Talking straight
Last weekend I went to training seminar on Nonviolent Communication. A friend lent me set of four CDs by Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of the process and head of the Center for Nonviolent Communication.
At the time, I wondered if it was some little message about the way I talk. I've gotten brutally candid in the last few years. Partially by choice, but partially because there just isn't any distance anymore between my thinking and my mouth. I also had some vague notion that it had something to do with the peace movement, but it was like one of those answers that pops out at a Trivia question and you don't know where it came from.
I listened to the CDs, each of them two or three times before I went on to the next one. It wasn't that they were so much fun, or inspiring. It was that they were so hard. Logical. Humane. But it was the first time I've listened to anything in a long time that I didn't just grok instantaneously.
Rosenberg is a psychotherapist who developed the technique to open up communication between people who can't resolve their differences. He gives examples of dealing with married couples, a couple of African tribes who have been slaughtering each other for generations, Black students trying to get fairness from school administrators, and more.
In the course of the CDs, he says several times that the technique goes against our cultural training at a lot of levels. And as I've been sharing it with other people, trying to practice it, and doing some coaching, I can see the hurdles in myself and others.
It requires listening without judging, including criticizing yourself. That, alone, is huge. And in working with myself and other people, I find we want to hold onto our anger and our judgments. "Don't I deserve to be angry?" is the common question. And the answer is, you don't have to deserve it. Your feelings are always right. But they're your feelings, something that is about you, some message from your nervous system about taking care of yourself, or some script running in your head about what you need and you're not getting. The other person isn't "making" these feelings in you. And they have their own feelings going on inside of them.
The premise of NVC is that, if it's possible to get to the real needs behind the feelings and get those needs on the table, it's also possible to get to a shared environment where people naturally look for common solutions. Solutions that don't have to involve surrender or even compromise. And the "discipline" of NVC, if I can call it that, is learning how to talk that way.
I had to wangle my way into this training on judging and self-talk. The prerequisites were basic training in NVC and 40 hours of practice in practice groups. I didn't have any training, except listening to the CDs, and the trainer thought about it, and then agreed to let me in, thinking he could arrange a working group for break-out sessions that would be able to work with me.
Then work got in the way and I couldn't show up on Thursday or Friday of the four-day event. He agreed to let me come on Saturday. I got endlessly lost trying to get there, and showed up 20 minutes late. When I walked in, he looked surprised. It turned out that he had sent me an e-mail, asking me not to come, because he felt like it would interrupt the process of the group.
What happened next was fascinating. I offered to leave (because I'd always felt unsure about being able to participate with people who already had experience). But he had me sit down, and with the other 14 people in the room, began to discuss how they felt about my being there and what needs were or were not being met by my entering the group at this late date and with no background.
The process went on for over an hour. As one person after another talked, it was easy to see how their reactions reflected their personal hopes and fears about the weekend, about themselves and life in general. But then I was still thinking at that point as I usually think, like an analyst. I could see that most of what was said wasn't about me at all. And though initially, I didn't mind the process, thinking that it was about them deciding whether they wanted me there, it eventually began to exhaust me. Because it wasn't about me, though I was the catalyst. I began to feel like an object in the room, something that stimulated discussion but wasn't a participant.
I finally asked to speak. I said that though I initially was willing to go through this, because I really was quite open to the idea that I didn't belong at this weekend, I felt that I really wanted to leave now. Tears started flowing though I wasn't sobbing. I said it was uncomfortable to feel like I had no part in this discussion, and I feared that I would not be able to really participate in the rest of the program. And I was volunteering to cut this discussion short, and just wait until I could get some basic training before I attempted to join a group doing this work. Because I was hear to learn, and I didn't think I could learn as much as I wanted unless I could participate fully.
The trainer asked me if I would wait just a few more moments, and I agreed. He asked if everyone felt they had been heard. And then he asked for a vote on whether people wanted me to stay. Everyone in the room, except one person, raised their hands.
It was a very interesting moment for me. You might think that I felt like I had "won." But it wasn't like that. It was more like realizing that I was already inside some larger process. And that's what the rest of the weekend was like. Being inside some group process that was broken up into exercises, all of which were designed to make us more honest with each other, better at articulating feelings and recognizing the needs behind them, and better at establishing connections that really worked.
In the days I missed, they had done some exercises on self-empathy. I was sorry to have missed that, because it turns out that self-criticism and second-guessing are big blocks to connecting. But there was one exercise in the time I was there that really stood out for me.
We wrote down our most damaging belief about ourselves, and then a few subsidiary beliefs that branch off it. Mine was "there is something really wrong with me." My subsidiary beliefs were that people know it and don't like me, that I'll never accomplish anything, that I can't fix it, and that it's so overwhelming to me that it's easier to find a piece of chocolate, a cigarette or take a nap so I can avoid thinking about it.
