NVC - Ecology, a new relationship with Mother Earth

God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. Genesis 1:28-29

The creator and the steward of creation
Like many ecologists, Lynn White in her book The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, blames the Bible and in her case also religion for being the mentor and the godmother of the unbridled domination and exploitation of the planet Earth. For us the students of NVC, however, this accusation is unfounded and unacceptable because in the biblical myth of creation violence appeared only afterwards as a problem, it was not desired nor was it created by God.

The overall justification of violence towards everything and everyone comes from the Babylonian myth of creation, which came before the biblical myth, and is the root of what theologian Walter Wink calls the “civil” religion that ever since the beginning and still holds true today has the most number of faithful. As we have seen before in the Babylonian myth, creation was an act of violence. In the Babylonian myth, violence is not a problem but just an intrinsic facet of creation, of nature and of Man himself.

The verb to dominate comes from the Hebrew word “Radah”, a word related to royalty and means to reign, it is therefore a term that carries the weight of the office of a king. What does the Bible tell us about how a king ought to govern? Let us see how this very word is used in the context of the coronation of King Solomon who for Israel is the symbol of wisdom:

May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (…) For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper. He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight. Psalm 72:8, 12-14

And what kind of ruler does God not want?

Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. Ezekiel 34:2-4

In light of the biblical myth of Creation the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), and its counterparts, God does not give us any rights, or ownership over creation, but rather the responsibility to take care for it in a way consistent with His will.

First, we need to understand that Man, and only he alone, was made responsible for Creation because out of all the creatures only he was created in the image and likeness of God the Creator. Second, dominion as synonym to unbridled exploitation can only come from the reading of the biblical myth of creation in view or through the eyes of the Babylonian myth which has shaped and formatted mankind and prevailed throughout the history of humanity. To this day when we ask around if humans are naturally violent or naturally non-violent, most will say that violence is part of the human nature.

Therefore, originally that is, interpreting the Bible in light of the Bible itself, using other texts from the same, the word “dominion” does not mean totalitarian despotism, or exercising absolute power in a cruel or oppressive way, but is the proper stewardship under God’s direction because God is the sole owner and landlord, the Lord of Creation of everything contained therein including us:

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it. Psalm 24:1

For God did not hand over creation to Man and became disinterested in it; on the contrary, Man should never forget that of creation he is only the steward:

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? (…) Whom did he consult for his enlightenment, and who taught him the path of justice? Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales; see, he takes up the isles like fine dust. Isaiah 40:12, 14-15

Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew? Job 38:28

He gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry. Psalm 147:9

To subjugate the earth, therefore, does not mean to dominate and exploit it, but to learn to understand all its processes, the laws of nature and all its creatures, for the benefit of humanity and the glory of God. This mandate is still in force and valid today for all the descendants of Adam and Eve, but is even more important for the Christians because we have the knowledge of the Lord not only in his work as the Creator of the world, but also as its Redeemer. The redemption that we have obtained from Christ is extended to the planet as the planet needs to be saved as well.

In this same spirit of life, in harmony with nature, the Church has a patron saint of animals and ecology to propose to the ecologists of our time, Saint Francis of Assisi.  For him there were no hostile or dangerous animals, no enemies, hence he called the wolf brother wolf; not only did he relate with the beasts of the earth, the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea as members of his family, but he also extended this relationship to the elements calling water his sister and the sun his brother.

The “New Testament” of the Babylonian myth
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally higher animals, directly follows. (The last paragraph from the book Origin of Species by Charles Darwin)

In other words, the battle for survival, with the elimination of the weak and the crippled, leads to the survival of the fittest, so that this war of nature must eventually lead to superior animals, superior races and finally to superior civilizations.

By the use and abuse of the violent words and concepts, the last paragraph in Darwin’s book appears to be the emblem of violence of the Babylonian myth of creation. Therefore already in modern times we see in Darwin, and in his most fanatical followers, a “New Testament” of the Babylonian myth, this religion that dominates the planet. And just as Christianity soon became felt in the world, so the effects of applying this philosophy in the 19th and 20th century are now being felt in the 21st century.

