that other people's needs are valid and we'd like to meet them if we can.
But in this state of emotional liberation, we don't meet other people's needs because of fear or guilt or shame. We meet other people's needs out of love and respect and compassion, and we don't ignore our own needs. May you all achieve emotional liberation. May I achieve emotional liberation. Oh, boy, wouldn't that be nice?
Expressing Our Needs
The next step here is to connect our expression of emotion to our needs. People know why we're feeling the way we're feeling. Remember, we're not going to blame these feelings on other people. We're going to say something about our emotion, and then we're going to go say something about our unmet need, or if it's a positive emotion, about the need that is being met.
Let's say you have a friend or a spouse or a partner, and they come home an hour late when you had dinner plans at a particular time. You can just say, "You're solely responsible. You're a terrible person for coming home late." These are evaluative judgments, not observation, so we don't want to do that.
We could say something like, "You're an hour late. It makes me sad when you come home late for dinner." That's an expression of an emotion with just an observation rather than a moral judgment. But then we can add the need. "I feel sad when you come home late for dinner, because I really had a strong need for companionship and connection tonight." That's an expression of our emotion with an observation and a statement of our need. The fact that that need was unmet explains why we had the emotion that we did.
The beauty of this is that it teaches us to accept responsibility for our own emotions by attributing our emotions to our own need, instead of attributing our emotions to other people's actions. Instead of saying, "I feel sad because you came home late. Now I'm depressed and it's your fault," you could say, "I feel sad when you come home late because I had a real need for companionship and connection tonight." It's clear that their coming home late failed to meet your need for compassion and connection, but you don't make this world judgment. You just say what you felt and what you needed and how that need was not met.
An important observation here is to differentiate your needs from the behaviors that might get your needs met. That's the next step, which I'm not going to talk here. But obviously when we talk about our feelings and then we talk about our unmet needs, the next logical thing is to make a request for a specific behavior that the other person could do that would meet your needs in a more satisfactory way. After that, maybe we can relieve the negative emotion or produce a positive emotion. In another post, I'll talk about how we use nonviolent communication to make requests, and then to talk about the consequences of those behaviors if the request work were granted.
Summary
Those are three core principles of Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication. Boy, in this day and age we could use something that promotes nonviolence and understanding and positive feeling and connection and friendship and love and understanding. I think nonviolent communication has the potential to do that.
The three main principles:
Separate observation from evaluation
Talk about our feelings, not our thoughts or our opinions or our judgments
Connect those feelings to our needs
There you have it. A few important ideas from Marshall Rosenberg's system for non-violent communication. I hope you click on those links throughout the blog and read more about it yourself. It's really interesting and worth your time.