This post is edited from an original piece I posted on the forum for certified trainers in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which means that a bit of contextualizing is necessary to make sense of what I am saying.
Observations, feelings, needs, and requests, which many of us within the NVC network end up referring to as OFNR, are some of the most basic building blocks of NVC. Within the circles of people who study and practice NVC, a divergence exists about whether these elements are enough or whether NVC would need, in addition, other elements, such as systemic pointers or specific practices for making possible the liberation and collaboration that so many of us turn to NVC for. This is enough to make sense of this post.
One day in 2023, an insight landed in my lap that I then shared on that forum because of believing that it might help in creating some convergence. Thirty-one people “liked” the post and I got several responses which I found very thoughtful. This post is an edit of the original which integrates what contributed to my thinking from the responses I got.
Enough in principle
I believe that OFNR is enough in principle to do everything we need to do as humans to share resources in care for all of our needs with the least amount of unwanted impacts.
If we all had capacity to see what is happening without introducing any narratives and to share it without charge or assumption of knowing…
If we all had capacity to know what our needs are without attaching any expectation or “should” to it…
If we all had the capacity to experience impacts on us directly and to be able to share them in terms of what we are experiencing without any blaming or shaming…
If we all had the capacity to ask for what we want in a simple way without demanding, deferring, giving up, insisting, expecting, seeing who deserves what…
And if we all had the simple capacity to hear those things when they are expressed by others without reinterpreting it, judging it, distancing from it, reacting to it, or walking away from it…
Then I believe that OFNR would be enough and wouldn’t even be needed, because we would be in flow with each other most of the time. We would have enough trust most of the rest of the time to consciously make decisions to support us in finding the next wave of flow, and would have enough baseline trust in self, other, and life to be able to work out the conflicts that would sometimes arise and all the inevitable losses and impacts that come from being biological creatures who are vulnerable and ultimately die.
Mourning the obstacles
HOWEVER…
Because of the events that have unfolded in the last several thousand years since the patriarchal turn in West Asia and Europe, more intensively in the last 531 years since 1492, more intensively since the industrial revolution, and even more intensively in the last few decades and years …
There are far too many of us that won’t be able to learn and practice with OFNR without there being ways to attend to those impacts that can support us in recovering sufficiently from the impacts to be able to focus our attention in this way. To some extent, this is true of all of us, because we are all socialized into the mindset of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. As such, none of us can individually recover from the trauma of such socialization and restore our capacities sufficiently to where our internal landscape is aligned with flow, togetherness, and choice.
Still, the impacts are not evenly spread, and some of us will have more ease than others to know what we want and asking for it, to respond authentically to others’ needs and requests without submission or rebellion, to share with others when their actions have impacts on us, and to hear others across differences.
For some of us, what’s needed is massive support to find a way to speak at all, and no amount of NVC training or even empathy by itself will ever be enough without additional processes that will stitch us back together…
For some of us, what’s needed is massive support to maintain enough of a sense of our essential innocence that we can actually look at our impact on others and remain whole without crumbling in the face of it…
For some of us, what’s needed is enough acknowledgment of, not empathy about what has happened and continues to happen to our communities to be able to put our attention anywhere else… [Because in such situations (and many others, too) we actually need to see the other person’s heart breaking in response to our suffering in order to reweave the togetherness that was broken. Empathy shows understanding and care at its best, and what is needed in order to restore togetherness is actual co-holding, in which both people’s hearts are open, tender, connected, and expressive.]
For some of us, what’s needed is rehumanizing ourselves to ourselves through understanding that there is truly nothing wrong with us or our ancestors for whatever we or they have done, because all of them, all of us, have been overwhelmed by systems and events that train some of us, without our consent, to get our needs met at cost to others and to not even notice it…
And this is so not an exhaustive list…
What, then, do we do?
Because of these gaps that keep us from being able to notice what is happening, what we are feeling about it, how these feelings relate to our needs, and what we want about it all, we need something in addition to OFNR in order to be able to do OFNR.
One of my colleagues said, when responding to my original post: “OFNR alone, particularly when practiced by people like myself who grew up in a culture and in a country and in a paradigm that has embedded within its very fabric the use of power over others, is not going to be enough for me to contribute to an interdependent world.” It is this journey to an interdependent way of living that I am no longer believing can rely only on teaching OFNR to as many people as possible.
Part of what I believe is needed is to be able to distinguish between NVC as a worldview and a set of principles (what Marshall Rosenberg, who created NVC, used to call “NVC consciousness”), NVC as a set of practices, and a particular form of speech (which is what OFNR is) that can be used in practice settings to integrate the principles. The worldview, as I understand it, can be summed up in a simple way: regardless of what any of us ever do or say, all of us are fully human, with the same needs even if anyone’s actions or worldviews frighten us, and this includes us, too.