Among others, one of the more harmful results of this philosophy has been the careless exploitation of our natural resources – animal, mineral and human, all in the name of socioeconomic evolution. Large amount of mineral and plant resources, especially wood, have been misused and badly wasted; the nature’s balance of regeneration has been broken so that many animal and plant species became extinct. British environmentalist Norman Myers tried to put a number to the rate of extinction to over 130 species per day.

The spell is turned against the sorcerer – The effect of disorderly, selfish and arbitrary exploitation of our planet has resulted in unprecedented contamination of the ecosystems:

The soil is been depleted of essential elements for our health because of monocultivation; it is also contaminated with pesticides and chemical fertilizers that have altered its chemical composition and poisoned the groundwater from where our drinking water comes from;

The oceans are contaminated with plastic such as the microfibers that come out of our washing machines since plastics have replaced natural fabrics, like wool, cotton, linen and silk which together with heavy metals like mercury, are being absorbed by the fish that we consume;

The air is contaminated with carbon dioxide which leads to harmful level of greenhouse effect, resulting in global warming as seen by the increase of global temperature that melts glaciers and polar caps, raises the sea level, alters the course of winds, and modifies the pace of the seasons causing hurricanes, floods and droughts of unprecedented intensity.

The social environment is also plagued by the fact that today 1% of the humanity possesses more wealth (54%) than the remaining 99% (46%). The gap between the rich and the poor keeps getting wider. Some die of hunger, others die of abundance; if there was sharing, neither one nor the other would die. This situation is due to the ideology of Mr. Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, who believed that if all were selfish, that is if all sought their own self interest, an invisible hand would take care of the common interest; such invisible hand acting like Santa Claus has never been verified and in the meantime the situation goes from bad to worse.

We have nothing against the fundamentals of the science behind the evolution of species; in fact, since Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Humani Generis in 1950, the Catholic Church accepts the postulated fundamentals of the theory of evolution of species, that is, it is more than obvious that life comes from a common stock, which has been diversifying into various species over the course of millions of years to this day. What we cannot accept is the violent interpretation that this same Darwin and his disciples prescribe to the theory written above in his last paragraph of his famous book.

As a basis for the biblical myth of creation and NVC, we believe that violence is not part of nature, the engine of evolution, never was and never has been, contrary to what Darwin and his followers thought; violence was introduced by man, by the way he has been relating to nature, especially in the past two centuries.

The butterfly effect and the domino effect
A butterfly moves its wings in Hong Kong and causes a storm in New York. However small may be whatever we do, it affects the global ecology of our planet. Before when the human population on the planet was meager in comparison, the world appeared too big, too powerful and timeless to be affected by the action of Man. Today, however, apart from a catastrophic and mind-boggling population increase, we know that the action of Man on the planet is cumulative; that is, errors and crimes against the planet accumulate because as it is said, God always forgives, Man sometimes but nature neither forgives nor forgets.

Although the concept of the butterfly effect has been known since 1890, it only gained popular acceptance in 1961 due to the weather forecast model used by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He noted that small changes, which should have been statistically insignificant, led to scenarios that were exponentially different.

The analogy of the butterfly started in 1972 when Lorenz gave a talk titled, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?” And given the changes that we human beings have already introduced into the complex ecosystem, known as the planet Earth, it is accurate to say that we have already done the work of billions of butterflies.

One area of major importance is biodiversity. In addition to the fact that biodiversity protects humans against the effects of agricultural catastrophes such as the Irish potato famine, the loss of a species results in significant alterations in natural habitats that can seriously injure us in short, medium or long term.

Taking these same butterflies as an example, if they disappear and become extinct not only children would suffer for not having seen their beauty, but many plants that are intimately linked to the butterflies (and vice versa) would also be doomed to disappear, as one cannot survive without the other.

When we think of the natural interdependency of living beings with each other and of the ecosystems among themselves, it is frightening to think what can come crumbling down by the extinction of a single species. The bees are endangered and are the main pollinators in our planet; the squirrels are also endangered and they plant more trees than humans when they forget the nuts they hide in the ground to survive through the winters.

The domino effect is a reality in ecology; the climate change can lead to the extinction of animals and plants dependent of them and provoke a chain reaction of unpredictable consequences given the interdependency of living beings with each other and all of them dependent on the climate conditions of their natural habitat.

