Being compassionate with ourselves
After having described how this new language works, we will see that in practice it is much more than a simple language, it is indeed a new philosophy of life, a new way to relate with ourselves, with others, with the world that surrounds us and even with God.
“Charity begins at home” – When we are violent with ourselves it is difficult to be compassionate with others; when we do not exercise empathy with ourselves it is also difficult to exercise it with others. True love is unconditional, it is this type of self-empathy, free of constraints that we should have for ourselves. However, the structures of power, in order to dominate us, teach us to hate ourselves when our performance does not measure up to what is expected of us, and to love ourselves only when our social performance is acceptable within the parameters of the structures of power.
You shall love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19:18) – The unconditional love of self is not to be seen as selfishness, rather, it is the measure of love for others. I am first called to love myself and only then I am called to love others with the same degree that I love myself. Self-esteem and self-empathy, far from being considered as selfishness, are the foundation on which I establish any sort of relationship, being it with myself, with others and even with God. So, there is no true altruism without self-empathy.
The domination system cleverly sought to limit violence among people by inserting itself inside the moral consciousnesses of all. The Freudian superego works like a “Trojan horse” for the domination system. The domination system’s coercion is in this way exercised by the person against himself.
Like the Trojan horse of the domination system, the superego within our conscience mimics the criminal system of our society. It acts like the police who catch us committing a crime, and then acts like the court that judges us, declaring us guilty and applying a penalty in the form of self-punishment. This penalty can be prison in the form of depression, thus withdrawing ourselves from life, or depriving ourselves of this or that, for example, of love: I neither love myself nor let others love me. Or worse still, handing out the maximum penalty to oneself, the death penalty, that is, suicide – when one becomes the worst enemy of oneself and kills oneself in self-defense.
We use NVC to evaluate ourselves in order to generate self-growth rather than self-hatred. Nothing positive can come out of a negative motivation. The motivation to change cannot come from destructive energy, like guilt and shame, because these are forms of self-hatred. Whatever we do that is motivated or in reaction to feelings of guilt and/or shame can never be a positive act that gives us joy and happiness. Only what is motivated by the desire to enrich our lives and that of others can bring us joy and happiness.
Against sacrificing oneself for others
For this reason the Father loves me; because I lay down my life (…). No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. John 10:17-18
Throughout his working life, whenever my father worked the night shift he would confide in us by saying, “Off to exile I go”. My mother towards the end of her life used to say, “I never had a respite in my life”. I can conclude that my parents sacrificed themselves for their children. I have no doubt that they did it out of love for us and not out of duty, but at times they gave us the understanding that they fulfilled the needs of their children by leaving behind or putting aside the fulfillment of their own. This is not true Christianity because it does not take into account that love of neighbour must mimic love of self.
In NVC there are no slaves of duty; there is nothing that we must do out of obligation, out of duty; there is nothing we have to do whether we like it or not. The things that we do out of obligation have a high price to pay in our psyche and in the psyche of the recipient of our deeds, because they are motivated by a negative energy. This is a violent language because it denies that we have a choice. Rosenberg always stresses that we should only do the things that we like to do, and since we are free people, we always have a choice and the ability to decide.
In one of Rosenberg’s workshop, a woman opposed this way of thinking by saying that there are things that a person just had to do whether they wanted to or not; as an example she said that in fact after this workshop she had to go home and cook, and that she hated cooking with a passion and yet every day for 20 years she had to do it even when she was sick as a dog. That same night the woman went home and announced that she has decided that she would no longer cook and the family, contrary to what was expected, thanked her because now they could eat without having to listen to her complaints and regrets as she prepared the meals out of duty, and did a poor job of it too.
This does not mean that much of what we do by choice is not difficult and can cost us much sweat and tears, but when we do what we do out of choice and love and not out of duty or obligation, it makes a big difference and becomes much easier. As a Portuguese proverb has it, “he who runs for pleasure does not tire” meaning that if you do a job that you like it is not a hardship.
