Compassionate Living

Here is a one hour introduction to NVC consciousness that I gave on the bbs-radio-show Advanced Living with Kenneth Lesser on July 12, 2008.

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“RESPONSIBILITY!” was at the heart of a message I wanted to convey to my 12-year-old daughter last week. It must have been important because I was screaming it at the top of my lungs, which was shocking for both of us. After days of mourning my unmet needs for the care and trust I wish to have in our relationship (and communicating this to my daughter), I am now able to enjoy how this “interaction” motivated me to explore what this need for responsibility is all about for me.

I am grateful for the contributions of Inbal Kashtan, an NVC trainer in California who directs the Center for Nonviolent Communication Peaceful Parents, Peaceful World project and Rita Herzog, a trainer in Cleveland, for bringing me back once again to the importance of NVC consciousness over NVC skills and conceptual knowledge. We could all probably agree that when people take responsibility for their actions life is enriched in many ways (needs are met for ease, trust, harmony, efficiency, etc.). Yet, as I now know viscerally, reponsibility can be expressed with a power over consciousness that can lead to just as much disconnection as our most intense judgments of others.

On Taking Full Responsibility – (this is paraphrased from Inbal’s CD entitled Connected Parenting)

The tendency in our culture is to blame ourselves or blame others. We think that if we are blaming ourselves then we are taking responsibility. We think that if we are blaming another person it is because it is h/her responsibility. The idea in NVC is that my feelings have to do with me and your feelings have to do with you. My actions have to do with me. They are my choice. There is nothing that you can make me do. I am constantly choosing.

What I get from this is that I was holding responsibility in the situation with my daughter from the consciousness of the right/wrong blame game. Responsibility from an NVC consciousness is quite different. Rita Herzog helped me get clear about what I am responsible for in NVC:

1. I am responsible for how I take things and how I express myself. I am responsible for how I choose to hear other people and myself. Am I listening for feelings and needs that connect me to myself and the other person or do I focus my attention on information that helps me judge who is right/wrong, good/bad in the situation?

2. I am not responsible for the other person’s reaction. I have no control of this. Nor is the other person responsible for my reaction. They have no control over this.

3. I can be responsible to the other person (not for the other person) by being willing to listen with empathy – to stay in the dialogue. If we focus on being right then we miss the point, which is connection.

Instead of focusing my attention on building a case about how I know that I am right that someone isn’t being straight with me (which is what I did with my daughter) I much prefer the following question that Rita posed to me which focuses my attention on connecting to the needs that we hold in common:

“What need is this person protecting through their behavior?”

When I ask this question I see a human being who is doing the best she can with the strategies that she has learned in her 12 years of life to get her need met for play and fun. As an aside, as I write this I also see that part of my difficulty in connecting to my daughter’s need for fun is because I am not fully connected to its importance in my own life.

This connection to her needs does not mean that I am going to give up my own needs for trust and responsibility in our relationship, but it changes my strategies for how I go about meeting these needs. Before, I wanted to “teach a lesson” about responsibility. Now I want to embody responsibility in the way that I wrote about above which I predict will lead to the quality of connection that I would like to have with my daughter and subsequently to getting both of our needs met. In hindsight, I can see clearly how my lack of self-connection about what I was valuing in that interaction with my daughter didn’t meet my need for taking responsibility in the NVC sense of the word. This is a bitter pill to take for my ego that loves to be right, but it feels wonderful and “right” in my heart and for our relationship.

I agree with Rita Herzog when she says that often people don’t want to take responsibility because they haven’t learned how to make the distinction between being accountable and taking blame. From what most of us have been taught in our culture, taking responsibility as blame is tantamount to “giving in” and throwing oneself at the mercy of another’s judgments and perhaps more importantly, subjecting oneself to one’s own judgments. I can see why I have shied from taking responsibility in my own life when I was thinking of it in terms of blame. Who wants to subject themselves to the pain and fear of losing connection and love because of judgments that they have done something bad and wrong?

Being accountable looks like this: “I would have liked to have done things differently and I know that I am not a bad person i.e. I can connect to the beautiful needs that I was trying to meet by my actions.”

Hearing someone’s unmet needs as blame looks like this: “I keep myself intact by not taking responsibility i.e. I am afraid that I will be “less” in other people’s eyes and/or in my own if I admit that I did something wrong or bad because that means that I am wrong or bad. Losing connection or belonging because I am labeled as bad or wrong is too much to risk.”

If I know how to keep myself intact (by focusing on my feelings and needs; a place where neither I nor the other person has done anything wrong) and not go to that dark place of self-blame or blaming others then I will probably be more willing to take responsibility.

One of the values that I am trying to live is to make choices based on a connection to needs instead of reacting to my interpretations and judgments like I did with my daughter the other day. I see the pain that the latter stimulates in my life and I would like to contribute to all of us being freer to live from our hearts instead of reacting from our habitual ways of wanting to be right, looking good, judging etc. that lead us to disconnect from ourselves and others.

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