Then we split up in twos, and worked like this. The other person took my list and read my statements as though they were hers. My job was to empathize with her and try to understand the feelings and needs behind these statements. We were sitting on her bed in the conference center, and my first reaction when she read them was to fall down on the bed laughing. I pulled myself together and we tried it again, and again I just started to giggle. She asked what that was about, and I said, it looked like stand-up comedy to me, like Roseanne or Richard Pryor. And then I thought, hell, it was easier to make it comedy than own this shit. And then I took a deep breath and settled down.
And once I started paying attention, and not judging my partner for what she was saying but just listening for the emotional content, I could hear the despair, and behind that the sadness and grief. And behind that the anger and frustration and more despair that had just made me give up. On what? On my need for trust.
And when that word appeared, it was the weirdest thing. It felt like I was pulling it out of the depths of my subconscious, and my subconscious wasn't really sure it wanted to give it up. Like it was too dangerous a concept to put on the table, even with myself. At the same time, I got a kind of deathbed review of my life, and how trust issues -- with the world, other people and myself -- was a hidden and recurrent theme with everything. Not trusting because I was afraid, or trusting where I shouldn't be trusting, because I'd made a default decision to just trust everything, rather than trust nothing. Hard to explain but it was clearly a core dilemma in my life that had colored a lot of my experience.
The end of the exercise was to look into ourselves to see if we had any requests. This is a part of the NVC process, asking for what we want or even just asking for help. And the only thing I could think to ask for was to ask my own subconscious not to drag it back down again, but to let it stay floating on the top of my mind so I could see what how that new idea might percolate through my life.
The group was really different when we came back together after that one. I don't think everyone was a successful as I was at getting to some core, self-blocking belief. But most of them were, I believe. And the only way I can think to describe the atmosphere was something like I used to remember at the tail end of acid trips. When we used to call "acid-washed brains." There was a kind of clarity and settled-down feeling that was almost like light in the air.
One of the people in the group asked me if I went to a lot of "transformational" workshops. The question sort of set me back on my heels. I don't think of things that way. I want to learn how to be better at being myself, and more effective at accomplishing the things I want to do. "Transformational" sounds like looking for some kind of peak experience, something I might have done when I was younger, but now I'm just trudging down this path, trying to find my best self and set it in motion on the world.
But, for me, this weekend was transformational. By time we broke up, the group was so open with each other and so able to work together, that it was like being on another planet, a better planet. It felt like an entirely new realm of being human, connected, accepting, able to move forward in ways that never seemed possible before. And yes, though I wasn't looking for it, it qualified as a peak experience.
One of us mentioned at the end about her fears about leaving this group and having to go back to a world where people were not like this. But I had already found, in dealing with business e-mail that morning before I drove in to the conference center, that I was able to put it to work immediately. I talked differently. It affected the way I interpreted my own work, and the changes I made to press releases and a speech I was editing. I shared information in a different way, and the information itself was different.
The people on the other side of these interactions didn't have to do anything different. What was between us was better.
In the days since then, a lot of things have happened in my life. I shut down a plan I shared with someone, because I didn't feel safe in it, and couldn't get any response to my concerns. I explained to a person that I was dating that his denigration and cynicism of my "latest big thing" felt disrespectful to me, and unless we could at least accept that each other were doing the right thing for ourselves, I didn't feel comfortable about taking this any further.
I think that sounds like I'm just cleaning house again, and maybe so. But I think that I could have done better with these things if I understood how to let people know that I was equally interested in hearing about what was going on with them. I'm not so good at that part yet, but I hope to learn more about it in a basic training. There will be one in October at the same place where I did this one.
I don't know where all this is leading, but there's no question in my mind it's leading somewhere. Just before I left, the man who owns the center showed me some of their other training facilities. I had told him that I was thinking about teaching some courses, and looking for a place to do that. He was telling me how intuitive I am, how well I stepped right into the NVC environment. One of the things about NVC is that we don't analyze other people, and I didn't really absorb what he was saying. But he is an ex-Jesuit priest, and I told him that I'd always made jokes about starting my own religion.
He looked at me and said, "Why don't you say it like something you want?" I paused and said, "I want to start my own religion." On the way home, I thought about it. Trying out different "I want to" statements.
The one that felt closest to truth was that I want to teach people what is possible in their lives. And maybe in such as way that they can learn how to remove the obstacles to exercising their own potential.
That's as far as that goes so far. But it feels like a step forward.
If anyone has gotten all the way through this posting, you might want to visit www.cnvc.org. The list of "feelings" there is a good tool to get more precise about how you feel. But the list of "needs" is mind-blowing. There are things there that I never imagined I could consider a need. Not even anything I would imagine hoping for. Imagining them as a need, something that I or you could shape our lives around, make decisions that support them instead of mutely suffering for the lack of them, it might change our lives.
