(no subject)
My Experience of a Nonviolent Communications, (NVC), International Intensive Training, (IIT)
Chris English
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
This is an open letter and review of my experience at the "International Intensive Training" on Nonviolent Communications, (NVC), given by the Center for Nonviolent Communications, (CNVC), and taught by Marshall Rosenberg, the founder and innovator of NVC, in Albuquerque, New Mexico in September 2011.
First, I'm going to admit a few biases.
Biases
I'm multiply certified in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, (NLP), including practitioner, master, health, trainer, and a number of peripheral certifications including hypnosis. NLP changed my life because it opened my mind to the possibility of win-win situations, getting everyone's needs met, taking responsibility for my life, and because it provided nuts and bolts concrete instruction on communications including sensory specific descriptions of communications strategies and numerous sensitivity exercises intended to help develop my understanding of nonverbal communications. NLP taught me strategies for solving just about any personal and/or interpersonal problem I might run into. NLP also taught me skills for observing any expert in any field, eliciting their strategy, (even outside their conscious awareness), and modeling it such that it could be taught to others.
I will also admit that while I've read Marshall's book and taken a few short introductions to NVC, I have not been impressed with the NVC process itself nor with other practitioners. My purpose in attending the IIT was specifically to model Marshall's reported skills in empathy in order to develop those skills in myself.
I'm autistic. I'm not even going to begin to explain my autistic experience because that would literally take books and, frankly, I don't know the non-autistic experience of life well enough to explain the differences. Suffice to say that in most of my life I "pass" for neuro-typical, (not autistic), but that in environments like IIT which focus exclusively on in-person communications, (note: not written), with particular types of eye contact, facial expressions, vocal inflections, and the like, I frequently fail to pass for "normal". Which is to say, people intuitively recognize my behavior as different both from their own and also from the norm and they project their own meanings onto me. Since most people are not aware of autistic ways of being, they naturally project other types of meanings onto me such as that I am consciously choosing to be aloof, arrogant, cold, closed, nonempathetic, divisive, challenging, or stirring up trouble. These types of "attacks" are rarely malicious, nor is any single misunderstanding intolerable, but the pervasive consistency of these combined attacks have an overwhelming effect that I can't always process in real time.
Also, I left the IIT on the third day. I simply couldn't cope. I couldn't find ways to be in the group. I couldn't find relevant or suitable support. I couldn't find a way to effect constructive change either in the group or in my approach to it. And, to put it bluntly, I couldn't find food to eat in the time available and my hunger colored much of my personal resourcefulness.
Impressions
As for my impressions, there are several things that I want to write about here. The first impression is the issue of taking notes using an iPad or laptop.
On taking notes...
CNVC did an excellent job of letting us know ahead of time about what to expect from the experience, the facilities, and the process in general. So it was with great surprise when we were told on the first day, while holding our iPads and laptops, that we were not allowed to take notes on them. That's all. No discussion, no background, just a surprise proclamation.
That evening in circle, I brought the issue up. NLP style, not NVC. Although Marshall, his wife, and a CNVC representative were all present, no one was willing to take responsibility for having made the demand nor was anyone capable of explaining what was behind the demand.
One of the supporting trainers did offer to hold a session the following day on the issue, although none of the people in authority were to be present. From my perspective, this was simply offensive. Rather than negotiating in good faith over the issues, they were only willing to empathize with people whose needs were not being met. In short, to help them feel better about the fact that their needs weren't being met.
For the record, in another life I'm a computer engineer. I've spent the bulk of my career building technology for people - not corporations, not governments, but for people, in order to improve their lives through better communications, better access to information, and through alternative power structures. To the point, I build devices like the iPad, quite literally.
I'm happy to engage folks on this issue. I'm happy to negotiate a solution which can meet everyone's needs. And yet none of our trainers or facilitators were willing to engage on the issue at all. In my opinion, this was simply poorly done. None of the principles nor methods of NVC were used. And many people were frustrated and/or alienated, myself included. In my experience, this is a typical and common reaction for people to whom change is occurring, when they don't perceive themselves to have any control over or participation in the change. For example, I did not agree to avoid taking notes with my iPad. If I'd known that would be a rule ahead of time, I could have made my own decision about whether to attend under those conditions.
My impression overall is that someone didn't live up to their responsibilities. I'm not entirely sure who. And what we were left with was the request to validate an irrational fear of technology. And I'm sorry, but I was unwilling to validate that particular irrational fear.
