Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life, Second Edition @Team LiB (17 page)

As you explore the statement, “I choose to ____ because I want ____”, you may discover — as I did with the children’s carpool — the important values behind the choices you’ve made. I am convinced that after we gain clarity regarding the need being served by our actions, we can experience them as play even when they involve hard work, challenge or frustration.

For some items on your list, however, you might uncover one or several of the following motivations:

1) FOR MONEY

Money is a major form of extrinsic reward in our society. Choices prompted by a desire for reward are costly: they deprive us of the joy in life that comes with actions grounded in the clear intention to contribute to a human need. Money is not a “need” as we define it in NVC; it is one of countless strategies that may be selected to address a need.

2) FOR APPROVAL

Like money, approval from others is a form of extrinsic reward. Our culture has educated us to hunger for reward. We attended schools that used extrinsic means to motivate us to study; we grew up in homes where we were rewarded for being good little boys and girls, and punished when our caretakers judged us to be otherwise. Thus, as adults we easily trick ourselves into believing that life consists of doing things for reward; we are addicted to getting a smile, a pat on the back, and people’s verbal judgments that we are a “good person,” “good parent,” “good citizen,” “good worker,” “good friend,” etc. We do things to get people to like us, and avoid things that may lead them to dislike or punish us.

I find it tragic that we work so hard to buy love and assume that we must deny ourselves and do for others in order to be liked. In fact, when we do things solely in the spirit of enhancing life, we will find others appreciating us. Their appreciation, however, is only a feedback mechanism confirming that our efforts had the intended effect. The recognition that we have chosen to use our power to serve life and have done so successfully brings us the genuine joy of celebrating ourselves in a way that approval from others can never offer.

3) TO ESCAPE PUNISHMENT

Some of us pay income tax primarily to avoid punishment. As a consequence we are likely to approach that yearly ritual with a degree of resentment. I recall, however, in my childhood how differently my father and grandfather felt about paying taxes. They had immigrated from Russia to the United States, and were desirous of supporting a government they believed were protecting people in a way that the czar had not. Imagining the many people whose welfare was being served by their tax money, they felt earnest pleasure as they sent their checks to the U.S. government.

4) TO AVOID SHAME

There may be some tasks we choose to do just to avoid shame. We know that if we don’t do them, we’ll end up suffering severe self-judgment, hearing our own voice telling us how there is something wrong or stupid about us. If we do something stimulated solely by the urge to avoid shame, we will generally end up detesting it.

Be conscious of actions motivated by the desire for money or the approval of others, and by fear, shame, or guilt. Know the price you pay for them.

5) TO AVOID GUILT

In other instances, we may think, “If I don’t do this, people will be disappointed in me. ” We are afraid we’ll end up feeling guilty for failing to fulfill other people’s expectations of us. There is a world of difference between doing something for others in order to avoid guilt and doing it out of a clear awareness of our own need to contribute to the happiness of other human beings. The first is a world filled with misery; the second is a world filled with play.

6) OUT OF DUTY

When we use language which denies choice, e.g. words such as “should,” “have to,” “ought,” “must,” “can’t,” “supposed to,” etc., our behaviors arise out of a vague sense of guilt, duty, or obligation. I consider this to be the most socially dangerous and personally unfortunate of all the ways we act when we’re cut off from our needs.

In
Chapter 2
we saw how the concept of “Amtssprache” allowed Adolf Eichmann and his colleagues to send tens of thousands of people to their deaths without feeling emotionally affected or personally responsible. When we speak a language that denies choice, we forfeit the life in ourselves for a robot-like mentality that disconnects us from our own core.

The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things “because we’re supposed to.”

After examining the list of items you have generated, you may decide to stop doing certain things in the same spirit that I chose to forego clinical reports. As radical as it may seem, it is possible to do things only out of play. I believe that to the degree that we engage moment by moment in the playfulness of enriching life—motivated solely by the desire for its enrichment—to that degree are we being compassionate with ourselves.

The most crucial application of NVC may be in the way we treat ourselves. When we make mistakes, we can use the process of NVC mourning and self-forgiveness to show us where we can grow instead of getting caught up in moralistic self-judgments. By assessing our behaviors in terms of our own unmet needs, the impetus for change comes not out of shame, guilt, anger or depression, but out of the genuine desire to contribute to our own and others’ well-being.

We also cultivate self-compassion by consciously choosing in daily life to act only in service to our own needs and values rather than out of duty, for extrinsic rewards, or to avoid guilt, shame, and punishment. If we review the joyless acts to which we currently subject ourselves and make the translation from “have to” to “choose to,” we will discover more play and integrity in our lives.

The first step to fully expressing anger in NVC is to divorce the other person from any responsibility for our anger. We rid ourselves of thoughts such as, “He, she, or they made me angry when they did that.” Such thinking leads us to express our anger superficially by blaming or punishing the other person. Earlier we saw that the behavior of others may be a stimulus for our feelings, but not the cause. We are never angry because of what someone else did. We can identify the other person’s behavior as the stimulus, but it is important to establish a clear separation between stimulus and cause.

We are never angry because of what others say or do.

I’d like to illustrate this distinction with an example from my work at a Swedish prison. My job was to show prisoners who had behaved in violent ways how to fully express their anger rather than to kill, beat, or rape other people. During an exercise calling on them to identify the stimulus of their anger, one prisoner wrote: “Three weeks ago I made a request to the prison officials and they still haven’t responded to it.” His statement was a clear observation of a stimulus, describing what other people had done.