At the time, I wondered if it was some little message about the way I talk. I've gotten brutally candid in the last few years. Partially by choice, but partially because there just isn't any distance anymore between my thinking and my mouth. I also had some vague notion that it had something to do with the peace movement, but it was like one of those answers that pops out at a Trivia question and you don't know where it came from.
I listened to the CDs, each of them two or three times before I went on to the next one. It wasn't that they were so much fun, or inspiring. It was that they were so hard. Logical. Humane. But it was the first time I've listened to anything in a long time that I didn't just grok instantaneously.
Rosenberg is a psychotherapist who developed the technique to open up communication between people who can't resolve their differences. He gives examples of dealing with married couples, a couple of African tribes who have been slaughtering each other for generations, Black students trying to get fairness from school administrators, and more.
In the course of the CDs, he says several times that the technique goes against our cultural training at a lot of levels. And as I've been sharing it with other people, trying to practice it, and doing some coaching, I can see the hurdles in myself and others.
It requires listening without judging, including criticizing yourself. That, alone, is huge. And in working with myself and other people, I find we want to hold onto our anger and our judgments. "Don't I deserve to be angry?" is the common question. And the answer is, you don't have to deserve it. Your feelings are always right. But they're your feelings, something that is about you, some message from your nervous system about taking care of yourself, or some script running in your head about what you need and you're not getting. The other person isn't "making" these feelings in you. And they have their own feelings going on inside of them.
The premise of NVC is that, if it's possible to get to the real needs behind the feelings and get those needs on the table, it's also possible to get to a shared environment where people naturally look for common solutions. Solutions that don't have to involve surrender or even compromise. And the "discipline" of NVC, if I can call it that, is learning how to talk that way.
I had to wangle my way into this training on judging and self-talk. The prerequisites were basic training in NVC and 40 hours of practice in practice groups. I didn't have any training, except listening to the CDs, and the trainer thought about it, and then agreed to let me in, thinking he could arrange a working group for break-out sessions that would be able to work with me.
Then work got in the way and I couldn't show up on Thursday or Friday of the four-day event. He agreed to let me come on Saturday. I got endlessly lost trying to get there, and showed up 20 minutes late. When I walked in, he looked surprised. It turned out that he had sent me an e-mail, asking me not to come, because he felt like it would interrupt the process of the group.
What happened next was fascinating. I offered to leave (because I'd always felt unsure about being able to participate with people who already had experience). But he had me sit down, and with the other 14 people in the room, began to discuss how they felt about my being there and what needs were or were not being met by my entering the group at this late date and with no background.
The process went on for over an hour. As one person after another talked, it was easy to see how their reactions reflected their personal hopes and fears about the weekend, about themselves and life in general. But then I was still thinking at that point as I usually think, like an analyst. I could see that most of what was said wasn't about me at all. And though initially, I didn't mind the process, thinking that it was about them deciding whether they wanted me there, it eventually began to exhaust me. Because it wasn't about me, though I was the catalyst. I began to feel like an object in the room, something that stimulated discussion but wasn't a participant.
I finally asked to speak. I said that though I initially was willing to go through this, because I really was quite open to the idea that I didn't belong at this weekend, I felt that I really wanted to leave now. Tears started flowing though I wasn't sobbing. I said it was uncomfortable to feel like I had no part in this discussion, and I feared that I would not be able to really participate in the rest of the program. And I was volunteering to cut this discussion short, and just wait until I could get some basic training before I attempted to join a group doing this work. Because I was hear to learn, and I didn't think I could learn as much as I wanted unless I could participate fully.
The trainer asked me if I would wait just a few more moments, and I agreed. He asked if everyone felt they had been heard. And then he asked for a vote on whether people wanted me to stay. Everyone in the room, except one person, raised their hands.
It was a very interesting moment for me. You might think that I felt like I had "won." But it wasn't like that. It was more like realizing that I was already inside some larger process. And that's what the rest of the weekend was like. Being inside some group process that was broken up into exercises, all of which were designed to make us more honest with each other, better at articulating feelings and recognizing the needs behind them, and better at establishing connections that really worked.
In the days I missed, they had done some exercises on self-empathy. I was sorry to have missed that, because it turns out that self-criticism and second-guessing are big blocks to connecting. But there was one exercise in the time I was there that really stood out for me.
We wrote down our most damaging belief about ourselves, and then a few subsidiary beliefs that branch off it. Mine was "there is something really wrong with me." My subsidiary beliefs were that people know it and don't like me, that I'll never accomplish anything, that I can't fix it, and that it's so overwhelming to me that it's easier to find a piece of chocolate, a cigarette or take a nap so I can avoid thinking about it.