This significantly colored my trust in our organizers as well as my experience of the IIT.
On the food...
Secondly, there is the issue of the food. While I understand that it can be difficult to handle all of the idiosyncratic requests of a particularly divergent group such as IIT attendees, I have never experienced the types of problems we were seeing with the quantity of food available.
I have been to other week long events in which the group was essentially isolated from others and catered in order to support that isolation. Groups where the possibility of leaving the group to find alternate food was even more difficult than it was at this IIT. And those groups all seemed to manage quite reasonably. So I'm convinced that it is possible.
On the third day, one of the CNVC representatives spoke about the caterer and the food situation. Essentially, she was apologizing for the fact that it was difficult for many people to find food they could eat and that the food was running out such that there were no entrees left for folks in the second half of the line. Of course, she didn't actually apologize but she did tell us all about how she felt about it, that she was continuing the NVC process with the caterer, that they'd had problems like this fairly consistently in the past, and that they hoped to have them sorted out at some point in a future IIT, (international intensive training).
Of course, none of those things change the fact that a bunch of people aren't being fed. Call me silly, but somehow, getting people fed seems like a higher value to me than validating her frustration at the fact that we aren't being fed.
Let's go over those points again. Among the things we were told were:
Please note that no where in these statements was there any hope for improving the situation at the present IIT. We were specifically discouraged from participating in negotiations over or brainstorming around group solutions.
My "take away" from this was that if I was going to find a way to eat regularly during IIT, I was going to need to do so without support from CNVC and I was going to have to break some rules.
We were asked not to keep food in our rooms. There was one regular sized refrigerator to be shared amongst 50 some participants. There were no food preparation areas available for participants. And the nearest restaurants or grocers were a couple miles away. On foot, this is too far to manage in a 1hr meal break.
To me, this is simply disrespectful and intolerable.
On the empathy session...
The third impression that I'd like to share is from a session with Marshall on the third day, specifically about empathy. Note that part of the NVC process for empathizing involves guessing at the other person's feelings. When asked, (by someone other than me), how one can know what to guess, Marshall had no answer.
One participant suggested that empathizing might require some commonality of experience. And another participant relayed the experience of trying to work with prisoners. His conclusion was that you can't empathize with many prisoners because they don't believe that you have enough commonality of experience to empathize with them.
In my three days at the IIT, this is the only statement that resonated positively with me. It is true that I didn't trust our facilitators. And by the third day I was convinced that few people, facilitators or participants, had sufficient commonality of experience to empathize with me, nor I them.
While this is an interesting experience and learning, the conclusion that I drew from it was twofold. First, that the NVC process for empathy would not be useful to me in my life and secondly, that any hopes I might have had at finding support or empathy for myself at the IIT were even more bleak than I'd originally feared.
Criticisms
In my opinion, the NVC process is inherently abusive.
This doesn't mean that it can't be used constructively. I do believe that many of the NVC goals are worthy goals, goals that I support and encourage, like the idea of mutual wins, finding ways to get everyone's needs met concurrently, helping each of us take more control over our own individual lives, and experiencing our lives, including our emotional lives, as fully as we can.
But the processes proposed by NVC are only effective across a narrow set of situations and people and they are abusive to at least some people.
Rape culture
For example, Marshal says that "a 'no' is a tragic expression of a 'yes'". That's right, we're back to rape culture in a nutshell - back 20 years to before we, as a culture, started recognizing that 'no' means 'no'".
I mean, I think I can puzzle through what he's trying to say, that if you get a clear 'no', that means that the person has a clear picture of something that would meet their needs, (although it might not involve you), but the net result is that he's encouraging everyone to keep trying even when the person with whom they are interacting declines.
And this problem recurs. Here are some of the other patterns I noticed occurring repeatedly from Marshall and from our other facilitators.
Attack #1 - Rapport
Attack #1 works like this.
First, there is a presupposition that everyone has the same needs. Marshall states this explicitly.
Personally, I don't believe this - at least, not in the last 20 years since discovering polyamory, the bdsm scene, paganism, or NLP where it became abundantly clear to me that different people have different needs.
