Nonviolence — It Beats All the Other Methods, Hands Down

By Maria Padhila

Over the past few years as I’ve met new people and told them I was relatively new to polyamory, nearly every one of them recommended that I read up on or take a class or two in Nonviolent Communication.

Also known as “talkin’ like a Unitarian,” Nonviolent Communication is described on the Center for Nonviolent Communication website in ways including the following:

With NVC we learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others, and to identify and clearly articulate what ‘is alive in us’. When we focus on clarifying what is being observed, felt, needed, and wanted, rather than on diagnosing and judging, we discover the depth of our own compassion. Through its emphasis on deep listening — to ourselves as well as others — NVC fosters respect, attentiveness and empathy, and engenders a mutual desire to give from the heart. The form is simple, yet powerfully transformative. Founded on consciousness, language, communication skills, and use of power that enable us to remain human, even under trying conditions, Nonviolent Communication contains nothing new: all that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries.

That website will lead you to lots of sources if you’re interested in learning more. If you’d like to get a taste of what it’s like in action before delving deeper, there are a couple of online exercises that you can try.

This one is technologically awkward, but it’s useful in that it has the Official Lists of Feelings and Needs. The “official” part is a joke, of course, but the vocabulary lists there are what make me want to slap Nonviolent Communication. Upside the head, you know. Of course they don’t ‘make me’ do anything — I make myself feel slappy, I’m the one responsible for the slappy feeling. Plus, I would never do anything mean to Nonviolent Communication.

I’d just instead kind of lazily backslide into habits like replying, with a sigh, “Nothing…” when someone asks what’s wrong, or replying to a simple few words with a verbal smackdown because very few people actually ask me what’s wrong. Most people aren’t interested in how I’m feeling or what I need at all. That’s kind of life. Or the habit of statements like: “You always make me feel guilty about that!” Nothing like combining refusal to own one’s feelings with an always/never statement! That’s about as far as I go. As with athletics, I’m a dedicated amateur, not an elite.

But what would really cover the waterfront would be if I could slide a “…because you don’t really love me” in there. And then, a swirl of pass-agg whipped cream: “But it’s OK, because I understand that you just act that way because of your personality disorder (which I diagnosed) / lack of spiritual evolution / lack of awareness / Virgo stellium / parent who didn’t love you / intimate contractual relationship with Satan / etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Now, top with the plump maraschino cherry that is the threat of rejection: “I’m going out to go see my husband / boyfriend / girlfriend / mother / therapist / bookie / real estate agent now.”

In a time where a lot of communication can be reduced to just that, I think I need Nonviolent Communication, even if it is stilted. (The above is NOT what I do, if I need to explain that. I’m a little less unaware than that.)

No, the problem here is that the approach to correcting communication involves limiting the words you’re ‘allowed’ to use. Can’t do that to a writer (or a big talker). Despite the impression you might have gathered by seeing their words reduced to inspirational blocks of type for posting on Facebook, really great writers use violent, passionate, blaming, shaming, ugly, cruel, etc., language.

My other problem with the lists is I feel they don’t address human needs to control others and their environment — these are real needs, and they are the ones most imposed on me that trigger my freakouts. Even shaming comes down to a need to control another — an attempt to make someone shut up and go away.

So what I pick up from it is to use it to increase awareness, even if it doesn’t change the actual words I use. Nobody gets to take my words — why, they’re my only weapon, after all.

I did the shift exercise for this column using something my mother-in-law says that hurts me out of all proportion. When I offer to help in the kitchen, she often says “Oh, great, thanks for offering now that everything is already done. Your timing is perfect.”

I fall for it every time, and I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the heart every time. I recognized a long list of the feelings and needs on both sides. Feeling rejected, disrespected; needing inclusion, respect; boredom on her part, because she is doing a lot of the work and would rather be included in the fun parts. I well realize that busting on other people will not achieve this goal for her, but what do you say? I also have to reconcile my own need to be included. I am rejected from not only this but from many, many tribes in many years, and live in a state of primal fear that I won’t have the resources to live, which is what fear of rejection actually comes down to. If someone isn’t watching your back once in a while, how can you sleep, eat, raise a child? You need a tribe to protect you.

