56 pages • 1 hour read
Marshall B. RosenbergNonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Receiving Empathetically”
The second part of NVC, after expressing honesty (as was covered in previous chapters), is receiving empathetically. In order to apply true empathy, we need to shed preconceived ideas or judgments about others as we listen and avoid the temptation to give advice, issue reassurance, or “one-up” the other person with our own struggles; we also should avoid educating, shutting-down, interrogating, or correcting the speaker. In professional settings, seeking intellectual understanding or clarification can block empathy, because the listener is no longer fully present for the speaker’s feelings.
Listening for Feelings and Needs
Although it can be challenging, NVC requires us to listen for others’ observations, feelings, needs, and life-enriching requests. It can be especially difficult to avoid falling into the trap of blaming ourselves or blaming others, as we are socialized to feel that we are responsible for the needs of others.
Paraphrasing
Rosenberg shares that paraphrasing back what we have heard can be a powerful tool to ensure that we have understood what we are being told. Paraphrasing for clarification is most effective when we express our own emotional state in conjunction and when we are specific about what we need to know.
Paraphrasing has proved to save time in negotiations, as people are able to understand each other more efficiently.
By seeking to fully understand people, and therefore viewing comments as opportunities to know people more fully, we may find that messages we previously heard as critical or assigning blame are merely expressions of people’s pain.
Sustaining Empathy
It is important to make time for empathetic listening and paraphrasing before turning to solutions or requests for relief. Listeners should listen for a sense of relief, a release of tension, or a slowing of words to know that the speaker has fully expressed their experience.
When Pain Blocks Our Ability to Empathize
Sometimes, we find ourselves so depleted that we are unable to offer empathy to others. It can be helpful to turn our attention inward in these situations to empathetically hear our own distress in order to enable us to empathetically hear others.
Rosenberg also suggests “nonviolent screaming,” which means loudly expressing one’s pain to another, even if they are in distress.
Another option is to remove oneself from the situation.
Summary
Empathy entails respectfully hearing what others are experiencing. We need empathy in order to give empathy, and if we are unable to be empathetic, we might try giving ourselves genuine empathy, screaming nonviolently, or removing ourselves from the situations.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Power of Empathy”
Empathy That Heals
Rosenberg describes an instance where a school principal was reminded of the importance of listening empathetically rather than seeking to problem solve for others. A student one day told the principle that she didn’t want anything from the principle apart from her full attention as the student spoke about her challenges. It can be harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources, but this empathy is equally important. For example, teachers should empathize with their students as well as their principals.
Empathy and the Ability to Be Vulnerable
Although opening up to other people can feel challenging and vulnerable, counterintuitively, exposing ourselves can actually allow us to feel safer in relationships, because we are not laboring to maintain a facade of impregnability. We have the ability to hear the needs and feelings behind any phrase, even one that is intended to be insulting to us.
Using Empathy to Defuse Danger
Using empathy can defuse dangerous situations, as often perpetrators of crimes are fearful, angry, or overwhelmed. A teacher facing a rapist, a police officer being mobbed by an angry crowd, and a worker at a drug detoxification center all used NVC to defuse situations; listening to feelings and needs allowed them to see people who previously appeared monstrous as instead people with unmet needs and overwhelming feelings. In the instance of the worker at the detox center Rosenberg cites, she was even threatened by someone armed and under the influence of drugs; though this is an instance where people might think NVC cannot be useful, Rosenberg stresses that it in fact effectively de-escalated the situation.
Empathy in Hearing Someone’s “No!”
Empathizing with the reasons behind someone’s “no” by asking for clarification helps us not to feel rejection, since it allows us to see that these reasons are not about us but are instead about the other person and their needs.
Empathy to Revive A Lifeless Conversation
Rosenberg also advises employing NVC in conversations where we feel bored or talked at. Sometimes, we can find ourselves receiving a conversation that we no longer feel energized by. In these situations, Rosenberg suggests empathetically interrupting with a reflective paraphrase of the speaker’s needs and feelings. You can also interrupt by expressing your desire to be more connected. Rosenberg acknowledges that this can feel difficult, but informal surveys he has conducted suggest that people would prefer to be interrupted than bore people.