Rosenberg recalls from his childhood how his Uncle Julius would come to his house every evening after a long day at work as a pharmacist to help his mother take care of his maternal grandmother who was paralyzed and bed-ridden, suffering from a progressive degenerative neurological condition called Lou Gehrig's disease. He would always have a beautiful smile on his face as he cleaned Rosenberg’s grandmother despite the unpleasantness of the task; because he did it out of love, it was easy for him to overcome any inconveniences.
Personally I remember when I volunteered at a psychiatric hospital during my novitiate, where every day my colleague and I would take care of the personal hygiene of a man who had been a professor of literature at the University of Valladolid and who now lay paralyzed in bed with his mental faculties much compromised. One day while taking care of him, out of the blue he said, “You guys are very good-hearted people because shit is always shit…”
Jesus, as we have quoted above, never loses the power of free choice, despite saying here and elsewhere that he follows the will of his Father, even in the Garden of Gethsemane when his will and the will of the Father seem to diverge. The moment he decided to honor the will of the Father, this is already no longer the Father’s will but his own, because it is the fruit of a free choice. It is he who chooses the course of his life, this does not come to him imposed from above or from outside of himself. To Jesus no one takes his life from him because it is he who gives it freely. All who have died by martyrdom died like Jesus, by choice: to safeguard the eternal life by letting go of the temporal one, instead of saving temporarily the temporal one and ending up in time losing both the temporal and the eternal.
What is depression in NVC?
For Rosenberg depression results from what people think of themselves and what they say to themselves. For him there is no such thing as a disease called depression, it is instead the way the society educates people to think about themselves that creates it. If we ask a depressed person what his needs are at the present moment, it is most likely that he would respond with a diagnosis of himself, “I am a failure, I see my brothers who are so successful in life and I am a nobody”.
In his book The Revolution in Psychiatry, Ernest Becker attributes depression to “cognitively arrested alternatives” where the person finds himself in a blind alley without any cognitive exits at the level of his thought. When we feed an interior with hypercritical dialogues of what we are and of our shortcomings, we can get caught in this self-diagnosis that there is something wrong with us. For example, if I am hungry and instead of acknowledging my hunger and considering strategies that nature naturally puts at my disposal and start to look for food, as any living being would, I scold myself with “You are always hungry”. This spiritual and psychological condition makes us completely oblivious of our real needs, and by not being aware of our needs we have no way of satisfying them.
Or if I am a parent and I don’t know how, or find it hard, to connect with the needs of my children and instead of finding out ways to connect, it comes to my mind that I am a terrible parent. If we think that there is such thing as a good parent then we will become depressed in no time.
Altogether this way of thinking alienates us from our needs so that by not recognizing them we can do nothing to fulfill them. We enter into a vicious circle, or a cul-de-sac, in which the depression goes deeper and deeper, spiraling downward, digging an ominous trench in our psyche into which we can fall and lose ourselves completely.
Dan Greenburg, in his book How to Make Yourself Miserable, asks us the readers in a humorous tone to compare ourselves to what some famous people like Mozart have achieved at various stages of their lives as a way to feel depressed. He also shows as examples photos of perfect and beautiful bodies with ideal measurements and then asks us to take our own measurements. It is guaranteed that in no time we will feel miserable when we compare ourselves to these famous characters. It is the way we judge ourselves, sometimes in comparison to others, that makes us miserable and depressed; self-assessments that imply malice, abnormality, dysfunctionality, or inferiority are sure path to depression.
As Rosenberg says, when anger-stricken we allow ourselves to be invaded by negative, hypercritical thoughts in which we blame ourselves and others, it then becomes difficult to establish a healthy internal environment for ourselves. NVC helps us to create a state of peace of mind, and encourages us to focus our attention on what we really need – by translating internal negative messages into feelings and needs, instead of hypercritically and negatively analyzing what goes on with ourselves and with others.
Those who are depressed have a low self-esteem and are numbed by a false negative concept of themselves. The truth is that behind these self-judgments that produce depression are the needs that have not been met. The difficulty is that we have been educated not to think of what we need and what we feel, but rather what we are.
