Thank You, Marshall.
“Non-violent Communication,” a theory/technique/philosophy of communication (and of life) created by Marshall Rosenberg, has changed my life in really positive ways in the past year. It’s given me ways of looking at myself and others and my relationships that I don’t know if I’d ever have discovered on my own. It’s helped me as a parent. It’s shown me a way out of the pain of constant anger over the nation’s political system.
And now it’s time for me to say goodbye.
Well, not really. I don’t think I’ll ever leave behind the lessons I’ve learned trying to practice NVC. I don’t want to stop learning more about this way of relating to people. It’s done good things for me and I’m sure it’s got more to teach me.
But it’s hurting my effort at living mindfully.
Yep, this is another post about mindfulness — see my first and second. It more relates to the second — the “map is not the territory” phenomenon.
You see, for all it bills itself as a technique of communication, NVC is also a worldview, a way of understanding human life. It’s a picture of the world. And I’m a sucker, as I’ve said, for worldviews, theories, that claim to be “the real truth,” the little-known inside scoop on reality which if you know it makes everything easier. And accepting a particular model of reality, a particular way of understanding the world, as *the* way of understanding the world, is a mindfulness-killer.
Here’s the tip-off: you’re following instructions and you don’t get the results they promised. You don’t question the value of these instructions for you, you question your own value, ability, competence, worthiness. That’s a dead giveaway.
So I’m gonna back off. I’m going to stop making a conscious effort to use NVC in my parenting and other parts of my life, at least for a while. I’m going to open my mind to other ways of thinking about things. I’ve got it there as a way of looking at things but I’m not going to make it *the* way of looking at things.
I think even Marshall would approve. After all, he called his book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, not Nonviolent Communication, The Language Of Life.
February 9th, 2006 at 4:57 am
It is a compelling post, this. It’s the challenge of the world view that I enjoy, the sense of moving up one awareness level, rather than down.
I don’t get it, though. Why and how? Maybe the mystery is part of the enjoyment, maybe not. At any rate, good luck!
Life,
/Mattias
November 26th, 2006 at 12:05 am
What struck me about “non-violent communication” when I read the book was how rooted it is in liberal capitalist ideology. Like liberalism, “non-violent communication” is an atomistic theory of the individual. As in classical Western liberalism, “non-violent communication” provides some magic formulas for making the pursuit of self-interest turn into something other than what it is. I can’t buy either the notion that the Self is an atom rather than a node in a social network, or the idea that the pursuit of self-interest, mutual or not, will lead to anything other than the pursuit of self-interest.
It’s interesting to note that the values of public morality in Nazi Germany were not that far from the middle-class bohemian values of Rosenberg’s programme: solidarity, simplicity, honesty, etc. Of course, these same values existed alongside their negation: the pursuit of self-interest. It’s much the same within Rosenberg’s target consumers and in Rosenberg’s facile book.
November 26th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Lev, I had noted the point of commonality with, say, Ayn Rand: the NVC bunch do have an interest in “enlightened selfishness.” (Much more apparent in Kelly Bryson’s book tha in NVC:ALOL.)
But as Marshall would say, “I’m not in agreement” with most of the rest of your assessment.
November 26th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Heh! Nice! I didn’t know “Lev Bronstein” was Leon Trotsky’s real name.