Empathy for Silence
We can also listen to the feelings and needs communicated by silence by asking for clarification on what the silence means. Rosenberg describes psychotherapy appointments with a patient who was mute for their first three sessions. He reflected back his interpretation of her apparent fear, as well as sharing his own emotional state. Eventually, because he was responsive to her silence, she began to talk.
Summary
Empathy entails being present in the moment with another person. It helps us to be vulnerable, hear “no” without feeling rejected, revive a lifeless conversation, and hear the needs and feelings expressed through silence.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Connecting Compassionately With Ourselves”
Rosenberg claims that it is difficult to be compassionate to others if we are not compassionate to ourselves.
Remembering the Specialness of What We Are
Sometimes, we can lose our understanding of how special and unique we are. If we view ourselves as objects full of shortcomings, we are more likely to view others in this violent way. We should employ NVC to ourselves to create growth rather than self-hatred.
Evaluating Ourselves When We’ve Been Less Than Perfect
Rosenberg describes a workshop activity that asked participants to reveal their internal messaging after making a mistake. In reference to this example, Rosenberg says that we should always be motivated toward self-improvement by a desire for self-enrichment, rather than shame or guilt. In particular, the word “should,” when directed at ourselves carries connotations of shame and guilt. Even when it comes from us, we feel an innate resistance toward being compelled to do something by guilt, shame, or emotional manipulation.
Translating Self-Judgements and Inner Demands
We should evaluate ourselves in terms of whether our needs are being fulfilled by our behavior, and this should be done from a place of respect and self-compassion.
NVC Mourning
Rosenberg addresses instances where we regret past actions. He says, instead of reproaching ourselves, we should look at what unmet needs are being expressed through moralistic judgments and shift our thinking toward how that need can be fulfilled.
We can mourn the fact that we didn’t meet our own needs through our past actions without recriminating ourselves harshly. This will help us to meet our needs better in the future.
Self-Forgiveness
We should consider what need we were trying to meet when we acted in a way we regret. It is easier to forgive ourselves when we listen empathetically.
The Lesson of the Polka-Dotted Suit
Rosenberg cites a personal example in which he noticed that he was treating himself with harsh self-recrimination when the ink from his pen spread into a new suit pocket. He empathetically connected with the needs he was trying to meet when he had made the mistake—attending to the requests of others rather than caring for himself. He appreciated that his self-recrimination was due to the fact that he wanted to also take care of his own needs in the future.
“Don’t Do Anything That Isn’t Play!”
Rosenberg suggests that we should only undertake tasks that are life-enriching, rather than doing things out of feelings of guilt, shame, or obligation.
Translating “Have to” to “Choose to”
Rosenberg recommends listing the things that you do that don’t bring you joy. Shift your thinking around each item by detailing why you do them: “I choose to do x because I want y” (137). This will allow you to become conscious of how your choices are serving your needs, rather than these actions creating resentment.
Cultivating Awareness of the Energy Behind Our Actions
Choices motivated by a need for money can deprive us of joy. Choices made to gain the approval of others is also an uninspiring, extrinsic motivation. We should also avoid making choices simply to avoid punishment, shame, guilt, or out of a sense of duty.
Summary
The most important application of NVC may be how we treat ourselves. We should avoid moralistic self-judgments in favor of NVC mourning and self-forgiveness, which allow growth rather than creating self-hatred.