There is a consistent world view in which it might be true at some deep and/or abstract level that everyone has the same needs, but it is clear to me that individual people's interpretations of those needs varies so radically that even claiming out loud that everyone has the same needs invalidates some people's sense of self determinism and verges on abusive. Holding this belief privately would lead me to treating people as though I knew what their needs were better than they did, which, to me, is abusive and sets up a "power over" dynamic. Nonetheless, this is one of the presuppositions of NVC.
A corollary to this presupposition is the presupposition that everyone has a need to connect to each and every other person. Personally, I'm convinced that I have no such need but this is a presupposition of NVC.
Based on these two presuppositions, there is no concept of "rapport" in NVC as there is in NLP. In NLP, managing rapport is one of the first and constant considerations of NLP. But in NVC, rapport is assumed. Anyone who walks away from an NVC practitioner is judged to be broken.
Marshall doesn't use that word. Instead, he says, "the person is not ready to participate in a win-win world", which sounds to me like a roundabout way of saying "defective" and simultaneously claiming that NVC is the only possible approach to a win-win.
Attack #2 - Installation of Feelings
Attack #2 deals with the NVC concept of "empathy". The process in NVC involves guessing what the other person is feeling and naming that.
In NLP, the guess is referred to as a "hallucination" and we're strongly cautioned away from putting voice to our hallucinations. The problem is that when I voice my hallucination, "You must be so angry!", I'm also using a hypnotic language pattern which essentially installs anger in the listener. Regardless of what the other person might have been feeling previously, it's now polluted by my hallucination. And there's a much higher probability that they really are angry after having stated my guess than they were prior.
There is a related pattern in NLP called an audio menu. It is used with people who don't know what they want, as with children. Instead of asking a child what he wants to eat, which might be a big and complicated question, you can ask him whether he would prefer peanut butter and jelly or mac and cheese. This makes the question multiple choice and easier to process.
However, doing this also creates a "power over" position in that one person really is claiming to have a better idea of the other person's needs than they do themselves.
There's a closely related pattern in NLP called a false choice and it works like this. "Would you like to sit quietly over here? Or over there?" No matter what choice is selected, the listener has agreed to sit quietly - hence the false choice.
I name this as an attack because in NVC, the "empathy" process isn't about clarity nor is it about understanding what's there. Instead, it's about telling people how they feel. And that seems abusive to me.
Furthermore, there are several presuppositions involved here.
If your experience is not sufficiently common, then there is no reason to suspect kinship. If I do not believe that you are capable of empathizing, then any guess you might make about my feelings is simply offensive. And if your guesses are inaccurate with any degree of frequency, then you are proving the opposite of empathy, (ecpathy), instead.
Please note that for me, all three are false in most cases where I attempt to guess at another person's feelings.
When I guess your feelings...
Guessing feelings works for me if the person is close to angry or angry. If I misguess in that situation, then the misguess tends to provoke a correction along with some projection of the anger onto me. But the net result is that they continue to engage with me even if they become angry with me because of the misguess.
My experience tells me that I get about 1.5 misguesses. After the first, people look at me suspiciously as though I were doing something covert or manipulative because I'm creating an experience for them that they don't understand. It's confusing to them. And I spend some rapport on the guess. That's only useful if I'm simultaneously installing something else, like responding to "I'm angry" with "so you've been angry with your... son?" My response begins to presuppose that the anger is ending and it can be worth spending some rapport to create that tiny shift, even when I'm wrong about the feeling.
If I make two wrong guesses in a row then I'll generally lose rapport. I'll break trust, and typically even break the interaction. That is, the person will stop engaging with me and will often walk away.
In effect, I rarely guess right. And since it's so damaging to guess wrong, I'm much better off not guessing at all. I can do that to an extent by only using words they've used already, complete with mirroring gestures, body position, tone of voice, etc, and by using general language like "what you're feeling" rather than naming any particular emotion. But if I get too many gestures right, then the person perceives me to be mocking them. So I've taking to mirroring as many things as I can, then intentionally omitting or modifying at least one of them. More, if the person seems to be feeling uneasy about it.
When You Guess My Feelings...
Similarly, it's rare for someone guessing how I feel to guess right. It happens, of course, but it happens more seldom than being guessed wrong. And it breaks rapport for me as well since the other person is demonstrating that they really don't understand my experience, which is essentially the opposite of empathy.
Worse, an incorrect guess amounts to a psychic attack. It takes energy on my part to recognize the attack, investigate my own feelings, notice that you are projecting onto me, and then take action to defend myself from your attack. In a large group of people, with many people making these sorts of attacks one after the other, the experience can become intolerable.
