Nonviolent Communication
Marshall B. Rosenberg
Nonviolent Communication
Marshall B. Rosenberg
A Language of Life: a four-part way of speaking and listening (observations, feelings, needs and requests) that keeps people connected even in hard conversations
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- 12 key ideas
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- Published 1999
Introduction
Marshall Rosenberg says two questions stayed with him from childhood: what cuts us off from our natural compassion and leads us to act violently, and what lets some people stay compassionate even in the worst conditions? His answer is a way of speaking and listening that he calls Nonviolent Communication, using the word nonviolence as Gandhi used it. In any exchange it turns our attention to four things: what we actually observe, what we feel, what we need, and what we ask for. It has two halves: saying these four things honestly about ourselves, and hearing them with empathy in other people, whatever words they use.
The book has thirteen chapters. After the opening chapter and one on the habits of speech that block compassion, four chapters take the four parts in turn. Two chapters follow on receiving others with empathy and on the power of empathy, then chapters on compassion for ourselves, on expressing anger fully, on the protective use of force, on freeing ourselves from old habits and counseling others, and on expressing appreciation. Short dialogues called "NVC in Action" run through the book; Rosenberg notes that they are shortened versions of real exchanges.
Notes: the book first appeared in 1999 as Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion. This summary follows the second edition of 2003, retitled A Language of Life; a third edition followed in 2015. The examples come from Rosenberg's own workshops and mediations, and his views on anger, punishment and psychiatric diagnosis are reported here as his. The Dari quotes are our own translation of Rosenberg's English.
- 1Rosenberg's method turns our attention to four things in any exchange: what we observe, what we feel, what we need, and what we ask for
- 2Rosenberg argues that some everyday ways of talking cut us off from compassion: moral judgments, comparisons, denying our own choice, and demands
- 3The first part is to describe what someone actually did, without mixing in our evaluation of them
- 4The second part is to name our feelings, and to tell a real feeling apart from a thought or from a word about what others are doing to us
- 5The third part is to trace each feeling to a need of our own: what others do can stimulate our feelings but never causes them
- 6The fourth part is a request: a clear, doable action asked for in positive words, and it stays a request only if the other person is truly free to say no
- 7Receiving with empathy means being fully present with what the other person feels and needs, instead of rushing to advise, reassure or explain
- 8Rosenberg's stories show empathy healing people, calming danger, and turning even silence into connection
- 9Rosenberg asks us to treat ourselves with the same compassion: to mourn our mistakes instead of punishing ourselves, and to act from choice rather than from "should"
- 10Rosenberg argues that anger comes from our own blaming thoughts, and that it is best used as an alarm that one of our needs is not being met
- 11When force cannot be avoided, Rosenberg separates force used to protect from force used to punish
- 12Rosenberg's way of thanking someone is to say what they did, which need of ours it met, and how we feel, to celebrate rather than to steer them
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