While writing these lines we have received the sad news of the death of the last white male rhinoceros. Prior to its death some of its sperms were frozen in the hope of continuing the species, but of the last two existing females one is sterile. This makes the prognosis of salvation of the white rhinoceros very bleak. It is known that this species was mercilessly hunted down because some cultures like the Chinese believe that its horns have aphrodisiac properties.

Genesis of violence in the biblical myth of creation
According to the religion of violence of the domination system which has as its sacred scripture in the Babylonian myth, violence is the principal commandment, the matrix upon which all relationships emanate – the relationship of man with his own kind, the relationship of man with himself, with God to whom sacrifices of violence are offered to appease His anger or to win His favor, and with nature who is not a prodigious mother to us, but rather a stepmother.

Nature gave animals everything, even clothed them, to us it gave us nothing, we were born naked, and if we want to eat we need to labour. Contrary to the Neanderthal, who adapted to nature, the Homo Sapiens sought to dominate Nature with his mind and adapt it to his needs. Understanding himself, in relationship to other animals, as the “Ugly Duckling” of Creation, the relationship of Man with Nature seems to be a relationship of vengeance.

‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it”, cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ Genesis 3:17-19

Violence was natural for the Babylonian myth, but not so for the biblical myth. What God created was good and there was a time when Man was as God had created him just like the original Nature, that is, the Garden of Eden. Man and Nature lived in symbiosis and in harmony, the same harmony that used to reign between God and Man who strolled at dusk in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:8). With the fall, this harmony between God and Man and Man and Nature was disrupted.

The “win win” philosophy of NVC as the solution to the ecological problem
Christ came to bring salvation not only to Man but also to the environment in which Man lives; this Earth can return to be the paradise that it once was. For this we have to give up the exacerbated Darwinism that relates violently with nature; as we have already exposed the fallacy of the myth of the redemptive violence, now we must condemn the myth of domination and survival of the strongest over the weakest and less capable, declaring it as a false ideology, which has tried to explain the relationships of animals over millions of years of evolution.

There is no violence among animals, there is only the fulfillment of their needs. Animals do not kill because they feel hatred for one another, but to meet their needs within the food chain. It is known that a cat will play with mice and birds and not eat or harm them if one feeds it by other means.

The final goal of NVC is that everyone will find their needs harmoniously met. It is possible to return to the world that we had before the industrial era, to find a form of harmony, progress that is sustainable and friendly to the environment. In NVC the needs of others are also our needs, there is no antagonism between us and others even when they say No we hear a yes.

In NVC there is only “win win” because we are convinced that everyone can win; as there is no human life outside this planet that we know of, what is good for the planet is good for Man and vice versa, what is bad for the planet at long range is also bad for Man in the long run. The consequences of past ills have already begun to be felt. Let us stop being enemies of the environment because it is in it that we live.

If Mother Earth sustains life, our life, then she is also alive, she is a living organism. Let us relate to her using the four components of Nonviolent Communication and objectively observe the situation she finds herself, let us ask the Indian shamans of North America, to help us scrutinize her feelings and needs and finally to discern what she is asking of us to keep her alive and in turn, keep us alive.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

NVC - A New Relationship With Others

You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Mark 12:31

Self-empathy and empathy for others
Both the expression of our own feelings and needs and the empathic hunch about the feelings and needs of others are grounded in a particular state of consciousness that is the heart of the Nonviolent Communication. This state of consciousness is nourished by empathy for others and empathy for ourselves.

Both in the New Testament as quoted above as in the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:18), the Bible has already foreseen that it is not possible to love one’s neighbour without loving oneself, and vice versa it is not possible to love oneself (with a healthy, non-narcissistic love) without loving one’s neighbour.

The esteem for self and the esteem for others are intimately connected; the measure we apply to others is the measure we apply to ourselves. Empathy consists of extending to others the same compassion that we have for ourselves in using the four components of NVC. This means looking closely into the other person’s feelings and needs which may be disguised and hidden behind the interpretations, analyses and judgments that he makes of us, himself, or society at large.

The application of NVC implies an intention to connect compassionately with ourselves and with others, and an ability to keep our attention centered on the present moment – which includes being aware that at times in this present moment we are recalling the past, or imagining a future possibility. In other words, it is to connect compassionately with what is alive in us and in others, or what is happening in us and in others at the level of feelings and needs in the here and now.