The solution is therefore to recognize these thoughts and self-assessment when they surface in our consciousness and translate them into unmet needs. Once the need is recognized, the depression disappears and is replaced by a feeling of sadness or frustration; these feelings are positive ones because they no longer lead us into a dark tunnel as depression does, but instead propel our psyche to search for ways to fulfill these needs.
Confronting the domination system
What produces anger, guilt, depression and shame is never what I or the other says or does, but the way I interpret, evaluate and judge what I or the other says or does. When I understand these statements as alienating, tragic and suicidal ways of expressing unmet needs, I seek then to identify these needs. Anger, guilt, depression and shame dissolve themselves when beyond my previous judgments I find and get connected to unmet needs.
By being connected to our feelings and needs we are then connected to a life serving system as Rosenberg calls it. As he points out, we do not make good slaves when we are connected to our feelings and needs, and this goes against the domination system since all it attempts to do is to disconnect us from our feelings and needs in order to give tribute to their ideology which they implant in our mind to overpower us like a Trojan horse. So instead of educating us in a process or dynamic language that would be more suited for a world in continuous evolution, they educate us in a static language that imprisons us with clichés and tells us what we are to ourselves and to others.
When we live within the NVC philosophy, we never have to be concerned about what the other person tells us but instead, how we take the other person’s statement about us. I don’t have to worry about a person diagnosing me such as saying I am too sensitive; it is not what the other person says that creates my pain but how I react and deal with what the person says.
When what the other person says affects me, I am basically giving him the power to define me, to say what I am or am not. Giving ears to what the other person says about me is to acknowledge his influence over me and to let him determine how I should feel about myself. It is giving up autonomy, conceding defeat and taking my security, my self-worth, out of my own hands and putting it into someone else’s.
It is hard to avoid this from affecting us since we have been taught right from childhood that our whole life depends on how other people think of us, especially people with titles. NVC is a process language not a static one that trains us to hear needs and feelings behind whatever other people tell us. I hear the need behind a “no”, behind a criticism and similarly behind praises, compliments, and congratulations that are given in a static language and are not referable to a concrete need.
Creating a life serving system
I have taken my chances more than once / and I have got my fingers burned /and done some things I wouldn’t have done /If I knew then what I’ve since learned. (Marshal Rosenberg)
Since we never have the perfect information in any given situation, we never do anything wrong and will never do anything wrong. All we do and will ever do, and what all human beings have ever done, is to seek to satisfy needs in order to make life more wonderful for ourselves and for others.
For example, last night we wanted some relaxation and played the music very loudly; the following morning our neighbor greets us in an angry manner. At the time we chose to play the music out loud we were not thinking of our neighbor, he was not part of the equation. Sometimes we choose to do things without a full awareness of the possible implications of our actions.
This does not mean we did something wrong as what we did met the need for relaxation, but it didn’t meet the need to be sensitive to our neighbor. To explain this better Rosenberg splits our psyche into two parts: our chooser-self did meet our need for relaxation, but since it was met at the expense of our educator-self, the part of us that has the need to be sensitive to our neighbor. It empathizes with our educator-self in order to find ways for both needs to be met. Nobody does or has ever done anything wrong deliberately, what all human beings have ever done is to serve life. What at that time they thought were serving life, this also includes Hitler, the strategies they used proved to be wrong, maybe at that time they didn’t know any better but their aim was never to deliberately do something wrong.
Sometimes we may even be aware of the implications of our actions but our need is so strong that we don’t know how to meet both of our needs. For instance, Rosenberg tells us, “I have said things to my children that I knew were wrong and that it would disturb them but my pain at that moment was so great that I took the risk and did it anyway. I did not know at that moment how to do it otherwise. I had two needs at the same time and I didn’t know how to meet them both so I chose to do the one that was more intensive.” We don’t do anything that isn’t for a good reason, even a serial killer kills people to serve life, or so he thinks.
