Nonviolent Communication


Nonviolent Communication is a communication process developed by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s and 1970s based on the principles of nonviolence and humanistic psychology. It aims to increase empathic understanding and reduce conflict in everyday interactions. It foregrounds four components—observation, feelings, fundamental needs, and requests—and encourages expressing observations and needs without judgment in order to foster voluntary cooperation. Nonviolent Communication evolved from concepts used in person-centered therapy.
Nonviolent Communication is both used as a clinical psychotherapy modality and also offered in workshops for the general public, particularly in regard to seeking harmony in relationships and at workplaces. It can also be applied in daily life to reduce stress. Sometimes, whole communities are founded upon its principles.
NVC has been applied in clinical, educational, organisational and community settings and has been the subject of small trials and scoping reviews that report improvements in self-reported empathy and interpersonal outcomes; however, the evidence base is heterogeneous and reviewers have called for larger, longer and more rigorous studies, and for attention to cultural adaptation and trauma-sensitive implementation.
The United Nations Academic Impact organisation has cited nonviolent communication as a means of achieving Article 1 of the UN Charter, i.e. of avoiding war and propagating peace. More specifically, UNAI believes the UN's Sustainable Development Goals can be achieved more easily by enhancing people's emotional intelligence and that NVC is a good method of doing this. It sees NVC as a tool "that guides practitioners in reframing how they express themselves, how to hear others and resolve conflicts by focusing on what they are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting. It is a tool that leads us toward compassionate connection between people in which everyone's needs are valued and are met through collaboration."
NVC is also part of the Inner Development Goals Toolkit. The IDGs are intended to complement the UN SDGs by bringing the power of inner development to global challenges faced by humanity; they are an invitation to people to be the change they want to see in the world.
PuddleDancer Press reports that NVC has been endorsed by a variety of public figures and best-selling authors, including Anthony Robbins, John Gray and Deepak Chopra.
There are a large number of workshops and clinical materials about NVC, including Rosenberg's book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life and a companion workbook. Marshall Rosenberg also taught NVC in a number of video lectures available online; the workshop recorded in San Francisco is the most well-known. The complete series of NVC trainings by Marshall Rosenberg, plus lectures, workshops and interviews with him, are available as a podcast on Spotify. Many workshops are also available on YouTube.

History

Origins

Marshall Rosenberg's motivation for developing NVC was based on his own experiences at the Detroit race riot of 1943, as well as the antisemitism that he experienced in his early life.
According to Marion Little, the roots of the NVC model developed in the late 1960s, when Rosenberg was working on racial integration in schools and organizations in the Southern United States. The earliest version of the model was part of a training manual Rosenberg prepared in 1972.

Influences

NVC's development was highly influenced by Carl Rogers' person-centered therapy, particularly the value of congruence, empathic listening, and realness. Rogers emphasized: 1) experiential learning, 2) "frankness about one's emotional state," 3) the satisfaction of hearing others "in a way that resonates for them," 4) the enriching and encouraging experience of "creative, active, sensitive, accurate, empathic listening," 5) the "deep value of congruence between one's own inner experience, one's conscious awareness, and one's communication," and, subsequently, 6) the enlivening experience of unconditionally receiving love or appreciation and extending the same. These influenced the concepts described in the section below.
Rosenberg was also influenced by Erich Fromm, George Albee, and George Miller to adopt a community focus in his work, moving away from clinical psychological practice. The central ideas influencing this shift by Rosenberg were that: individual mental health depends on the social structure of a community, therapists alone are unable to meet the psychological needs of a community, and knowledge about human behavior will increase if psychology is freely given to the community.

Early work with children: Giraffe and Jackal

Rosenberg's early work with children with learning disabilities shows his interest in psycholinguistics and the power of language, as well as his emphasis on collaboration. In its initial development, the NVC model re-structured the pupil-teacher relationship to give students greater responsibility for, and decision-making related to, their own learning. The model has evolved over the years to incorporate institutional power relationships and informal ones. The ultimate aim is to develop societal relationships based on a restorative, "partnership" paradigm and mutual respect, rather than a retributive, fear-based, "domination" paradigm.
In order to show the differences between communication styles, Rosenberg started to use two animals. Violent communication was represented by the carnivorous Jackal as a symbol of aggression and especially dominance. The herbivorous Giraffe on the other hand, represented his NVC strategy. The Giraffe was chosen as symbol for NVC as its long neck is supposed to show the clear-sighted speaker, being aware of his fellow speakers' reactions; and because the Giraffe has a large heart, representing the compassionate side of NVC. In his courses he tended to use these animals in order to make the differences in communication clearer to the audience.

Evolution of NVC model

The model had evolved to its present form by 1992. Since the late 2000s, there has been more emphasis on self-empathy as a key to the model's effectiveness. Another shift in emphasis, since 2000, has been the reference to the model as a process. The focus is thus less on the "steps" themselves and more on the practitioner's intentions in speaking in listening and the quality of connection experienced with others.

NVC and #MeToo

In 2019, a group of certified NVC trainers published a #MeToo statement encouraging all facilitators to share a warning with prospective clients and students about the potential risks of empathy work and recommended sexual boundaries.

Overview

Nonviolent Communication holds that most conflicts between individuals or groups arise from miscommunication about their human needs, due to coercive or manipulative language that aims to induce fear, guilt, shame, etc. These "violent" modes of communication, when used during a conflict, divert the attention of the participants away from clarifying their needs, their feelings, their perceptions, and their requests, thus perpetuating the conflict.

Alternative names

In a recorded lecture, Marshall Rosenberg describes the origins of the name Nonviolent Communication. He explains that the name was chosen to connect his work to the word "nonviolence" that was used by the peace movement, thus showing the ambition to create peace on the planet. Meanwhile, Marshall did not like that name since it described what NVC is not, rather than what NVC is. In fact, this goes against an important principle in the fourth component of NVC, i.e. requests. Specifically, in an NVC request, one should ask for what one does want, not what one doesn't want. Because of this, a number of alternative names have become common, most importantly giraffe language, compassionate communication or collaborative communication.

Components

There are four components to practice nonviolent communication, and in this order:
  1. Observation: These are facts as distinct from our evaluation of meaning and significance. NVC discourages static generalizations. It is said that "When we combine observation with evaluation, others are apt to hear criticism and resist what we are saying." Instead, a focus on observations specific to time and context is recommended.
  2. Feelings: These are emotions or sensations, free of thought and story. They are pure emotional states, explicitly excluding statements which attribute cause or blame. Feelings are to be distinguished from thoughts and from words colloquially used as feelings but which convey what we think we are, how we think others are evaluating us, or what we think others are doing to us. Feelings are said to reflect whether we are experiencing our needs as met or unmet. Identifying feelings is said to allow us to more easily connect with one another, and "Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable by expressing our feelings can help resolve conflicts."
  3. Needs: These are universal human needs, as distinct from particular strategies for meeting needs. It is posited that "Everything we do is in service of our needs." Marshall Rosenberg refers to Max-Neef's model where needs may be categorised into 9 classes: sustenance, safety, love, understanding/empathy, creativity, recreation, sense of belonging, autonomy and meaning. The Center for Nonviolent Communication provides an extensive inventory of universal human needs.
  4. Requests: Requests are distinguished from demands in that one is open to hearing a response of "no" without this triggering an attempt to force the matter. If one makes a request and receives a "no" it is not recommended that one gives up, but that one empathizes with what is preventing the other person from saying "yes," before deciding how to continue the conversation. It is recommended that requests use clear, positive, concrete action language.