For me and for people like me, and NVC based group process can be abusive.
Attack #3 - Needs vs Strategies
Attack #3 is a little more complicated to explain.
NLP talks about achieving goals where a goal is stated as a "well formed outcome", which essentially means that the goal is initiated by you, controlled by you, and includes sensory specific cues that can be used to recognize when the goal has been completed, (these are called "observations" in NVC).
In NVC, there are no goals. Instead, the idea is to work towards addressing "needs" which are described specifically as not being well formed outcomes. In fact, there's a list of what constitutes appropriate "needs" since everyone is presupposed to have the same needs and the list is finite. Also note that in the absence of a well formed outcome, no one ever actually accomplishes their goals in NVC. Instead, either their needs are met or they keep practicing the NVC process.
In both NVC and in NLP a "strategy" is how one gets to the desired state, be it a goal or a need.
However, in NLP, goals can, and frequently are nested. It's common to break a big goal up into smaller goals. This is referred to as "chunking" or finding the right "chunk size" since some goals are just too overwhelming to address head on without being broken down into pieces.
Also, there's a technique in NLP call meta chaining. Meta chaining is taking a goal and then asking, "if you had that goal, what else would you have that would be even more important to you? That is, what would achieving this goal accomplish for you?" This is an important piece of a number of different change work processes. In a nutshell, if you can recognize a higher goal, then it become easier to let go of a lower level strategy. And this recurs in several of the major NLP processes.
Needs don't nest in NVC. It's all simple and flat, although one can, and is presumed to, have multiple needs concurrently. And now I'm ready to explain the third attack.
If you have a strategy which addresses your need, and I have a strategy which addresses my need, and for whatever reason, I don't like your need, I can say, "Oh, but your need isn't really a need. It's just a strategy. If we only knew what the real need was behind your strategy, then we could find you a different strategy for accomplishing that need."
Notice that this is exactly like NLP meta chaining. It also leads to changing your behavior rather than changing mine. And because of this demotion of your need into "just" a strategy, I find this particular behavior to be abusive.
It would be a different situation if I came to you and complained that I'd like to quit smoking and I'd like your help. At that point, it makes perfect sense to meta chain, and find alternate strategies to meet whatever goals smoking might meet for me. That's initiated by me, I've asked for a change, and I've asked for your help. My consent is clear in this case whereas in the NVC paradigm, consent is presumed because... "everyone has the need to connect".
In my opinion, this is abusive.
Attack #4 - Compassion
Attack #4 is the final line.
Marshall himself says that you can practice all of NVC word perfect and that it will fail... if you aren't coming at it from a place of compassion.
So the final attack comes when we're both practicing NVC and I'm still not getting my way. At that point, I simply claim that you aren't coming at the discussion from a place of compassion. This gives me permission to dismiss you and walk away while blaming you for the communications failure.
I find this type of dismissal to be abusive.
Conclusions
It would be convenient if I could simply claim that Marshall and the facilitators weren't coming at the IIT with compassion. And if it is true that compassion will necessarily predict success with NVC, then it must be true that they weren't. But I think the situation is more complex.
I suspect that Marshall has been a charming and talented agent for change in the past. Marshall and NVC still have a reputation for being strong on empathy. But I didn't find it.
I believe that a sufficiently talented and insightful practitioner could still make NVC work, although I also believe that there are far more effective modalities available in the world today.
I'm sorry to be the one to say it but I think that it needs to be said. Marshall is aging. He may still be a wonderful man but he is no longer the entertaining instructor or perceptive agent for change that he likely was in the past.
I think this extends to many areas that I might not have considered from a distance. For example, if, in the past, Marshall was able to work with his caterers, his venue hosts, and his staff to create a fine experience for all participants... that is, if it were his force of personality and skill which brought it all together, and that skill is fading, then it begins to make sense that instead of being the smooth and professional experience one might expect, there might be conflicts developing with the venue, with the caterers, and amongst the staff.
Marshall no longer commands the focus, the detail, the subtlety, nor the bigger picture understanding. If there were one piece of info that I'd wished I'd known prior to spending the time and money to attend an IIT, this is the piece I wish I had known.