We can also benefit from shifting our thinking around tasks we don’t enjoy, reframing them as things we choose to do, or else deciding to stop doing them.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
In these chapters, Rosenberg emphasizes The Importance of Empathy in Order to Communicate Effectively. Engaging in empathy allows us to experience another person’s lived experience of their present moment. Rosenberg conveys that many of our tendencies in trying to listen attentively and lovingly to those around us in fact prevent the speaker from feeling fully heard. As listeners, we may have the “strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling”; instead, we should resist this urge in favor of “focusing full attention on the other person’s message” (92). Empathy can be applied even in situations where people are being critical or cruel; these can be understood as “opportunities to give to people who are in pain” (100), as these individuals are providing us information about their feelings and needs. Rosenberg even establishes empathy as important in situations where people are acting in terrifying ways. Respectful communication can be established that de-escalates situations, as “when we listen for their feelings and needs, we no longer see people as monsters” (120). These claims are significant, because Rosenberg is suggesting, on the one hand, that we have common habits of responding to others that do not make them feel heard, even when that isn’t our intention; on the other hand, Rosenberg also suggests that there are instances where we might feel justified in not listening to someone—such as when we perceive someone as a monster—when in fact this is precisely a moment when NVC is urgently needed.
Through the examples of people managing terrifying behavior, such as the person who jumped on the drug rehabilitation clinic worker while armed and under the influence of drugs, Rosenberg stresses the pivotal theme: Compassion as Natural, Conflict as Unnatural. He proposes that those who act in frightening, combative ways are simply people who are frustrated or afraid because their needs are not being met. The de-escalation of the situation created by empathetic paraphrasing suggests that, through compassionate and understanding treatment, the person under the influence of drugs was able to regulate their behavior and return to a similarly compassionate state: “[A]fter he’d received the empathy he needed, he got off me, put the knife away, and I [the clinic employee] helped him find a room at another center” (120). This man, suggests Rosenberg, acts in an initially monstrous way because he is fed up with being treated poorly. His change in behavior supports Rosenberg’s assertions on the vital and humanizing importance of empathy: “[I]t is a poignant experience to receive concrete evidence that someone is empathically connected to us” (101). The clinic worker took the man’s explosive and threatening behavior as an opportunity to know the man better by seeing his underlying feelings and needs, and she responded empathetically, negating the man’s need to express himself threateningly and furiously. As in other instances, Rosenberg uses this example to demonstrate the efficacy of the NVC approach, here lending further credence to this claim given the high stakes of the scenario.
In conjunction with exploring empathy toward others, Rosenberg stresses the application of NVC toward oneself; he emphasizes The Importance of Honest and Compassionate Introspection and Self-Expression, thereby further underscoring the claim that NVC is applicable to a wide array of situations, including one’s own relationship with oneself. Firstly, we cannot give empathy to others unless we are feeling emotionally sated ourselves: “[I]f we become skilled in giving ourselves empathy, we often experience in just a few seconds a natural release of energy that then enables us to be present with the other person” (103). As well as using empathy for ourselves to allow us to best serve others, Rosenberg emphasizes that we deserve the life-enriching experience of self-love, rather than self-hate, which Rosenberg sees as endemic in modern society: “[U]nfortunately, the way we’ve been trained to evaluate ourselves often promotes more self-hatred than learning” (130). Rosenberg therefore subverts the idea that self-hatred is either natural or productive, suggesting instead that a natural human attitude is one of compassion, and as such, it is also far more effectively than self-hatred and the critical evaluations that go with it.
Rosenberg points out that self-admonishment implies that we should suffer for our mistakes. When we engage in this kind of thinking, we fail to learn from our mistakes, which should instead be interpreted as an opportunity to “show us our limitations and guide us towards growth” (130). Instead, we should compassionately acknowledge that we were doing our best, and that “our choice was an attempt to serve life” (133). Through mourning how the choice did not serve our life, we can grow toward different choices in the future. This growth should be toward our needs which are not being met, as Rosenberg suggests that “self-judgments, like all judgments, are tragic expressions of unmet needs” (132). By emphasizing this point, Rosenberg reinforces a key claim of his text, namely, that any and all negative evaluations and feelings, whether about oneself or others, is an inauthentic (and ultimately unnatural) expression of unmet needs.