Then we split up in twos, and worked like this. The other person took my list and read my statements as though they were hers. My job was to empathize with her and try to understand the feelings and needs behind these statements. We were sitting on her bed in the conference center, and my first reaction when she read them was to fall down on the bed laughing. I pulled myself together and we tried it again, and again I just started to giggle. She asked what that was about, and I said, it looked like stand-up comedy to me, like Roseanne or Richard Pryor. And then I thought, hell, it was easier to make it comedy than own this shit. And then I took a deep breath and settled down.
And once I started paying attention, and not judging my partner for what she was saying but just listening for the emotional content, I could hear the despair, and behind that the sadness and grief. And behind that the anger and frustration and more despair that had just made me give up. On what? On my need for trust.
And when that word appeared, it was the weirdest thing. It felt like I was pulling it out of the depths of my subconscious, and my subconscious wasn't really sure it wanted to give it up. Like it was too dangerous a concept to put on the table, even with myself. At the same time, I got a kind of deathbed review of my life, and how trust issues -- with the world, other people and myself -- was a hidden and recurrent theme with everything. Not trusting because I was afraid, or trusting where I shouldn't be trusting, because I'd made a default decision to just trust everything, rather than trust nothing. Hard to explain but it was clearly a core dilemma in my life that had colored a lot of my experience.
The end of the exercise was to look into ourselves to see if we had any requests. This is a part of the NVC process, asking for what we want or even just asking for help. And the only thing I could think to ask for was to ask my own subconscious not to drag it back down again, but to let it stay floating on the top of my mind so I could see what how that new idea might percolate through my life.
The group was really different when we came back together after that one. I don't think everyone was a successful as I was at getting to some core, self-blocking belief. But most of them were, I believe. And the only way I can think to describe the atmosphere was something like I used to remember at the tail end of acid trips. When we used to call "acid-washed brains." There was a kind of clarity and settled-down feeling that was almost like light in the air.
One of the people in the group asked me if I went to a lot of "transformational" workshops. The question sort of set me back on my heels. I don't think of things that way. I want to learn how to be better at being myself, and more effective at accomplishing the things I want to do. "Transformational" sounds like looking for some kind of peak experience, something I might have done when I was younger, but now I'm just trudging down this path, trying to find my best self and set it in motion on the world.
But, for me, this weekend was transformational. By time we broke up, the group was so open with each other and so able to work together, that it was like being on another planet, a better planet. It felt like an entirely new realm of being human, connected, accepting, able to move forward in ways that never seemed possible before. And yes, though I wasn't looking for it, it qualified as a peak experience.
One of us mentioned at the end about her fears about leaving this group and having to go back to a world where people were not like this. But I had already found, in dealing with business e-mail that morning before I drove in to the conference center, that I was able to put it to work immediately. I talked differently. It affected the way I interpreted my own work, and the changes I made to press releases and a speech I was editing. I shared information in a different way, and the information itself was different.
The people on the other side of these interactions didn't have to do anything different. What was between us was better.
In the days since then, a lot of things have happened in my life. I shut down a plan I shared with someone, because I didn't feel safe in it, and couldn't get any response to my concerns. I explained to a person that I was dating that his denigration and cynicism of my "latest big thing" felt disrespectful to me, and unless we could at least accept that each other were doing the right thing for ourselves, I didn't feel comfortable about taking this any further.
I think that sounds like I'm just cleaning house again, and maybe so. But I think that I could have done better with these things if I understood how to let people know that I was equally interested in hearing about what was going on with them. I'm not so good at that part yet, but I hope to learn more about it in a basic training. There will be one in October at the same place where I did this one.
I don't know where all this is leading, but there's no question in my mind it's leading somewhere. Just before I left, the man who owns the center showed me some of their other training facilities. I had told him that I was thinking about teaching some courses, and looking for a place to do that. He was telling me how intuitive I am, how well I stepped right into the NVC environment. One of the things about NVC is that we don't analyze other people, and I didn't really absorb what he was saying. But he is an ex-Jesuit priest, and I told him that I'd always made jokes about starting my own religion.
He looked at me and said, "Why don't you say it like something you want?" I paused and said, "I want to start my own religion." On the way home, I thought about it. Trying out different "I want to" statements.
The one that felt closest to truth was that I want to teach people what is possible in their lives. And maybe in such as way that they can learn how to remove the obstacles to exercising their own potential.
That's as far as that goes so far. But it feels like a step forward.
If anyone has gotten all the way through this posting, you might want to visit www.cnvc.org. The list of "feelings" there is a good tool to get more precise about how you feel. But the list of "needs" is mind-blowing. There are things there that I never imagined I could consider a need. Not even anything I would imagine hoping for. Imagining them as a need, something that I or you could shape our lives around, make decisions that support them instead of mutely suffering for the lack of them, it might change our lives.