We learn more from our mistakes than from the things we do right. Nobody has ever learned how to ride a bicycle without having fallen more than once. The process of learning anything includes mistakes; what do we do with the mistakes, how do we learn from them and how do we forget about them without losing our self-respect? What we do with our mistakes after having learned a lesson is to mourn them.
Love yourself unconditionally
(…) Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5: 44-45
Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God demonstrates his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Romans 5:7-8
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8: 38-39
In NVC, love is not a feeling, but a need; as such it is a universal part of the human nature; all human beings that ever existed until now and will ever exist, need to love and be loved. This is the first and most important need after the physical ones which we have in common with other living beings. This is the need that most characterizes the human species in comparison with other living beings. Without love there is no human life because to live is to love.
As a universal need embedded in human nature, love is by definition unconditional; it is not constrained to any conditioning nor is it deserved. If you love, then love unconditionally as conditioned love is not love.
God and in general our parents love us unconditionally, that means, we do not need to be morally good, or be successful in life for them to love us. Despite this, when it comes to self-love, I believe that there are only few people who love themselves unconditionally. For the most part, we may even love others unconditionally, but not ourselves. I suppose this is one of the causes of depression. We do not forgive ourselves easily when we make mistakes and are less than perfect because self-love seems to be tied to performance. We love ourselves when we perform well, when we are successful, and tend to despise ourselves otherwise.
But if God loves us unconditionally as it is biblically proven above, why do we not love ourselves as He does? God our Creator sends rain on both the just and the unjust, and in the parable of the sower He does not care whether we produce 30 or 60 or 100% as long as we produce. We are certainly harsher on ourselves than God is…. This means perhaps that we do not yet know Him…Paraphrasing 1 John 4:8, the one who does not love HIMSELF does not know God, because God is love.
Translating self-criticism into needs
As we already know, for Rosenberg all criticisms and self-judgments are tragic expressions of unmet needs. Instead of saying that someone or I am wrong or bad, what I should say is that the other and I are not acting in harmony and conformity with our needs. When we hear a self-criticism or a self-judgment within ourselves, we need to ask ourselves: How do I feel? What am I needing?
I am addicted to television!
Observation – Identify what you are doing, how many hours a day do you spend watching television.
Feeling – How do you feel? - I feel stressed and anxious, because I neglected to do many important things.
Need – Connect the feeling with a need that is not being met with this behaviour. - I need to allocate some of the time I spend on television to my tasks.
Request – After feeling this need you can tell yourself -- I will set aside this much time for television, to have time for my tasks.
Errors as progress steps
“Errors are the growing pains of wisdom. Without them there would be no individual growth, no progress, no conquest.” William Jordan
In NVC we look at mistakes in a positive way without giving it any ethical value that can lead us to a feeling of guilt. If a mistake takes hold of our conscience so that we think about it over and over again, it is because we are blaming ourselves for what happened; in such case we need to get ourselves out of this destructive cycle.
“Errare humanum est” – In the learning of whatever it may be – piano, cycling, a new language etc. – to err is part of the learning process. They are opportunities for lessons to be learned; if there were no mistakes we would not know when we get it right; in life we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes; mistakes have lessons to teach, successes not so much. It is the mistakes that tell us what we have learned and what we have yet to learn.
In the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, the evil act is called sin. The concept of sin today that is so moralizingly linked to the feeling of guilt and to an inordinately scrupulous moral conscience, as being a serious offense against God and neighbour, originally had no such meaning or moral connotation.
In Amharic, the Semitic and official national language of Ethiopia, sin is “hatiat” which comes from the root word “hatá” which means lost, did not find or missed the mark. In other words, we are to imagine a person with his bow and arrow aiming for the bulls-eye or target and misses. This is what sin means, to miss the mark. Hence in itself it is not a bad deed, but an error of calculation or of vision and the only thing it tells us is that we need to practice more.
In one of his workshops, a woman informed Rosenberg of the shouting match that she had with her son just before coming to the session:
Marshall: What did you tell yourself after the shouting?
