Beyond Feelings: Getting Started With Nonviolent Communication

Ali Miller, MFT
NVC is so transformative for so many people because it invites us to take responsibility for our feelings, by shifting our focus away from blaming others for our feelings and towards looking inside and identifying what met or unmet need is the source of our feelings.  The more we can connect our feelings to our needs, the more likely we are to actually get our needs met!
-Ali Miller, MFT







Author: Ali Miller, MFT
Website: www.AliMillerMFT.com, www.BefriendingOurselves.com

If you are interested in living a more meaningful, authentic, and connected life the teachings of psychologist and international peacemaker, Marshall Rosenberg, are for you! Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is used in a wide range of situations—from mediating conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, to helping couples work through disagreements and increase intimacy, to personal growth/inner healing work, and everything in-between. I have been personally enriched since I started learning NVC six years ago and am awed and inspired at the transformations in the lives of my clients and am excited to share how you can use NVC tools in your life!

Ready? Great! I am going to focus on two areas:

1) How you can use the tools and consciousness of NVC to create a more harmonious relationship with yourself, to develop more inner peace, self-compassion, authenticity, and genuine empowerment.

2) How NVC can support you in your relationships with others, including partners, lovers, friends, colleagues, coworkers, bosses, supervisees, teachers, neighbors, siblings, parents, children, and even that pesky telemarketer who won’t stop calling you. I will pay particular attention to how couples can use these tools to stay connected through conflicts, deepen intimacy, and enjoy each other more.

So how does it work? I think you’ll understand it better if you actually experience some beginning principles, so here’s an exercise you can do right now:
In addition to turning our attention to our feelings, NVC goes further than other therapies because we also turn our attention to our needs - met and unmet needs. In the NVC model, our feelings are connected to our needs: when our needs are met, we feel pleasant feelings such as joy, contentment, and excitement; when our needs are not met, we feel unpleasant feelings such as sadness, loneliness, and anger.

Try this:
These two questions: What am I feeling? and What am I needing? are at the heart of NVC.
One of the reasons NVC is so transformative for so many people is that it invites us to take responsibility for our feelings, by shifting our focus away from blaming others for our feelings and towards looking inside and identifying what met or unmet need is the source of our feelings.
For example, if someone tells me that this blog entry is crappy, rather than blaming them for making me feel hurt, through NVC consciousness my perception shifts to seeing that I might feel really sad because I have an unmet need for appreciation and contribution. Certainly their statement affected me, but it didn’t cause my feelings.

This is one of the big shifts of consciousness that NVC offers: other people don’t cause our feelings; our feelings stem from our met or unmet needs. We are so used to blaming others when our needs aren’t being fulfilled, and this often leads to disconnection, not only from others, but also from ourselves. The more we can connect our feelings to our needs, the more likely we are to actually get our needs met.

Can you sense how empowering this can be and how it has the potential to avert a lot of conflict in our heads, homes, communities, and planet? No more waiting for other people to change in order for us to be happy. No more blaming our partners for “making” us angry. No more believing we’re powerless victims. That’s the potential that NVC offers us and, from my own experience, I can tell you: it’s huge.

Here’s my invitation to you: Next time you feel upset about something, take a breath, and listen inside: What are you feeling? What are you needing? I believe that if you make it a practice to connect your feelings to your needs, you’ll notice a big change in how you relate to yourself and others. Let me know!

I’d love my posts to be interactive so that it speaks to you and supports you as you try out NVC principles. We are just getting started so come check back in on Thursdays for more NVC tools. If you want to go straight to the source, I highly recommend Marshall Rosenberg’s book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, or check out www.cnvc.org.



Labels: , , , , ,