“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you…” Luke 6:27

Neither self-empathy nor empathy for others are easy to put into practice; the structures of power teach us to hate ourselves as much as we hate others. In times of calm, this practice may be relatively easy, but in times of stress, or internal or external conflict, the reptilian hatred can make us reluctant and make it difficult to access empathy and compassion for ourselves as well as for others. It is only with lots of practice, which implies that there are times when we will fail, that there will be occasions of success that will be total if we stay on course.

Enemies do not exist, others or rivals are not truly our enemies because like us, they only seek to fulfill their needs. Therefore, when we are not afraid to genuinely and honestly express our feelings and needs, even knowing that it makes us vulnerable and indigent, we are appealing to the empathy and compassion of the other person because needs and feelings are universal. Afterwards, when eventually we do make our requests known, neither in an aggressive nor arrogant nor submissive but in an assertive way, the other will very likely respond positively. It will be the compassion and empathy that we ignite in them that will help them connect to their neocortex and thus conquer on their own and overcome their reptilian selfishness.

Receiving empathically
NVC is a two-way street; we have previously described the four components of NVC in connection with ourselves, that is, what we observe, feel, and need, and what request we make of others to enrich our lives. Now it is applying these same four components to others by listening to their observations, feelings, needs and appeals or requests; this is what is called receiving empathically.

In Nonviolent Communication half of the process is learning to express oneself using the four components; the other half is learning how to listen and respond to others in the mold of the four components in order to establish connection with what is happening in the other person at that precise moment on the level of feelings and needs.

The empathic connection allows us to supersede appearances to contemplate and connect with the intrinsic beauty in the other person, with the divine energy operating in him, with what’s alive in him. The objective of the empathic connection, however, is not to intellectually understand the other person; it is not to go out of the forest so we can see and analyse it better, or to abstract ourselves from it. Conversely, to understand someone intellectually is to stop being empathic with him; when we mentally analyse the other we are not with him.

Empathy is staying, feeling, or being with someone; it is a respectful understanding of what the other person is experiencing at the present moment. It is in this sense how the non-directive psychotherapy of Carl Rogers, Rosenberg’s teacher, works. The silent active presence and the empathic compassionate listening of the psychotherapist, before the client’s outburst, consoles (derived from Latin cum solis or to stay with) and comforts (from Latin cum fortis or to make strong), strengthens and energizes the client so that he himself finds the solution to his problems.

Frequently, instead of empathy, of placing ourselves side by side with the other, we assume a position of authority as if we are the parent or teacher, and begin to give advice or display what we are thinking or feeling. The belief that we have to fix or solve other people’s problems, or make them feel better, prevents us from staying empathically with them. With his typical sense of humour and irony, Rosenberg says that when it comes to giving advice, we should never do it, unless the one making the request submits a petition in writing signed by a notary. Let us see in the following example what empathy is and is not:

-    I’m uglier than a mule – says the young girl as she looks into the mirror.
-    No, you are the most gorgeous creature God has ever created – answers the father with a quick solution not in like with NVC.
-    Are you feeling disillusioned with your appearance today? – this is an empathic reaction in line with NVC.

The norms of the non-directive psychotherapy
The norms of the non-directive psychotherapy when applied perfectly:
The therapist sits in front of the client without a table or any other obstacles between them; he maintains an open posture which means without crossing his legs; he is relaxed, but not overly so otherwise it could transmit disinterest to the client; seated neither too close nor too far from the client, by the virtue of the territorial instinct; observing all the bodily movements of the client not just his eyes and giving him feedback, asking for examples, “I see that you have a closed fist, what does it mean to you?

Do not leave the client dwelling too long in the past, bring him back to the present moment by asking: How is it affecting you now, how do you feel now?  Ask open-ended explorative questions for which the answer can never be a simple yes or no; for a greater understanding of the discourse, paraphrase what the client says: I hear you say that… I realize that according to you… Are you feeling irritated and disillusioned because… The questions are made in a way the client can make himself clearer and not to satisfy the curiosity of the therapist.

Barriers to empathy
There are inappropriate statements that end up putting a barrier between the one who hears and the one who speaks, hampering their communication. This type of reaction or affirmation on our part often shows disrespect to the thoughts and feelings of the other person. In order to improve the ability to relate well, it is important to recognize these barriers, because once they are identified it is easier to avoid them.