Chris English
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
This is an open letter and review of my experience at the "International Intensive Training" on Nonviolent Communications, (NVC), given by the Center for Nonviolent Communications, (CNVC), and taught by Marshall Rosenberg, the founder and innovator of NVC, in Albuquerque, New Mexico in September 2011.
First, I'm going to admit a few biases.
Biases
I'm multiply certified in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, (NLP), including practitioner, master, health, trainer, and a number of peripheral certifications including hypnosis. NLP changed my life because it opened my mind to the possibility of win-win situations, getting everyone's needs met, taking responsibility for my life, and because it provided nuts and bolts concrete instruction on communications including sensory specific descriptions of communications strategies and numerous sensitivity exercises intended to help develop my understanding of nonverbal communications. NLP taught me strategies for solving just about any personal and/or interpersonal problem I might run into. NLP also taught me skills for observing any expert in any field, eliciting their strategy, (even outside their conscious awareness), and modeling it such that it could be taught to others.
I will also admit that while I've read Marshall's book and taken a few short introductions to NVC, I have not been impressed with the NVC process itself nor with other practitioners. My purpose in attending the IIT was specifically to model Marshall's reported skills in empathy in order to develop those skills in myself.
I'm autistic. I'm not even going to begin to explain my autistic experience because that would literally take books and, frankly, I don't know the non-autistic experience of life well enough to explain the differences. Suffice to say that in most of my life I "pass" for neuro-typical, (not autistic), but that in environments like IIT which focus exclusively on in-person communications, (note: not written), with particular types of eye contact, facial expressions, vocal inflections, and the like, I frequently fail to pass for "normal". Which is to say, people intuitively recognize my behavior as different both from their own and also from the norm and they project their own meanings onto me. Since most people are not aware of autistic ways of being, they naturally project other types of meanings onto me such as that I am consciously choosing to be aloof, arrogant, cold, closed, nonempathetic, divisive, challenging, or stirring up trouble. These types of "attacks" are rarely malicious, nor is any single misunderstanding intolerable, but the pervasive consistency of these combined attacks have an overwhelming effect that I can't always process in real time.
Also, I left the IIT on the third day. I simply couldn't cope. I couldn't find ways to be in the group. I couldn't find relevant or suitable support. I couldn't find a way to effect constructive change either in the group or in my approach to it. And, to put it bluntly, I couldn't find food to eat in the time available and my hunger colored much of my personal resourcefulness.
Impressions
As for my impressions, there are several things that I want to write about here. The first impression is the issue of taking notes using an iPad or laptop.
On taking notes...
CNVC did an excellent job of letting us know ahead of time about what to expect from the experience, the facilities, and the process in general. So it was with great surprise when we were told on the first day, while holding our iPads and laptops, that we were not allowed to take notes on them. That's all. No discussion, no background, just a surprise proclamation.
That evening in circle, I brought the issue up. NLP style, not NVC. Although Marshall, his wife, and a CNVC representative were all present, no one was willing to take responsibility for having made the demand nor was anyone capable of explaining what was behind the demand.
One of the supporting trainers did offer to hold a session the following day on the issue, although none of the people in authority were to be present. From my perspective, this was simply offensive. Rather than negotiating in good faith over the issues, they were only willing to empathize with people whose needs were not being met. In short, to help them feel better about the fact that their needs weren't being met.
For the record, in another life I'm a computer engineer. I've spent the bulk of my career building technology for people - not corporations, not governments, but for people, in order to improve their lives through better communications, better access to information, and through alternative power structures. To the point, I build devices like the iPad, quite literally.
I'm happy to engage folks on this issue. I'm happy to negotiate a solution which can meet everyone's needs. And yet none of our trainers or facilitators were willing to engage on the issue at all. In my opinion, this was simply poorly done. None of the principles nor methods of NVC were used. And many people were frustrated and/or alienated, myself included. In my experience, this is a typical and common reaction for people to whom change is occurring, when they don't perceive themselves to have any control over or participation in the change. For example, I did not agree to avoid taking notes with my iPad. If I'd known that would be a rule ahead of time, I could have made my own decision about whether to attend under those conditions.
My impression overall is that someone didn't live up to their responsibilities. I'm not entirely sure who. And what we were left with was the request to validate an irrational fear of technology. And I'm sorry, but I was unwilling to validate that particular irrational fear.
This significantly colored my trust in our organizers as well as my experience of the IIT.
On the food...