I then asked him to state the cause of his anger: “When this happened, you felt angry because
what
?”

“I just told you,” he exclaimed. “I felt angry because they didn’t-respond to my request!” By equating stimulus and cause, he had tricked himself into thinking that it was the behavior of the prison officials that was making him angry. This is an easy habit to acquire in a culture that uses guilt as a means of controlling people. In such cultures, it becomes important to trick people into thinking that we can
make
others feel a certain way.

Where guilt is a tactic of manipulation and coercion, it is useful-to confuse stimulus and cause. As mentioned earlier, children who hear, “It hurts Mommy and Daddy when you get poor grades” are led to believe that their behavior is the cause of their parents’ pain. The same dynamic is observed among intimate partners: “It really disappoints me when you’re not here for my birthday.” The English language facilitates the use of this guilt-inducing tactic.

To motivate by guilt, mix up stimulus and cause.

We say: “You make me angry.” “You hurt me by doing that.” “I feel sad because you did that.” We use our language in many different ways to trick ourselves into believing that our feelings result from what others do. The first step in the process of fully expressing our anger is to realize that what other people do is never the cause of how we feel.

So what is the cause of anger? In
Chapter 5
, we discussed the four options we have when confronted with a message or behavior that we don’t like. Anger is generated when we choose the second option: whenever we are angry, we are finding fault—we choose to play God by judging or blaming the other person for being wrong or deserving of punishment. I would like to suggest that this is the cause of anger. Even if we are not initially conscious of it, the cause of anger is located in our own thinking.

The cause of anger lies in our thinking—in thoughts of blame and judgment.

The third option described in
Chapter 5
is to shine the light of consciousness on our own feelings and needs. Rather than going up to our head to make a mental analysis of wrongness regarding somebody, we choose to connect to the life that is within us. This life energy is most palpable and accessible when we focus on what we need in each moment.

For example, if someone arrives late for an appointment and we need reassurance that she cares about us, we may feel hurt. If, instead, our need is to spend time purposefully and constructively, we may feel frustrated. If, on the other hand, our need is for thirty minutes of quiet solitude, we may be grateful for her tardiness and feel pleased. Thus, it is not the behavior of the other person, but our own need that causes our feeling. When we are connected to our need, whether it is for reassurance, purposefulness, or solitude, we are in touch with our life energy. We may have strong feelings, but we are never angry. Anger is a result of life-alienating thinking that is disconnected from needs. It indicates that we have moved up to our head to analyze and judge somebody, rather than focus on which of our needs are not getting met.

In addition to the third option of focusing on our own needs and feelings, the choice is ours at any moment to shine the light of consciousness on the other person’s feelings and needs. When we choose this fourth option, we also never feel anger. We are not repressing the anger; we see how anger is simply absent in each moment that we are fully present with the other person’s feelings and needs.

“But,” I am asked, “aren’t there circumstances in which anger is justified? Isn’t ‘righteous indignation’ called for in the face of careless, thoughtless pollution of the environment, for example?” My answer is that I strongly believe that to whatever degree I support the consciousness that there
is
such a thing as a “careless action,” or a “ conscientious action,” a “greedy person,” or a “moral person,” I am contributing to violence on this planet. Rather than agreeing or disagreeing about what people
are
for murdering, raping, or polluting the environment, I believe we serve life better by focusing attention on what we are needing.

When we judge others, we contribute to violence.

I see all anger as a result of life-alienating, violence-provocative-thinking. At the core of all anger is a need that is not being fulfilled. Thus anger can be valuable if we use it as an alarm clock to wake us up—to realize we have a need that isn’t being met and that we are thinking in a way that makes it unlikely to be met. To fully express anger requires full consciousness of our need. In addition, energy is required to get the need met. Anger, however, coopts our energy by directing it toward punishing people rather than meeting our needs. Instead of engaging in “righteous indignation,” I recommend connecting empathically with our own needs or those of others. This may take extensive practice, whereby over and over again, we consciously replace the phrase “I am angry because they . . . ” with “I am angry
because I am needing
. . . ”

Use anger as a wake-up call.

I once was taught a remarkable lesson while working with students in a correctional school for children in Wisconsin. On two successive days I was hit on the nose in remarkably similar ways. The first time I received a sharp blow across the nose from an elbow while interceding in a fight between two students. I was so enraged it was all I could do to keep myself from hitting back. On the streets of Detroit where I grew up, it took far less than an elbow in the nose to provoke me to rage. The second day: similar situation, same nose (and thus more physical pain), but not a bit of anger!

Anger co-opts our energy by diverting it toward punitive actions.

Reflecting deeply that evening on this experience, I recognized how I had labeled the first child in my mind as a “spoiled brat.” That image was in my head before his elbow ever caught my nose, and when it did, it was no longer simply an elbow hitting my nose. It was: “That obnoxious brat has no right to do this!” I had another judgment about the second child; I saw him as a “pathetic creature.” Since I had a tendency to worry about this child, even though my nose was hurting and bleeding much more severely the second day, I felt no rage at all. I could not have received a more powerful lesson to help me see that it’s not what the other person does, but the images and interpretations in my own head that produce my anger.