• Advice or teach – “I think you should...” “Why didn’t you do…?” We are not to diagnose nor hand out recipes; we simply help the other to come to his own conclusions, see the lessons learned from the process and the possible solutions.
• Express intolerance, disgust, and disapproval – The other person will feel rejected.
• Moralistic – Statements that judge the acts of others whether good or bad, or what they say is appropriate or inappropriate.
• Discount and reject the feelings of others – “This is nothing, I have been through worse…” “You should not feel this way…” The other person may even feel relieved for a moment, but the feeling will come back.
• Educate – “Look at it this way, it could even turn into a very positive experience if you…”
• Pseudo-consolation – “It was not your fault, you did your best…”
• Tell stories – “This reminds me of the time when I…”
• Denial – “Be happy, don’t feel sad…”
• Ask too many questions to satisfy our curiosity – “When did this happen to you?”
• Correcting – “That’s not how it happened…”
• What’s the point if you never listen? – When the other person asks for an opinion.
• Are you feeling sad because you think I don’t understand you? – The focus is on what he thinks and not on what he needs, in addition to the feeling of guilt in “I don’t understand you”. The correct way from the NVC point of view would have been, “Are you feeling sad because you need to be heard?” because the focus is now placed on your need and not on me as if I have done something wrong.

All these non-empathic reactions have one thing in common, they remove the focus from the other person to center it on ourselves. At best they distract the other from his problem, or temporarily anesthetize him of his pain, but they do not help resolve the crisis but rather the contrary.

In NVC, we are not to worry about what people say, nor the way they say it, because we know beforehand that everything they say can be translated into observations, feelings, needs and requests. In his workshops, Rosenberg never tired of repeating that over thousands of years of history, since the human beings learned to speak, everything that they say and continue to say to this day boils down to two expressions:

“Please…” in expressing observations, feelings and needs that end in a request, and, therefore, an opportunity or means to enrich life, and make it more wonderful.

“Thank you” in recognizing with gratitude, and at the same time celebrating life, because their needs were met.

The empathy of Jesus
Jesus’ empathy and his ability to actively listen is revealed throughout the Scripture, here we present a few:
Jesus did not judge Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10), on the contrary, he had a positive and welcoming regard for him, and because he did not judge him, it was Zacchaeus who then accuses himself and finds a solution to his own problem. Nor did Jesus judge the woman caught in flagrant adultery (John 8:1-10) for when a person is hurt the last thing they want is to be judged! Jesus was compassionate, he defended her, and he descended so she could ascend. Similarly, Jesus cried tears of compassion for his friend Lazarus, showing empathy for the suffering of his sisters.

Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well stands out as a detailed account of interpersonal action. Enough is revealed in the account about the thoughts and feelings of the two participants to rebuild the encounter as a study case in psychotherapy. From the superficial and trivial to the more profound, this encounter reveals Jesus’ skills as a psychotherapist.

Jesus led the woman through a series of steps towards psychological and spiritual integrity. Firstly, Jesus accepted the shunned and marginalized woman as a person. In addition to violating all the taboos of that time which stood between him and the woman, Jesus respected her individuality, and was not intimidated, nor reacted negatively to her veiled sarcasm. Jesus let the woman set the initial tone and direction of their conversation; in this way, he let her understand that she is accepted as a unique person and with the potential to grow as a person.

Secondly, Jesus let her confess (clarify better) her personal needs. A condemnation at the outset, by a look or word, would have been the expected response from a Rabbi towards a woman of questionable reputation as she seemed to be. In fact, the woman’s first question to Jesus implied that she doubted his real motive of asking for a drink. Jesus, however, let her choose her own time to reveal the depth of her need. When the woman eventually did, she opened up completely by letting him know that she wanted to turn her life around.

Thirdly, Jesus provided insights into the woman’s intimate life by probing into her sordid past. If she was not prepared to face the truth, Jesus’ question would have been premature and even harmful. But it was not so, Jesus used the trauma of exposing her intimate life in order to end her vicious circle of marriage-divorce-marriage by exposing her feeling of guilt.

Fourthly, Jesus freed the woman from the feeling of guilt, which he had promised before, to satisfy her compulsive thirst for love.