Secondly, there is the issue of the food. While I understand that it can be difficult to handle all of the idiosyncratic requests of a particularly divergent group such as IIT attendees, I have never experienced the types of problems we were seeing with the quantity of food available.
I have been to other week long events in which the group was essentially isolated from others and catered in order to support that isolation. Groups where the possibility of leaving the group to find alternate food was even more difficult than it was at this IIT. And those groups all seemed to manage quite reasonably. So I'm convinced that it is possible.
On the third day, one of the CNVC representatives spoke about the caterer and the food situation. Essentially, she was apologizing for the fact that it was difficult for many people to find food they could eat and that the food was running out such that there were no entrees left for folks in the second half of the line. Of course, she didn't actually apologize but she did tell us all about how she felt about it, that she was continuing the NVC process with the caterer, that they'd had problems like this fairly consistently in the past, and that they hoped to have them sorted out at some point in a future IIT, (international intensive training).
Of course, none of those things change the fact that a bunch of people aren't being fed. Call me silly, but somehow, getting people fed seems like a higher value to me than validating her frustration at the fact that we aren't being fed.
Let's go over those points again. Among the things we were told were:
- CNVC had been having similar problems with caterers for several IIT's. (That is, this was not a new problem, they've known about it for quite some time.)
- There were CNVC people working the NVC process with regards to this issue.
- That they were hopeful that at some future IIT the problems could be resolved.
Please note that no where in these statements was there any hope for improving the situation at the present IIT. We were specifically discouraged from participating in negotiations over or brainstorming around group solutions.
My "take away" from this was that if I was going to find a way to eat regularly during IIT, I was going to need to do so without support from CNVC and I was going to have to break some rules.
We were asked not to keep food in our rooms. There was one regular sized refrigerator to be shared amongst 50 some participants. There were no food preparation areas available for participants. And the nearest restaurants or grocers were a couple miles away. On foot, this is too far to manage in a 1hr meal break.
To me, this is simply disrespectful and intolerable.
On the empathy session...
The third impression that I'd like to share is from a session with Marshall on the third day, specifically about empathy. Note that part of the NVC process for empathizing involves guessing at the other person's feelings. When asked, (by someone other than me), how one can know what to guess, Marshall had no answer.
One participant suggested that empathizing might require some commonality of experience. And another participant relayed the experience of trying to work with prisoners. His conclusion was that you can't empathize with many prisoners because they don't believe that you have enough commonality of experience to empathize with them.
In my three days at the IIT, this is the only statement that resonated positively with me. It is true that I didn't trust our facilitators. And by the third day I was convinced that few people, facilitators or participants, had sufficient commonality of experience to empathize with me, nor I them.
While this is an interesting experience and learning, the conclusion that I drew from it was twofold. First, that the NVC process for empathy would not be useful to me in my life and secondly, that any hopes I might have had at finding support or empathy for myself at the IIT were even more bleak than I'd originally feared.
Criticisms
In my opinion, the NVC process is inherently abusive.
This doesn't mean that it can't be used constructively. I do believe that many of the NVC goals are worthy goals, goals that I support and encourage, like the idea of mutual wins, finding ways to get everyone's needs met concurrently, helping each of us take more control over our own individual lives, and experiencing our lives, including our emotional lives, as fully as we can.
But the processes proposed by NVC are only effective across a narrow set of situations and people and they are abusive to at least some people.
Rape culture
For example, Marshal says that "a 'no' is a tragic expression of a 'yes'". That's right, we're back to rape culture in a nutshell - back 20 years to before we, as a culture, started recognizing that 'no' means 'no'".
I mean, I think I can puzzle through what he's trying to say, that if you get a clear 'no', that means that the person has a clear picture of something that would meet their needs, (although it might not involve you), but the net result is that he's encouraging everyone to keep trying even when the person with whom they are interacting declines.
And this problem recurs. Here are some of the other patterns I noticed occurring repeatedly from Marshall and from our other facilitators.
Attack #1 - Rapport
Attack #1 works like this.
First, there is a presupposition that everyone has the same needs. Marshall states this explicitly.
Personally, I don't believe this - at least, not in the last 20 years since discovering polyamory, the bdsm scene, paganism, or NLP where it became abundantly clear to me that different people have different needs.