Mother: I told myself that I’m a bad mother. I should not have talked like that to my son. What’s wrong with me?
Just as we should not take other people’s insults and criticisms personally, we are also not to take in any way our own judgments ‘personally’ to heart either. The feelings that accompany self-judgment are guilt and shame which can plunge us into depression.
In the case of education, these feelings may lead the mother to somehow compensate her son, by being paternalistic or too complacent, thereby doing more harm than good. We need to learn but without hating ourselves or insulting ourselves in the process. The learning that occurs through guilt or shame will cost us a lot and also to those in close relationship with us.
Marshall – What needs of yours were not met with the way you treated your son?
Mother – For me, it is a value and a need to respect others, by failing to respect my own son, I was going against my own need and value of respecting others.
Marshall – Now that your attention is focused on your needs and values and not on guilt, how do you feel?
Mother – I feel sad.
Marshall – How do you feel this sadness in comparison to what you were thinking before when you told yourself that you were a bad mother and that was something wrong with you?
Mother – I feel sad, but relieved and hopeful.
With the use of NVC, the screaming that had led the mother to qualify herself as a bad mother, which could have led her into depression and consequently to paternalism motivated by guilt, turned out to be only an occasion for learning. In seeing herself freed from the sense of guilt, this mother felt relieved and hopeful that the next time things would turn out better. In NVC, we are neither bad nor guilty, we are only not always up to meeting our needs and values.
“I want to” instead of “I should”
Don’t do anything that isn’t play! – Marshall Rosenberg
In NVC there are no duties, and no things that we have to do whether we like it or want to or not. We do nothing out of duty nor do we do anything because others want us to; everything that we do will fulfill a need of ours so we do it because we want to enrich life or to make my and other people’s lives more wonderful.
When what we do is motivated by the sheer desire of doing it we never get tired of doing it since the motivation is intrinsic. On the other hand, when what we do is motivated by duty, the motivation is extrinsic, not part of us, we then do it sadly and poorly, and whenever we can escape from this duty we readily take that route.
One of the most violent words that human beings ever invented is the word “should” as in “I should not have done that” or “I should have been more considerate”. The “should” puts us always in situations of constant indebtedness from which we can never get out. Hence whatever we do, and the more we do it the more we have to do it, we never live fulfilled when what is done is done out of duty; this is because we are always indebted. What we do out of duty does not arise from a fount of happiness and joy to enrich life but from a fount of dread and fear; in this way he who does things out of duty always lives unfulfilled. The “should” is a chip of the domination system placed in our moral conscience so that we live forever as slaves -- slaves of duty.
Translating duty into choice
1st Step – Bring to mind the things you usually say to yourself that you have to do, something that you dislike and fear, but you do it anyway because you think you have no choice.
2nd Step – Acknowledge that fundamentally and truthfully you are doing these things because you choose to do them. So that at the beginning of each item you listed you replace “I have to…” by “I choose to…” and feel how it sounds differently to your ears and to your heart.
3rd Step – Make yourself aware of the need that is inherent in each of the thing that you choose to do and complete the sentence with this need, “I choose to do… because I need…” In those cases where you do not find any need that is being met, then it is a good reason to abandon doing them.
In each choice or option make yourself aware of the need or value that will be met or fulfilled. By gaining foresight of these needs that are being met by our actions, we experience and live them with enjoyment, even when some may be challenging, involving effort, suffering and frustration. There are no great victories without great battles; “Sadness well whipped makes a cream of joy” says the proverb.
Putting the past behind positively
“Passed waters do not move mills.” (Portuguese proverb)
Frequently human nature seems to function contrary to physical nature. The water that has already passed through the mill can no longer move it; but in us, there are many past things that still move, propel, and touch us in the present, as psychoanalysis has shown.
Unlike psychoanalysis, which analyzes the past to find in it the reason for our present ills, NVC is only concerned with the present. Speaking about the past in excess may not help and may perpetuate the hurt and the pain. Just as “To remember is to live again”, remembering the sorrows and past traumas is to relive them now, giving us the feeling that we are still there.