The use of empathy to counteract danger
Rosenberg recounts how a girl managed to counteract her potential rapist by using NVC:
Assailant – Take off your clothes!
Girl – (Noticing that he was shaking) It seems to me that you are nervous…
Assailant – Are you deaf? I say it again, take off your clothes!
Girl – I’m sensing that you’re really irritated and you want me to do what you’re telling me.
Assailant – You’re dammed right, and you’re going to get hurt if you don’t.
Girl – I’d like you to tell me if there’s some other way of meeting your needs that wouldn’t hurt me.
Assailant – I said take them off.
Girl – I can hear how much you want this, but I want you to know how scared and horrible I feel, and how grateful I’d be if you’d leave without hurting me.
Assailant – Give me your purse.
The girl handed the purse to him relieved that the assailant had not raped her. Later she recognized that each time she empathized with her aggressor his intention of violating her began to lose ground. This is one of those situations in which it is very difficult to empathize with the other person. But it is a fact that when we discover and empathize with the feelings and needs of the one in conflict with us, we no longer see an enemy but a person.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

NVC - A New Relationship With Myself

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2

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

NVC - A World of Giraffes and Jackals

Marshall Rosenberg in a workshop

So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach was made bitter. Then they said to me, ‘You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.’ Revelation 10:10-11

Marshall Rosenberg (1934-2015)
The founder of Nonviolent Communication upon realizing the potential of this new language to change the hearts and minds of people, with the goal of establishing new relations and ultimately build a harmonious and peaceful society, decided that this should be his contribution to humanity, his mission, his personal fight. Consequently, he abandoned his lucrative private practice as a psychotherapist to embark on the adventure and mission of spreading the good news of Nonviolent Communication. Within the United States he drove thousands of miles to conduct workshops in major cities, camping outside of towns and sleeping in his car in order to make the workshops affordable and available to anyone.

The success of these workshops quickly made Rosenberg trade his old car for the commercial airplanes as the mode of travel, taking this new language of peace to more than 50 countries, making his contribution in the resolution of long-standing conflicts in countries like Northern Ireland, Israel, Nigeria among others. He established the Giraffe schools, as he called them, so that the children of the future would be educated in this new language and philosophy of life. The prophetic component of his ideas, along with his gift with words and dynamic sense of humour, easily conquered many hearts and minds to his cause.

To paraphrase the scripture verse above taken from the book of Revelation, NVC tastes as sweet as honey in the mouth; that is, it easily delights and excites us, and gives us hope that with it we can transform inwardly, beginning with our own small world and eventually with the world at large. But when we ruminate or digest it, we realize that it is not easy to replace a language that has been around for thousands of years, within a short time, and in which we have been educated, formed and even programmed.

Analogically we can say that the digestion of this new nonviolent language is difficult because our stomachs have not yet developed the right acids to break it down and assimilate it. It takes time and eventually when we do begin to use it, it will not come out automatically like the reactive violent language supplied by our reptilian brain. Often in the beginning we need to stop the practice ‘game’ and ask for a time-out, like the coach in a basketball game, in order to reconnect to our neocortex, the part of the brain that is authentically human and product of evolution. In this sense, it is a language that may come out unnaturally at first as if we were speaking from a book following an unfamiliar script.

But this is how it is going to be until it becomes second nature. Learning NVC is like learning a new foreign language, we need to think carefully in order to speak intelligibly, and we need to learn the new grammar that is quite different from the old grammar of the violent language that we are so accustomed to. NVC is in fact quite easy to learn, but it is not easily integrated into our daily conversation, nor is it easy to embody and use it in our everyday life, it requires time and patience.

In order to make it simpler to learn this new language, and to show the differences between these two languages or these two styles of communication and life philosophy, Rosenberg used two animals as mascots. The violent communication is represented by the meat-eating Jackal, a symbol of aggression, domination and autocracy, and the Nonviolent Communication by the plant-eating Giraffe because of its peaceful nature and for having the biggest heart of all the land animals.

The Jackal
The cell of a pack of jackals is made up of a monogamous couple, who defends their territory from potential predators. This territory is vigorously defended by chasing away and expelling rival intruders by drenching their territory with urine and feces.

