Communicating with Care
In a world filled with conflict, we can often feel justified creating conflict in our own lives. With all the stressors of life and thousands of voices telling us do this or that, some of that chaos is bound to come out on those around us. We internalize all the conflict portrayed on the media and we encounter triggers for our sensitivities each day. Each of us has our own set of experiences as well as our family legacy of pain; whether that be systemic racial oppression, abuse or just emotional coldness. How do we navigate this sea of turmoil with grace? Many of us choose avoidance of conflict as a strategy to deal with all this challenge; however, as many of us know, that which we repress comes back with a vengeance. I want to offer an alternative to aggression and repression.
What is Non-Violent Communication?
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a style of assertive communication that focuses on non-blaming language and empathy. NVC teaches communicators to address conflict in a way that honors both parties’ experience by focusing on facts, feelings and needs. NVC offers an opportunity to solve conflict from a win-win perspective by focusing on connection and compassion. The basic structure of NVC is in four parts:
Observation- The facts about what happened to lead to the conflict.
Feelings- What feelings arose because of the event?
Needs- What underlying needs need to be met or were unmet in the conflict.
Request- A specific request for how to get the underlying needs met in the future.
Let’s use an example to illustrate the steps. Let’s say that you have a friend who continues to call you whenever they are feeling overwhelmed. However, let’s say that friend is extremely overwhelmed three times a week and calling you for help. You are starting to feel drained and exhausted by this, but you still want to be a supportive friend. Let’s practice, “Gina, when you call me three times a week feeling overwhelmed with your job or responsibilities, I feel exhausted and depleted. I need to be able to take care of my own emotional state and when I am depleted that is hard. I still want to be supportive of you because I really care about you, but could you limit calls with intense emotional content to once a week? I think it would really help our relationship be healthier if you could do that.” I added a few extra pieces here such as validation, but for the most part this retains the format of observation, feelings, needs and request.
Listening and Expressing
There are two parts to NVC- communicating our feelings honestly and listening empathically. The example I used above is that of someone communicating their feelings honestly, without blame and with vulnerability. When we honestly express our feelings, we are expressing our own internal experience. When we move away from blaming others for our feelings, we can begin to understand and express them on a deeper level. The whole idea is owning our feelings and needs rather than making someone else responsible for the way we feel. This can be empowering! I do feel I need to point out that this concept does not apply when there is any kind of abuse; in those situations, there is a victim and a perpetrator. When listening empathically, the idea is to hear what someone is saying by listening for their feelings and needs compassionately. While listening empathically, we try not to react to the emotions the other person is having but rather see their underlying needs.
The Universal Language of Needs
What I have found to be the most powerful part of NVC is that of uncovering our deepest needs. Needs are not just basic needs like food and shelter, they are human needs like support and understanding. The basis for NVC is that we all have these core needs which connect us, such as the need to be seen. When someone communicates from a place of their deeper needs, rather than blame or the topical emotion, we begin to empathize with whatever they are telling us. I will provide an example to illustrate this idea of invoking empathy from utilizing the language of needs. Imagine that you are my roommate and you leave your things in the common space and that is really starting to bother me, so I decide to speak to you about it. Here are two versions, “I am really getting frustrated with you leaving your things out. You need to put your stuff in your room” and “I noticed you leave your things in the living room. I get frustrated when there is clutter because I really need peacefulness and order in my home.” Then you could follow up with a request like, “Would you mind keeping the common spaces clean?” How do these two statements impact you differently? One of them likely makes you defensive, while the second one invokes more understanding of what I am needing and experiencing around our home.
When we ask ourselves, “what do I need?” we begin to get to the bottom of how we can shift our negative emotions to more positive ones. Underlying every positive emotion are met needs and underlying every negative emotion are unmet needs. Under happiness could be the met needs of connection, meaning and peacefulness. Under the emotion of anger could be the unmet needs of equality and reciprocity.
Ownership Replaces Blame
The deeper we begin to understand NVC, the more that we move away from blaming others and towards understanding our own emotions. By understanding the need that is underneath an emotion, we are more able to be advocate for our needs to be met. NVC helps us meet our needs without blame. By simply asking for what we need and understanding how that will influence our emotional state, we have more agency to get our needs met in ways we may have been blocked before. Blame almost always repels the person we are address, which then often repels them from meeting our need. When we communicate our needs from a place of ownership of our own emotional experience, people often respect this communication. From this place of ownership, you are less likely to trigger the listener into a defensive stance when you communicate your negative feelings.
By utilizing NVC, you can begin to understand and resolve issues both interpersonally and intrapersonally (within yourself). Try communicating in this way once and just see what the result is; you may be pleasantly surprising.