In those situations in which the capacity needed to learn OFNR cannot be accessed directly because of the reasons I outlined earlier, what I want those of us who are living, applying, and sharing NVC to bring forward is whatever additional tools may be needed to support people in finding liberation, so long as we can do it without losing the fundamental human connection and focus on liberation for all that NVC entails.
For example, the systemic lens, in and of itself, isn’t automatically aligned with the NVC worldview. Many people and groups use particular forms of systemic analysis that contribute to separation and are laden with judgments. I believe this is why so many NVC people are concerned about leaning on a systemic perspective. I also believe that without a systemic lens, there will be consistent impacts, within NVC circles, on people of certain groups whose experience is often made invisible if, for example, they are asked to speak of observations only in the context of what just happened and without the larger frame of the systemic phenomena that the particular observation is so likely an example of. I have ample experience of situations in which looking through a systemic lens that is grounded in the NVC perspective of shared human needs and a commitment to liberation for all has a dramatically different effect.
I have found that when I or others do that, the systemic lens brings more compassion and understanding in terms of precisely how the systemic context of different people’s lives impacts their access to understanding their needs, their capacity to experience agency in their actions, or their capacity to see the impacts of their actions on others. The systemic lens can bring tenderness or harshness; togetherness or separation; understanding or confusion. It all depends on how we use it, which is precisely why I see it as a vital tool that can support all of us in learning and integrating more deeply the NVC approach to living.
One of the highlights of my NVC life was a two-hour session in which I sat with a Black woman minister who was leading a congregation that was mostly white, which was exceedingly difficult for her. One day, she had had it, and she was expressing a tremendous amount of judgment at the white people in the congregation and how they were orienting to her leadership. I decided, on the spot, that I would try finding a way to reflect her experience back to her in a way that would capture the intensity, passion, and anguish in full, without in any way participating in the judgments.
I did not use pure OFNR, because I was completely confident that it would not give her a sense that her experience was actually gotten. I have seen enough situations in which reflecting something in the language of needs left people, sadly, with an experience of flatness. This has also happened to me when others have attempted to respond to me with guessing my feelings and needs. The experience of this flatness can be summarized like this: “Sure, yes, what you are saying makes sense, I definitely have these needs, and yes, if they were met it would be great, and I still think you just don’t get it…” Those memories helped me set my yardstick for my interaction with the minister: I wanted her to actually feel what it’s like to be received in full while also being true to my vision. I leaned heavily on the systemic lens, which includes bits of my limited and anguished knowledge about Black people’s experience in the US as well as tenderness for what needs to happen to white children to prepare them to participate in that system. And it worked. By the end, the experience was meaningful enough to be in silence. She was received, and the very understandable rage was gone. Then we could speak freely about her needs and the needs of others within that community, and she was quite calmly able to assess the capacity within the community and to choose to leave her ministry without bitterness.
I feel similarly about a variety of approaches to healing trauma or leaning on ways of understanding how the brain functions. To the extent that they are integrated into the fundamental way of making sense of human life that is the foundation of NVC, I can see them as pathways to support liberation and creating the collective conditions for engaging that would make leaning on OFNR possible and, as I said initially, less necessary.
In the absence of systemic approaches and a deeper understanding of the obstacles that most of us face in integrating the NVC worldview into our baseline functioning, focusing on OFNR as the only important element of NVC can lead, as I see it, to NVC losing its immense potential to contribute to individual and collective human liberation.
Instead, it can become, sadly, similar to the “Just say no” response to addiction that has been entrenched as part of the “War on Drugs” campaign in the US. No one can do what is beyond capacity, and “just say no” is beyond capacity for the overwhelming majority of people who struggle with addictions and don’t have true support that is oriented to the truth of their existence. In a similar way, I want us to recognize how easily NVC can be used as pressure on people, as an insistence that they be able to do something that isn’t within capacity, at this point, for just about anyone I know without massive liberation. It can also become what unfortunately many criticize it for and lead to inauthenticity and entrenching separation when studied just as a “do this” approach.
Still, with all this, some few of us do find the capacity to learn and integrate the deep shifts in how we think, how we speak, and how we act that NVC, like all disciplines that are rooted in nonviolence, is pointing to. My longing is for those of us who do find that capacity to accept with humility and awe that in an extremely low-capacity period for our species, we are called to model what we have integrated even when others don’t, to invite everyone around us to walk towards vision, and to supply the extra care and skill that we have in support of everyone, wherever we are. That’s not the same as all of us having capacity, and it may be a baby step in that direction.
Image credits
All images created by used with permission from Gwen Olton 2024