It represents the language the world has used since the Babylonian myth of creation. Since infancy our culture has been teaching us to speak “Jackal”, an autocratic, coercive, and aggressive language that provokes either submission or resistance and counterattack.

Being a static language, it goes well with Newton’s old mechanistic physics, for whom nature with its laws is static and functions with the precision of a Swiss clock; to the new quantum physics, however, the laws of nature have exceptions. Furthermore, Heisenberg’s Principle of uncertainty shows that there are as many exceptions as there are rules. Examining the human body, for instance, researchers are noting that the substantial differences in the basic biochemical processes between males and females warrant looking into developing gender-specific drugs.

For Jackals, people have a fixed identity that is not progressive and cannot be converted. But the truth is that we are all work in progress and therefore we are not classifiable, that is, cannot be labelled because we are not static beings.

In general, the jackal language is characterized by attempts to push reality into static boxes of what should or should not be, what is right or wrong, what people are or are not. Jackal people live in a world of ideas and analyses of past events or of how the future should be, they rarely live in the present moment.

The Giraffe
It is the symbol or mascot of those who use the new language of nonviolence, the language of the world of the future. From the point of view of Christianity, which at its inception was a nonviolent religion because its founder was the one who challenged the violence of the domination system, we believe that this new language is spoken in the Kingdom of God where justice, peace and the integrity of creation reign.

The giraffe is the land animal with the largest heart – It represents compassion which is the core and the way of NVC. Compassion is something that is natural to all human beings; that is why when we are compassionate to someone who is violent, we disarm him from his violence and help him to connect to his natural compassion, which resides deep within his heart and away from where he lives in discontent. The character Scrooge from Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens demonstrates this truth.

The giraffe’s long neck gives it a wider and clearer vision – The giraffe has in fact a large heart because it needs to pump blood up its long neck to its head. A head so high gives it the advantage of seeing everything from above and of having the widest angle of vision of any animal. Those who speak the language of nonviolence are objective in their observations which they can put into a larger context; what a Giraffe does not have is a tunnel vision, as this is more typical of a Jackal.

The giraffe can eat and digest thorns – The giraffe has a hard and strong tongue, with a texture that is similar to rubber or plastic. This means that giraffes can chew thorns without getting hurt. Translated in human terms, this means that when we are Giraffes we are able to ‘chew’ Jackals’ aggressive words, destructive criticisms and insults, and turn them into inoffensive ‘food’ without causing us any harm. Or more precisely, they are changed into unmet needs and frustrations that are behind the Jackal's dissatisfaction and outbursts.

Giraffe versus Jackal, and the winner is the Giraffe
As we can see in the figure above, Rosenberg used the two mascots, the Giraffe and the Jackal, in his conferences and workshops as hand puppets and thus demonstrating in a practical way the two styles of communication during confrontations.

As this has been so far a world of Jackals, we are all born Jackals, but we are all called to be Giraffes. All Giraffes were once Jackals, and similarly all Jackals can be Giraffes. Every Giraffe has a Jackal past, and every Jackal has or may have a Giraffe future.

In the face of an external attack in the form of an insult, negative evaluation or destructive criticism, the Jackal has only two alternatives, which are basically what the reptilian brain offers us: fight, rebel, revenge or flight, hide, submit oneself. The Jackal will either return the accusation by accusing the other or he will accept the accusation, and thus accusing himself and feeling guilty.

The Giraffe uses compassion and empathy both with himself and with the other; with himself by echoing and being conscious of the feelings and needs that the negative refusal of the other provoked, expressing them honestly to himself; with the other, he seeks to understand the feelings and needs behind the accusation, entering into dialogue with the other, making requests for clarification and establishing connection.

When we listen with giraffe ears we hear the feelings and needs of the speaker, independent of the words he uses. All the while we try not to forget that all needs are universal and satisfying them is the only objective that every human being is saying or doing.

Using giraffe ears externally makes life a whole lot easier. Where before we heard criticisms and personal attacks, we now hear someone expressing his needs. Using the same ears internally with ourselves, where we used to hear doubts, self-criticism, self-accusation and blame, we now hear feelings and needs.