There is a consistent world view in which it might be true at some deep and/or abstract level that everyone has the same needs, but it is clear to me that individual people's interpretations of those needs varies so radically that even claiming out loud that everyone has the same needs invalidates some people's sense of self determinism and verges on abusive. Holding this belief privately would lead me to treating people as though I knew what their needs were better than they did, which, to me, is abusive and sets up a "power over" dynamic. Nonetheless, this is one of the presuppositions of NVC.
A corollary to this presupposition is the presupposition that everyone has a need to connect to each and every other person. Personally, I'm convinced that I have no such need but this is a presupposition of NVC.
Based on these two presuppositions, there is no concept of "rapport" in NVC as there is in NLP. In NLP, managing rapport is one of the first and constant considerations of NLP. But in NVC, rapport is assumed. Anyone who walks away from an NVC practitioner is judged to be broken.
Marshall doesn't use that word. Instead, he says, "the person is not ready to participate in a win-win world", which sounds to me like a roundabout way of saying "defective" and simultaneously claiming that NVC is the only possible approach to a win-win.
Attack #2 - Installation of Feelings
Attack #2 deals with the NVC concept of "empathy". The process in NVC involves guessing what the other person is feeling and naming that.
In NLP, the guess is referred to as a "hallucination" and we're strongly cautioned away from putting voice to our hallucinations. The problem is that when I voice my hallucination, "You must be so angry!", I'm also using a hypnotic language pattern which essentially installs anger in the listener. Regardless of what the other person might have been feeling previously, it's now polluted by my hallucination. And there's a much higher probability that they really are angry after having stated my guess than they were prior.
There is a related pattern in NLP called an audio menu. It is used with people who don't know what they want, as with children. Instead of asking a child what he wants to eat, which might be a big and complicated question, you can ask him whether he would prefer peanut butter and jelly or mac and cheese. This makes the question multiple choice and easier to process.
However, doing this also creates a "power over" position in that one person really is claiming to have a better idea of the other person's needs than they do themselves.
There's a closely related pattern in NLP called a false choice and it works like this. "Would you like to sit quietly over here? Or over there?" No matter what choice is selected, the listener has agreed to sit quietly - hence the false choice.
I name this as an attack because in NVC, the "empathy" process isn't about clarity nor is it about understanding what's there. Instead, it's about telling people how they feel. And that seems abusive to me.
Furthermore, there are several presuppositions involved here.
- that our experience is sufficiently common for empathy
- that the recipient believes that you are capable of empathizing
- and that your guesses are relatively accurate most of the time.
If your experience is not sufficiently common, then there is no reason to suspect kinship. If I do not believe that you are capable of empathizing, then any guess you might make about my feelings is simply offensive. And if your guesses are inaccurate with any degree of frequency, then you are proving the opposite of empathy, (ecpathy), instead.
Please note that for me, all three are false in most cases where I attempt to guess at another person's feelings.
When I guess your feelings...
Guessing feelings works for me if the person is close to angry or angry. If I misguess in that situation, then the misguess tends to provoke a correction along with some projection of the anger onto me. But the net result is that they continue to engage with me even if they become angry with me because of the misguess.
My experience tells me that I get about 1.5 misguesses. After the first, people look at me suspiciously as though I were doing something covert or manipulative because I'm creating an experience for them that they don't understand. It's confusing to them. And I spend some rapport on the guess. That's only useful if I'm simultaneously installing something else, like responding to "I'm angry" with "so you've been angry with your... son?" My response begins to presuppose that the anger is ending and it can be worth spending some rapport to create that tiny shift, even when I'm wrong about the feeling.
If I make two wrong guesses in a row then I'll generally lose rapport. I'll break trust, and typically even break the interaction. That is, the person will stop engaging with me and will often walk away.
In effect, I rarely guess right. And since it's so damaging to guess wrong, I'm much better off not guessing at all. I can do that to an extent by only using words they've used already, complete with mirroring gestures, body position, tone of voice, etc, and by using general language like "what you're feeling" rather than naming any particular emotion. But if I get too many gestures right, then the person perceives me to be mocking them. So I've taking to mirroring as many things as I can, then intentionally omitting or modifying at least one of them. More, if the person seems to be feeling uneasy about it.
When You Guess My Feelings...
Similarly, it's rare for someone guessing how I feel to guess right. It happens, of course, but it happens more seldom than being guessed wrong. And it breaks rapport for me as well since the other person is demonstrating that they really don't understand my experience, which is essentially the opposite of empathy.
Worse, an incorrect guess amounts to a psychic attack. It takes energy on my part to recognize the attack, investigate my own feelings, notice that you are projecting onto me, and then take action to defend myself from your attack. In a large group of people, with many people making these sorts of attacks one after the other, the experience can become intolerable.
For me and for people like me, and NVC based group process can be abusive.
Attack #3 - Needs vs Strategies
Attack #3 is a little more complicated to explain.
NLP talks about achieving goals where a goal is stated as a "well formed outcome", which essentially means that the goal is initiated by you, controlled by you, and includes sensory specific cues that can be used to recognize when the goal has been completed, (these are called "observations" in NVC).
In NVC, there are no goals. Instead, the idea is to work towards addressing "needs" which are described specifically as not being well formed outcomes. In fact, there's a list of what constitutes appropriate "needs" since everyone is presupposed to have the same needs and the list is finite. Also note that in the absence of a well formed outcome, no one ever actually accomplishes their goals in NVC. Instead, either their needs are met or they keep practicing the NVC process.
In both NVC and in NLP a "strategy" is how one gets to the desired state, be it a goal or a need.
However, in NLP, goals can, and frequently are nested. It's common to break a big goal up into smaller goals. This is referred to as "chunking" or finding the right "chunk size" since some goals are just too overwhelming to address head on without being broken down into pieces.
Also, there's a technique in NLP call meta chaining. Meta chaining is taking a goal and then asking, "if you had that goal, what else would you have that would be even more important to you? That is, what would achieving this goal accomplish for you?" This is an important piece of a number of different change work processes. In a nutshell, if you can recognize a higher goal, then it become easier to let go of a lower level strategy. And this recurs in several of the major NLP processes.
Needs don't nest in NVC. It's all simple and flat, although one can, and is presumed to, have multiple needs concurrently. And now I'm ready to explain the third attack.
If you have a strategy which addresses your need, and I have a strategy which addresses my need, and for whatever reason, I don't like your need, I can say, "Oh, but your need isn't really a need. It's just a strategy. If we only knew what the real need was behind your strategy, then we could find you a different strategy for accomplishing that need."
Notice that this is exactly like NLP meta chaining. It also leads to changing your behavior rather than changing mine. And because of this demotion of your need into "just" a strategy, I find this particular behavior to be abusive.
It would be a different situation if I came to you and complained that I'd like to quit smoking and I'd like your help. At that point, it makes perfect sense to meta chain, and find alternate strategies to meet whatever goals smoking might meet for me. That's initiated by me, I've asked for a change, and I've asked for your help. My consent is clear in this case whereas in the NVC paradigm, consent is presumed because... "everyone has the need to connect".
In my opinion, this is abusive.
Attack #4 - Compassion
Attack #4 is the final line.
Marshall himself says that you can practice all of NVC word perfect and that it will fail... if you aren't coming at it from a place of compassion.
So the final attack comes when we're both practicing NVC and I'm still not getting my way. At that point, I simply claim that you aren't coming at the discussion from a place of compassion. This gives me permission to dismiss you and walk away while blaming you for the communications failure.
I find this type of dismissal to be abusive.
Conclusions
It would be convenient if I could simply claim that Marshall and the facilitators weren't coming at the IIT with compassion. And if it is true that compassion will necessarily predict success with NVC, then it must be true that they weren't. But I think the situation is more complex.
I suspect that Marshall has been a charming and talented agent for change in the past. Marshall and NVC still have a reputation for being strong on empathy. But I didn't find it.
I believe that a sufficiently talented and insightful practitioner could still make NVC work, although I also believe that there are far more effective modalities available in the world today.
I'm sorry to be the one to say it but I think that it needs to be said. Marshall is aging. He may still be a wonderful man but he is no longer the entertaining instructor or perceptive agent for change that he likely was in the past.
I think this extends to many areas that I might not have considered from a distance. For example, if, in the past, Marshall was able to work with his caterers, his venue hosts, and his staff to create a fine experience for all participants... that is, if it were his force of personality and skill which brought it all together, and that skill is fading, then it begins to make sense that instead of being the smooth and professional experience one might expect, there might be conflicts developing with the venue, with the caterers, and amongst the staff.
Marshall no longer commands the focus, the detail, the subtlety, nor the bigger picture understanding. If there were one piece of info that I'd wished I'd known prior to spending the time and money to attend an IIT, this is the piece I wish I had known.