[NVC] Ease and comfort
I've been doing a lot of thinking about my need for ease and comfort, in the NVC sense. Like the need for (non-physical) safety, I have become suspicious of this need, thinking it conceals something else.
My first clue has generally been how often this need is associated with anger--in fact, almost the most intense anger I experience, especially in terms of being accompanied by particularly vicious fantasies of revenge. Why would someone or something's putting stress on a need for comfort inspire such a ferocious defense?
I also have examined this need in an institutional sense--it seems as if some of the most destructive collective behaviours are brought to bear when challenges to a lifestyle are presented: challenges that seem to target the creature comforts of an institution, nation, or whatnot. Slavery comes to mind, although of course there is a powerful economic component here--slaves not only lift the burden of difficult labour from the shoulders of the privileged, they also massively leverage economic gains.
To return to the personal, I have also been witness to a similar seemingly disproportionate hostility where privileged people interact with service workers--I'm not going to insult the memory of slaves who have suffered unbelievable tragedy at the hands of their masters, but I do think there is some parallel with how service workers are treated as non-persons so often. How many of us have not witnessed some well-to-do businessperson completely losing their shit when their coffee isn't just right?
So I'm coming to think that "ease" is not really a need. It conceals an edifice of privilege--the idea that I should not suffer inconvenience, delay, boredom, or other rather minor insults to my sense of a life smooth and free of any irregularities in the rhythm I have established. That rhythm is the most superficial layer of the self-making project. Perhaps it is simply having been spared much hardship that is genuinely threatening to health, self-expression, connection, or other needs that I find easier to understand, that produces an extreme sensitivity to the ordinary annoyances of life. The emotional system, as it were, becomes hypersensitive from under-stimulation. Or, the other way around: having developed hypersensitivity for some reason, we surround ourselves with luxuries to keep even the littlest disturbance at bay.
Of course, there are real needs under those behaviours, as always. I think the closest I can come to an idea of "ease" that makes sense to me as a need is to husband my energy--it is important to me that I use my energy in a way that, after all, does support life (taking as given that this is the most fundamental need). But energy that goes into getting hacked off about not having the comfort I want is being pissed away only by myself, in the same way that any "unsafeness" I experience when I am free to depart and not under physical threat comes only from my own insecurity about my sense of self. (This is in no way to minimize the pain that can come with feelings of psychological threat--only that I would prefer to center the responsibility for those reactions in myself. And I would add, as Robert Gonzalez has also said, that children mark a special case here, and do need a level of emotional safety so they may develop a mature and resillient personality.)
The other element is a need for health; some symptoms that are only physically uncomfortable may be warnings of an illness that should be attended to. Ironically I see a lot of examples around me where people are very sensitive to "comfort" and yet in powerful denial about behaviour that seriously compromises their health.
So, these words are mostly notes to myself on an ongoing maunder I am having. If anyone feels like replying, please say what you like, and if you are particularly interested to help, what I'm trying to get to is a clearer understanding of this idea of "ease" and "comfort," especially (but not only) in the NVC context.
My first clue has generally been how often this need is associated with anger--in fact, almost the most intense anger I experience, especially in terms of being accompanied by particularly vicious fantasies of revenge. Why would someone or something's putting stress on a need for comfort inspire such a ferocious defense?
I also have examined this need in an institutional sense--it seems as if some of the most destructive collective behaviours are brought to bear when challenges to a lifestyle are presented: challenges that seem to target the creature comforts of an institution, nation, or whatnot. Slavery comes to mind, although of course there is a powerful economic component here--slaves not only lift the burden of difficult labour from the shoulders of the privileged, they also massively leverage economic gains.
To return to the personal, I have also been witness to a similar seemingly disproportionate hostility where privileged people interact with service workers--I'm not going to insult the memory of slaves who have suffered unbelievable tragedy at the hands of their masters, but I do think there is some parallel with how service workers are treated as non-persons so often. How many of us have not witnessed some well-to-do businessperson completely losing their shit when their coffee isn't just right?
So I'm coming to think that "ease" is not really a need. It conceals an edifice of privilege--the idea that I should not suffer inconvenience, delay, boredom, or other rather minor insults to my sense of a life smooth and free of any irregularities in the rhythm I have established. That rhythm is the most superficial layer of the self-making project. Perhaps it is simply having been spared much hardship that is genuinely threatening to health, self-expression, connection, or other needs that I find easier to understand, that produces an extreme sensitivity to the ordinary annoyances of life. The emotional system, as it were, becomes hypersensitive from under-stimulation. Or, the other way around: having developed hypersensitivity for some reason, we surround ourselves with luxuries to keep even the littlest disturbance at bay.
Of course, there are real needs under those behaviours, as always. I think the closest I can come to an idea of "ease" that makes sense to me as a need is to husband my energy--it is important to me that I use my energy in a way that, after all, does support life (taking as given that this is the most fundamental need). But energy that goes into getting hacked off about not having the comfort I want is being pissed away only by myself, in the same way that any "unsafeness" I experience when I am free to depart and not under physical threat comes only from my own insecurity about my sense of self. (This is in no way to minimize the pain that can come with feelings of psychological threat--only that I would prefer to center the responsibility for those reactions in myself. And I would add, as Robert Gonzalez has also said, that children mark a special case here, and do need a level of emotional safety so they may develop a mature and resillient personality.)
The other element is a need for health; some symptoms that are only physically uncomfortable may be warnings of an illness that should be attended to. Ironically I see a lot of examples around me where people are very sensitive to "comfort" and yet in powerful denial about behaviour that seriously compromises their health.
So, these words are mostly notes to myself on an ongoing maunder I am having. If anyone feels like replying, please say what you like, and if you are particularly interested to help, what I'm trying to get to is a clearer understanding of this idea of "ease" and "comfort," especially (but not only) in the NVC context.