	JACKAL – Alienates life	GIRAFFE – Serves life
Objectives	To be right Forces others to do what we want	To connect with others empathically To understand them
Evaluations	Moral judgments (good/bad, right/wrong) Dualistic thinking (or… or…)	Life-serving judgments (fulfilled or unfulfilled needs)
Motivations	Extrinsic (rewards and punishments)	Intrinsic (feelings, needs and values)
Source of feelings	Caused by external actions, people and events	Unmet needs – ours and/or others
Means to seek security	Hierarchical obedience	Empathic connection with others; affective is effective
Relations with others	Hierarchical, caste system, power over homo homini lupus, social classes, win-lose	Equality, solidarity, power with win-win, satisfying the needs of others
Source of authority	External, government, churches, employer, parents, teachers	Internal, of divine origin
Yield to	Feelings of guilt, shame or anger	Compassion or joy
Wanting others to feel my pain in order to…	Cause pain to others	Ask others to empathize
Image of others	Villain who deserves punishment or hero who deserves reward Others are seen as means to a goal	Authentically human What is alive in them, Others are ends in themselves
Focused on	Past actions and behaviours, and future events	The present moment

The Giraffe has two basic modes of acting:
Listens to himself and to others with empathy – “When you see/hear…” (observation) “Do you feel…?” (feelings), “Because you need…?”, “You like that…?”

Expresses with honesty – “When I see/hear...” (observation) “I feel…” (feelings), “because I need…”, “Would you be willing…?”

The Giraffe makes objective observations, expresses and makes himself responsible for his own feelings, recognizes and identifies his needs and on the basis of these, makes realistic requests that are doable. The Jackal, on the contrary, does not observe but evaluates, does not feel but think, confuses needs with strategies, and makes demands instead of requests.

Translating verbal aggression into needs
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Isaiah 2:4

Operating in the giraffe mode there are always two ways to connect:  with ourselves and with others. Turning the ears inwardly towards himself, the giraffe takes into account his own feelings and needs; turning the ears outwardly towards others, he takes into account the needs and feelings of others.

In the face of a verbal attack, within the language of violence that mimics the reptilian brain, the response is simple, we either rebel or surrender. In NVC there is a third way, to be responsible for what we hear by disconnecting from our reptilian brain, taking a deep breath, putting on our x-ray vision so we can read between the lines of what was said and discover the unmet needs that are behind the outburst, and at the end we translate the message into those needs. Let’s look at the following example:

“You are the most selfish person I have ever met!”

1. The outer Jackal – Blames others and counter accuses by blaming the speaker and says, “You have no right to say that. I’ve always been considerate, you are the selfish one!”
2. The inner Jackal – Blames himself and gives in: takes it personally and accepts the judgment of the other person and blames himself (blame, shame, depression) and affirms, “Sorry, I should have been more sensitive.”
3. The inner Giraffe – Becomes conscious of his own feelings and needs, and reflects to himself, “When I hear you call me selfish, I feel hurt because I need some recognition of my efforts to be considerate of your preferences…”
4. The outer Giraffe – Detects the feelings and needs of the speaker – “Do you feel hurt because you need more consideration of your preferences?”

In few words, the Jackal is selfish, and uses and abuses personal pronouns: I, me, and myself, while the Giraffe is altruistic and uses the pronoun ‘we’. The priority of the Jackal is to be always right so that the other person must be wrong, since he always wants to win, the other has to accept defeat. The priority of the Giraffe is to connect with the other person in a way that both win.

The Giraffe accepts the problem as belonging to both and seeks to find a valid solution for both, the Jackal is more interested in winning than in genuinely resolving the problem. In the case of an attack, the Jackal feels distressed and intimidated while the Giraffe feels empathy for himself. The Jackal judges, accuses and commands while the Giraffe observes, expresses honestly feelings, needs and requests.

In other words, the Giraffe observes, the Jackal evaluates; the Giraffe feels, the Jackal thinks; the Giraffe is aware of his needs, the Jackal confuses needs with strategies; the Giraffe makes request, the Jackal makes demands.

In confrontations between the Giraffe and the Jackal, the Giraffe always comes out a winner if he remains a Giraffe because by acting compassionately and empathetically, sooner or later, he can appeal to the heart of the Jackal, to his own compassion and empathy, eventually turning him also into a Giraffe. In this way, the number of Giraffes will increase and the number of Jackals will decrease until they become extinct. 

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC