First of all, John, I love your artwork!
By: Mick Guinn
Tags: Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication, Conversations, Empathy

First of all, John, I love your artwork! I shall investigate it more and see what you’ve done, but the illustrations in your essay are just delightful. Eleanor Roosevelt, no less! Boy, I wish I had your talent with a pencil. Bravo!

I confess I don’t have time to read the 97 comments that are already here (I’m a 50-something character perennially behind, in a fast-pacedMFA program…pant, pant…), so my apologies if this has already been said. BUT, with a slightly different emphasis, I was first introduced to these ideas through Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of NonViolent Communication (or “Compassionate” Communication, as he always wanted it to be called before that horse got out of the gate). Rosenberg was this freakish genius who had figured out the power of empathy to change people and the connections we might have with them through a somewhere formulaic approach. The concepts behind NVC have been used for MidEast peace talks, incarcerated people, as well as saving a few extended family conversations over a big dead bird.

There is much greater depth to it than this, but much of his decades of research led to this formula that he used to his dying day.

The basic outline of the model is the following:

When I see that______________

I feel ______________

because my need for ________________ is/is not met.

Would you be willing to __________________?

Again, lots more to it than that, and I’ll just link to it if Medium will let me here:

https://www.cnvc.org/online-learning/nvc-instruction-guide/nvc-instruction-guide

The overarching point I wanted to make was that NVC, at its core, is a course on empathy. It’s a kind of fierce and fearless empathy that can be used with those that you might never want to feel empathy with (like white supremacists, skinheads, and other hate groups where it has been used with notable results), as well as those you desperately want to love but might struggle to like a Mother-in-Law. I adult you not.

And it’s about the kind of conversations we should be having. All of the points you mention play into this flavor of fierce empathy, but what I love about how Rosenberg frames them, at least what my own personal “Aha!” about empathy was, is that it’s staying with the story of the other. Being raised the son of two unrepentant narcissists (both literally preachers), it was demonstrated to me, time and again that “empathy” meant that as someone told a story about how poor they’d slept the night before, that you needed to respond with a story about when you’d had a poor night’s sleep. And Rosenberg argues this is not empathy. I think you’re saying a similar thing without using his empathy model, but it seems to be at the tip of your literary tongue, nonetheless.

This concept at the core of his work helped me understand why so many of my attempts to share things with my mother throughout my life left me feeling completely unsatisfied as she unconsciously (or otherwise) kept making them about herself. Comparing someone’s tale to yourself, usually long before they’re anywhere near done with the telling of it, is not empathy. Rosenberg gently, persistently argues this. He even goes so far as to suggest that we can “wear down” a speaker with persistent empath and keeping to focus on them and their story. And I think he’s right. I still fall into the old family of origin habits on this one, but when I don’t, it’s fascinating to see how connective it can be with people that matter, and how disarming it can be with strangers we interact with in our lives. It’s almost a spiritual teaching of sorts.

I think we’re all so hungry to be heard that, as you’ve noted, conversation becomes like trench war lobbing grenades back and forth. We forget we’re actually in the same foxhole. If we just sat and had a cup of tea, we might realize there is no enemy but ourselves. It’s often a self-made, self-imagined war that no one wants.

I love rhetoric and thrive when I argue. Oh Lordy, you should see me on FaceBook.

But even if you want to debate or argue with someone, if you can let them feel heard and really “wear them out with listening,” as it were, it’s disarming. For me, it wasn’t just enough to be scolded that I don’t listen well enough. We’ve all been told at one time or another that we should just “shut up” and let someone else telling a boring tale drone on with their unrequited mantra. Hey, life is precious, the clock is ticking. It can be excruciatingly painful to listen to a long story that seems to have no purpose other than to aggrandize the speaker. But what’s cool about NVC is that you can use some of these concepts to even help the speaker get to the core of what is driving them to tell this tale. Maybe their whole story about the doctor making them wait and losing their paperwork is all about their fear of a bump they found on their chest. When you can use empathic questions to calm their fears that they must keep talking or they’ll never be heard (the famous “quantity = quality” myth), people go deeper. Suddenly you’re having a heart to heart about skin cancer instead of being on the verge of having to endure last summer’s vacation photos. Empathy actually helps others dive deeper and become more interesting. It’s a win-win.

Again, my apologies if others have mentioned the NVC connection. It was a teaching that answered some like long questions and problems I’d faced in communication in the past, and while I’m not a complete devotee, I honor how it changed the way I think about communicating with others.

I’m curious to know more about your discovery process with these ideas and wonder how much you’re familiar with NVC. Thank you again for your wonderful piece I had not intended to read, but was very glad to have done.

~