Being an artist, I know that being rejected comes with the territory. But you know, there’s always that thing: Sometimes you’re being rejected because you’re an artist or a shaman type, who’s making people nervous because you’re exploring the outer reaches, you’re passionate, you look too deep. Sometimes you’re being rejected because you’re an asshole, or you look too needy, or you’re boring. I think I would get the reject button hit on these family matters no matter who I was or how I behaved, but that doesn’t make it easier — I spend a lot of time with the married family in a state of shame and existential threat. It is my problem, as is every feeling and need, and I am told it is my problem, and my pain over this is usually met with frustration, anger, defensiveness, fear. And I am also paranoid, neurotic, imagining everything, and have my period. Ow.

I did not feel the compassion shift. Not even toward myself, where my most violent communication is most often directed. (I suspect this is true of most of us, and I hope this or other techniques could be some help in us ending this violence against ourselves.) It is usually difficult to feel I have much intrinsic value here, or even that the work I craft and the services I provide to others have any value. People don’t even seem to value my appreciation of them much of the time. Another exercise?

This one looks at intention, and I think is useful to transform violent communication against the self as well as with others. It’s called “What’s My Intention?” and it is meant to reconnect the intention to the statement, a connection that’s often lost or attached to a power strip that then goes under the dresser and is really hard to reach, so most of us just say “fuck it” and keep going. But starting with an attempt to “try recalling something you did that involves saying no to someone” can help untangle that connection and make it clearer.

When you come down to it, speculating on others’ motivations is usually a dead end. It’s useful as in the shift exercise, because it can open up vistas of compassion for others, but in the end, the only motivations you can really know are your own, no matter how genius perceptive you are (and as I demonstrated last time, oh, I sure am, yes indeed. ;)). So I think looking at myself first is the way to go.

It can be painful, but then again I am not coming out of 20 years of prison in Burma/Myanmar. Activist and civil disobedience leader Aung San Suu Kyi was only recently able to collect her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. She had guns pointed at her as she went to vote, among her other pro-democracy battles.

There is a point at which nonviolent resistance begins to appear like the most powerful kind of passive aggression, a phenomenon to which anyone who has tried to persuade and eventually pry a two-year-old off the floor of her friend’s house when the playdate is over can attest. Some commenting on Aung San Suu Kyi’s techniques talked of forcing a transformation on the opposition through modeling different behavior. I’ve got no problem with that, because I don’t reject force and violence per se. Despite the atrocities committed, the old defense of ‘he needed killing’ can in extreme conditions be hard to argue with.

All that aside, what I take from her struggle are two things: that sheer, stubborn ability to just keep going despite all the opposition with a sort of serenity and, well, cool. Violence is very uncool.

Here is a quote from her address at Oxford about her time in isolation:

It felt as though I were no longer part of the real world. There was a house which was my world. There was a world of others who also were not free, but who were together in prison as a community. And there was the world of the free. Each one was a different planet pursuing its own separate cause in an indifferent universe.

The argument that sways me most strongly, though, and would almost lead me to give up nine-tenths of my vocabulary is this, from an interview aired on NPR:

I was attracted to the way of non-violence, but not on moral grounds, as some believe, only on practical, political grounds. It is simply based on my conviction that we need to put an end to the tradition of regime change through violence, a tradition that has become the running sore of Burmese politics.

Nonviolence is practical. We’ve tried everything else. It’s what the wonks would call a strongly evidence-based solution — look at India, South Africa. Certainly the advent of some democracy and justice doesn’t mean the beginning of a fairy tale, but people did change things using nonviolence. It’s that practical reality that most appeals to me.