Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life, Second Edition @Team LiB

Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.

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Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
2nd Edition Printing, August, 2003

Author: Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.
Editor: Lucy Leu
Project Director: Jeanne Iler
Cover and Interior Design: Lightbourne,
www.lightbourne.com
Cover photograph of Jerusalem artichoke: Eric Dresser

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN: 1-892005-03-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosenberg, Marshall B.

Nonviolent communication : a language of life / by Marshall B. Rosenberg. -- 2nd ed.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 1-892005-03-4
1. Interpersonal communication. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.

BF637.C45R67 2003 153.6--dc21

2003010831

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful that I was able to study and work with Professor Carl Rogers at a time when he was researching the components of a helping relationship. The results of this research played a key role in the evolution of the process of communication that I will be describing in this book.

I will be forever grateful that Professor Michael Hakeem helped me to see the scientific limitations and the social and political dangers of practicing psychology in the way that I had been trained: a pathology-based understanding of human beings. Seeing the limitations of this model stimulated me to search for ways of practicing a different psychology, one based on a growing clarity about how we human beings were meant to live.

I’m grateful, too, for George Miller’s and George Albee’s efforts to alert psychologists to the need of finding better ways for “giving psychology away.” They helped me see that the enormity of suffering on our planet requires more effective ways of distributing much-needed skills than can be offered by a clinical approach.

I would like to thank Lucy Leu for editing this book and creating-the final manuscript; Rita Herzog and Kathy Smith for their editing assistance; and for the additional help of Darold Milligan, Sonia Nordenson, Melanie Sears, Bridget Belgrave, Marian Moore, Kittrell McCord, Virginia Hoyte, and Peter Weismiller.

Finally, I would like to express gratitude to my friend Annie Muller. Her encouragement to be clearer about the spiritual foundation of my work has strengthened that work and enriched my life.

About The Author

MARSHALL B. ROSENBERG, PH.D. is Founder and Director of Educational Services for the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC).

Growing up in a turbulent Detroit neighborhood, Dr. Rosenberg developed a keen interest in new forms of communication that would provide peaceful alternatives to the violence he encountered. His interest led to a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. His subsequent life experience and study of comparative religion motivated him to develop Nonviolent Communication (NVC).

Dr. Rosenberg first used NVC in federally funded projects to provide mediation and communication skills training during the 1960s. He founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) in 1984. Since then CNVC has grown into an international nonprofit organization with over 100 trainers. They provide training in 30 countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and offer workshops for educators, counselors, parents, health care providers, mediators, business managers, prison inmates and guards, police, military personnel, clergy, and government officials.

Dr. Rosenberg has initiated peace programs in war torn areas including Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, the Middle East, Colombia, Serbia, Croatia, and Northern Ireland. Funded by UNESCO, the CNVC team in Yugoslavia has trained tens of thousands of students and teachers. The government of Israel has officially recognized NVC and is now offering training in hundreds of schools in that country.

Dr. Rosenberg is currently based in Wasserfallenhof, Switzerland, and travels regularly offering NVC training and conflict mediation.

Arun Gandhi
Founder/President, M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence

Growing up as a person of color in apartheid South Africa in the 1940’s was not something anyone relished. This was especially-true if you were brutally reminded of your skin color every moment of every day. And then to be beaten up at the age of ten by white youths because they considered you too black, and then by black youths because they considered you too white, is a
humiliating experience that could drive anyone to vengeful violence.

I was so outraged by my experiences that my parents decided to take me to India and leave me for some time with grandfather, the legendry M. K. Gandhi, so that I could learn from him how to deal with the anger, the frustration, the discrimination, and the humiliation that violent color prejudice can evoke in you. In those 18 months I learned more than I anticipated. My only regret now is that I was just 13 years old and a mediocre student at that. If only I was older, a bit wiser and a bit more thoughtful, I could have learned so much more. But one must be happy with what one has received and not be greedy—a fundamental lesson in nonviolent living. How can I forget this?

One of the many things I learned from grandfather is to understand the depth and breadth of nonviolence, and to acknowledge that we are all violent and that we need to bring about a qualitative change in our attitudes. We often don’t acknowledge our violence because we are ignorant about it. We assume we are not violent because our vision of violence is one of fighting, killing, beating, and wars—the type of things that average individuals don’t do.

To bring this home to me, grandfather made me draw a family tree of violence using the same principles as are used for a genealogical tree. His argument was that I would have a better appreciation of nonviolence if I understood and acknowledged the violence that exists in the world. He assisted me every evening to analyze the day’s happenings—everything that I experienced, read about, saw or did to others—and put them down on the tree either under “physical” (if it was violence where physical force was used) or under “passive” (if it was the type of violence where the hurt was more emotional).

Within a few months I covered one wall in my room with acts of “passive" violence that grandfather described as being more insidious than “physical" violence. He then explained that passive violence ultimately generated anger in the victim who, as an individual or as a member of a collective, responded violently. In other words it is passive violence that fuels the fire of physical violence. It is because we don’t understand or appreciate this concept that all our efforts to work for peace have either not fructified, or the peace that we achieved was only temporary. How can we extinguish a fire if we don’t first cut off the fuel that ignites the inferno?

Grandfather always vociferously stressed the need for nonviolence in communications—something that Marshall Rosenberg has been doing admirably for many years through his writings and his seminars. I read with considerable interest Mr. Rosenberg’s book,
Nonviolent Communication—A Language of Life
, and was impressed by the depth of his work and the simplicity of the solutions.

Unless, as grandfather would say, “we become the change we wish to see in the world,” no change will ever take place. We are all, unfortunately, waiting for the other person to change first.

Nonviolence is not a strategy that can be used today and discarded tomorrow, nor is it something that makes you meek or a pushover. Nonviolence is about inculcating positive attitudes to replace the negative attitudes that dominate us. Everything that we do is conditioned by selfish motives—what’s in it for me—and even more so in an overwhelmingly materialistic society that thrives on rugged individualism. None of these negative concepts is conducive to building a homogeneous family, community, society, or nation.

It is not important that we come together in a moment of crisis-and show our patriotism by flying the flag; it is not enough that we become a superpower by building an arsenal that can destroy this earth several times over; it is not enough that we subjugate the rest of the world through our military might, because peace cannot be built on the foundations of fear.

Nonviolence means allowing the positive within you to emerge. Be dominated by love, respect, understanding, appreciation, compassion, and concern for others rather than the self-centered and selfish, greedy, hateful, prejudiced, suspicious, and aggressive attitudes that usually dominate our thinking. We often hear people say: “This world is ruthless and if you want to survive you must become ruthless, too.” I humbly disagree with this contention.

This world is what we have made of it. If it is ruthless today it is because we have made it ruthless by our attitudes. If we change ourselves we can change the world, and changing ourselves begins with changing our language and methods of communication. I highly recommend reading this book, and applying the Nonviolent Communication process it teaches. It is a significant first step towards changing our communication and creating a compassionate world.

—Arun Gandhi