Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg.
Puddle Dance Press, 2003. Paper, $17.95.

I attended one of Marshall Rosenberg’s workshops when he came to Eugene in May 2004. His vision of nonviolent communication inspired me; it seemed so hopeful and so possible. Rosenberg has undertaken dialogue and teaching of the NVC process in many places all over the world where violence and hatred have flared. I was very impressed by his book and want to learn more.

In an interview in The Sun Magazine (Feb 2003) Rosenberg described how he helped rapists and the women they had raped communicate with one another, a dialogue that traveled past rage and remorse, even beyond conventional concepts of apology and forgiveness. In the introduction to that interview, D. Killian says that Nonviolent Communication is “more than a technique for resolving conflict. It’s a different way of understanding human motivation and behavior.

Rosenberg says “NVC is founded on language and communication skills that strengthen our ability to remain human, even under trying conditions. It contains nothing new; all that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries. The intent is to remind us about what we already know—about how we humans were meant to relate to one another—and to assist us in living in a way that concretely manifests this knowledge.”

The first step in this transformation is the separation of observation from evaluation, especially in situations that provoke crisis and emotional confrontation. Observation means paying attention to the actual actions or events as opposed to making a judgment of these actions or events, and addressing only what concretely happens. This isn’t always easy. Rosenberg quotes Krishnamurti, who remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence.

Discerning how we feel in relation to what we are observing is the second step in the NVC process. As I was reading Nonviolent Communication the night before the workshop I found Rosenberg saying something very simple that I kept thinking about before I fell asleep. He says all feelings originate from needs. This idea struck me like a revelation—I had never clearly made the connection that feelings arise as the expression of needs. It seemed that feelings just happened and I was often uneasy about the unfathomable or uncontrollable quality of many feelings I had; I would try to argue myself out of them. To Rosenberg, feelings are based in needs for universal human necessities: autonomy, celebration, integrity, interdependence, physical nurturance, play, spiritual communion. When these needs are acknowledged and met, we are joyful, confident, energetic, inspired. When they aren’t, we become angry, confused, distressed, overwhelmed, and sad.

Teaching people to comprehend and respect how their feelings are based on what they need (in this context, in this moment) is the third step of Nonviolent Communication. Self-communication is as important as listening to someone else—it is even essential to being able to listen to someone else.

In the workshop I became interested in something else Rosenberg said. He was speaking about anger. In my environment lately, there have been a lot of anger and communication difficulties, so I wanted to understand how to work with anger. Rosenberg said anger was not a true feeling. Or perhaps he said it was not precisely a feeling. He said that anger was always based on a judgment—an evaluation. That every instance of anger contains a “should” or an “ought.” This is the root of all violence, he said. Violence starts in this judgment of how things are supposed to be, or what is right—of what is deserved. In speaking about communication that blocks compassion, he emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between value judgments and moralistic judgments. We all make value judgments based on our beliefs about what matters in life. We make moralistic judgments of people and behaviors that fail to support our value judgments, e.g. ‘Violence is bad. People who kill others are evil.’ 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. For example, instead of “Violence is bad,’ we might say instead, ‘I am fearful of the use of violence to resolve conflicts; I value the resolution of human conflicts through other means.” To think in terms of what we feel and need leads us toward life-affirming communication.

The last essential step in NVC focuses on requests. These are concrete actions that we’d like to request of others “in order to enrich our lives” as Rosenberg puts it. “When our needs are not being fulfilled, we follow the expression of what we are observing, feeling, and needing with a specific request: we ask for actions that might fulfill our needs.”

What makes Nonviolent Communication so powerful is empathy. Empathy in Rosenberg’s view is based on an active process of deep listening and acceptance. It’s based on responsibility for and recognition of one’s own feelings and needs and the capacity to express them without judgment. Rosenberg says eloquently on page 4 of Nonviolent Communication that he “developed NVC as a way to train my attention—to shine the light on consciousness—on places that have the potential to yield what I am seeking. What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.”

June 2004