NVC is not against revisiting the past, but we must have a positive outlook in relation to it. Like in Christianity, we read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, it is in the spirit of our present moment that we should read the past. And put behind positively the negative experiences by chanting our “Felix Culpa”, that is, seeing that if our present is good, then the past ills have somehow mysteriously contributed to it: “every cloud has a silver lining”. The accent or the focus of our attention is always on the present and it is in it that we live and therefore the eternal question that we must ask is, “What is alive in us here and now?”, that is, how are we feeling and what are our needs at the present moment, and what can we do to make life more wonderful.
“A new lover makes us forget the old one” – The positive experiences in the present will heal the traumas of the past; they will be the new tenants of our unconscious. They will remove the traumas that are there and take their place, giving us a feeling of happiness and well-being. Therefore contrary to psychoanalysis, which goes backward in order to move forward, NVC goes from the front to the back. Compassion and empathy with ourselves and with others embodied and lived in the present take care of the past by healing it as if by magic.
Nonviolent Communication shows us the big difference between mourning and saying sorry:
Saying sorry – In NVC there is no apology because it is part of the violent game. He who apologizes feels guilty because he feels he has done something wrong, and therefore he must pay the price, must do penance, like the contrition in the sacrament of confession where he admits that he is a bad person and confesses the evil that he has done and at the end he is obliged to pay for it – that is, do penance to counterbalance the evil he has done. When one hates oneself enough then one can be forgiven. But this can turn into a vicious circle: he hates himself because he does not forgive himself and does not forgive himself because he hates himself.
Mourning – The violent apology, the guilt itself, is replaced by nonviolent mourning. In an exercise of introspection, the person asks himself what need was not met by such behaviour. When he identifies the unmet need, he ceases to feel guilt and shame, and feels a different type of suffering, natural not moral; a suffering that does not lead him to lie down licking the wound, but gives him hope, because it leads to learning and healing, and not to self-hatred, blame, humiliation and into the pit and prison of depression. In this way, we learn from our mistakes without losing self-esteem and self-respect. Blaming oneself or blaming others is always a tragic expression of an unmet need, says Rosenberg.
Appreciation instead of praises
“Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Matthew 6:1
“You did a good job”, “You are a nice person”, “You are so intelligent” – Praises, though positive, imply a form of judgment from others. To Rosenberg the positive judgments are as alienating as the negative ones because they say nothing of either the giver or the receiver.
We learn nothing about ourselves or others with static language that pretends to evaluate our entire person within the context of a single action. On the contrary, I learn something about me and others when people tell me not what I am but what I did, and the impact on them of what I did, that means the need of theirs that I helped to satisfy.
It is obvious that whatever I do, I do it out of gratuity for the pure pleasure of doing it and not to hear any word of thanks. But I do need to hear a word of thanks as a feedback to confirm that my action met the intended objective, that is, to make mine and the lives of others more wonderful.
It is tragic to work so hard to buy love and praises, denying oneself, one’s nature and stopping doing what one likes in order to please others. Sooner or later those whom we want to please or others in general, will realize that we are phony and ironically, with this type of behaviour, whatever we do will end up backfiring.
When we do what we do unconditionally, however, for the sole purpose of enriching life, this is when we receive the true appreciation from others. But since we did not do it to receive it, this appreciation is then a celebration of life.
In NVC we do not express generic value judgments to a person and we do not use the verb to be; the expressed gratitude refers always to the act that helped enrich our lives. Express or receive gratitude using the four components: describe what the other person did, describe what we felt in face of what was done, then describe the need or value that was met. Gratitude is expressed to celebrate and not to manipulate.
The appreciation is in this case only the feedback that confirms that our efforts had the intended effect and was well received. The recognition that our efforts were worthwhile and had succeeded because they enriched lives, therefore we rejoice and celebrate in a way that the approval of others could never provide us.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC