NVC - Retributive justice VS Restorative justice

When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, (...) if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, bum for bum, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. Exodus 21:22-25

Genesis of retributive justice
Modelling this aspect of the Hammurabi Babylonian code, the Bible recognizes that human acts have inescapable consequences. It is as if a law of reciprocation was embedded in the universe that says people reap what they sow (Galatians 6:7). The basic retributive concepts of guilt, atonement and proportionality of penalty are widely attested both in the Old and the New Testaments.

In fact, the Bible even ends with an affirmation of retributive principle of justice: “See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work” (Revelation 22:12). Therefore biblical justice is retributive insofar as it revolves around the concepts of moral guilt, reward and respect for the Law.

It would be, however, an error to conclude that the concept of retributive justice exhausts or encompasses the whole idea of justice in the Bible. Justice in the ancient Israel involved everything that was needed to create, maintain and restore healthy relationships at the heart of the community.

A criminal offense was considered wrong, firstly because it violated the relational commitments that the society upheld. Secondly, because the criminal acts in themselves could lead to a chain reaction of ruin and disaster if they were not stopped. Already in the Old Testament, but especially in the New, believers were exhorted to give up retribution or retaliation by relegating it to God and in its place to embrace the principles of forgiveness and reconciliation (Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:17-21, 1Peter 2:21-23)

Retributive justice, as it works today, came about in the thirteenth century. With the implementation of the Social Contract, the King, the State or the Law confiscates the conflicts. From that moment on, the offenses are no longer made against concrete persons of flesh and bone, but against the State by the transgression of its laws. Therefore the real victims disappear and in their place the State stands as the injured party. Whereas the real victim could even forgive, the penal system does not forgive because the crime is now committed against a collective society, the State.

In countries where there is still the death penalty or life imprisonment, the crime that the justice system commits is far worse than the one committed by the criminal; who, incidentally, acted under the influence of some volatile strong emotion or passion in a reactive moment, moved, as we know, by his lower reptilian brain more than by his rational neocortex. Whereas the crime of the penal system is premeditated and not only by one person, but by a large number of people; what is even more cruel, nefarious and barbaric, are the years between the pronouncement of the death sentence and its execution.

By carrying out the punishments, allegedly proportional to the crime, the penal system exists to protect the society from crimes, but what it really hides is the fact that it is articulated as an instrument of domination of one class over another. We just need to take a look at our prisons to realize that they are full of people from the lower class who committed petty crimes, when compared to people of the upper class who commit far worse crimes and yet live in freedom.

The purpose of retributive justice
Retributive justice is the type of criminal justice that is practiced in the entire world; it consists of handing out in kind, to a delinquent or offender, a punishment or penalty deserved for a wrongdoing committed on another person (the real victim), this punishment is imposed by a legislator to compensate for the damage done to the victim, in the majority of cases the penalty is the deprivation of freedom.

For retributive justice, an offence is an act of violation of the laws of the State by an individual; the responsibility must be borne by the offender. The crime is a matter between the State and the offender, neither the victim, who is truly the injured party, nor the people indirectly involved, nor the community that has somehow been harmed, is taken into account.

In retributive justice there are only two instances: the State that presents itself and assumes at the same time the role of the victim of the crime, the legislative, executive and coercive power, and the offender who suffers the consequences of his infraction of the law.

The duty of the State is to capture the accused, charge him, prove his guilt, and hand out an adequate sentence for his crime.

The task of the offender is to comply with the sentence and passively suffer the penalty that was imposed on him without any saying in the process.

The victim too has no saying in this process, the one who truly suffered the crime, as well as the families of both the victim and the offender and the local community; none of these groups of people exists in the retributive justice penal system.

The objective of the retributive system is for the offender to suffer in his skin and bone the damage he caused to the State; that he be punished according to the seriousness of his act. The society is protected from him by depriving him of the ability to commit new crimes; finally, that everyone in general, by virtue of this punishment, be dissuaded from committing that or similar crimes. Deterrence was, in fact, the motive behind the Roman crucifixions at the roadside.

Restorative justice in the Bible
Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live? Ezekiel 18:23

The restorative character of biblical justice is already evident at the macro-theological level of the Bible from the beginning to the end. In the Bible, human being was created in the image and likeness of God; with the offense of our parents Adam and Eve, we lost the likeness while retaining the image. The sole subject of the Bible is the story of salvation or redemption, or the restoration of the human race to the dignity it once possessed, the likeness of God.

As we have seen in retributive justice, the victim, his family as well as the family of the offender and the local community, disappear, whereas in restorative justice they gain prominence. In the story of salvation, God is the victim who undertakes to do all that is necessary to restore humanity to its former dignity, as the parable of the prodigal son suggests, and to repair the damage done.

In addition to the macro-history of salvation, already in the Old Testament we find elements of restorative justice: in Numbers 5:6-7 and Leviticus 6:1-7 those who offend should acknowledge error, feel remorse, confess the sin, and restitute to the victim adding compensation.

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian… Galatians 3:23-25

If Cain was avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold (Genesis 4:24) – The objective of the law is to prevent the out of control escalation of violence. But it was not God’s intention that the law should be a permanent solution. For this very reason Jesus, in Matthew (5:38-48), revokes and replaces the law of an eye for an eye with a superior system of unconditional forgiveness and love of enemy, also replacing Lamech’s declaration of extreme violence with forgiving seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22).

Is the law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law. Galatians 3:21

For Paul, it is Jesus who gives life; retribution and punishment are not transmitters of life because they only have negative consequences for offensive acts, but they have no power to change hearts, to heal. Only restorative justice, heals and cures, and, in union with Christ transforms us. Retributive justice has no capacity to make us saints so it is not, nor can it be, God’s last plan. In fact, after the coming of Jesus to continue to be guided by the law is counterproductive and can only be bad.

I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. Romans 7:9-11

Anything good can become bad; the family is supposed to be a place where we feel safe and loved, but also can be deeply abusive and leave devastating scars. The Religion and the Law are, “per se”, also good, but, like the family, they can also become abusive. In the gospel, we witness this sort of abuse by the Pharisees whom Jesus repeatedly confronts. Paul was also himself a Pharisee until he converted and took the way of Christ.

In conclusion, retributive justice has always existed; the Law came in to prevent the escalation of violence, however as Paul tells us, the Law was only a disciplinarian. God’s definitive plan is the restorative justice in Christ. Jesus does not accuse nor condemn, he restores the spiritual, moral and physical health of the people he meets on the way; like he did with Zacchaeus, the woman caught in adultery, the paralytic, the lepers, and so on.

How does restorative justice work?
Howard Zehr’s 1990 book titled “A New Focus for Crime and Justice”, is considered to be the first to articulate this theory in a systematic way. It is true that this concept trails behind and, as Zehr acknowledges, due credit should be given to the practice of justice in some indigenous tribes in Canada, United States and New Zealand.

The penal system does not solve any problems and in fact, creates others. It fills prisons, creating outcasts and “personas non-grata” in society who sooner or later, given the opportunity, transgress again. The penal system is a system that produces much more pain and suffering than the violence it pretends to fight. Revenge is not justice and the punishment of the offender, however hard it may be, brings no satisfaction to the victim; to impose pain on another person does not make our pain disappear, nor does it diminish.

For restorative justice crime is any action that damages a person. It is an interpersonal conflict, and more than a transgression of the law, it is a wrong done to the victim and to the community at large. If the crime was committed against the community and a concrete person within that community, and not against an abstract entity like the State, it is in the community that the problem needs to be resolved. As the saying goes, “Don’t wash your dirty laundry in public.”

The place where retributive justice is carried out is in the courtroom and in prison; for restorative justice, the place is in the community center where the offender, his family and friends meet with the victim, along with his family and friends, and other relevant people of the community to which both belong. Interestingly, in places where the death penalty is carried out, these meetings also take place, when the victim’s next of kin will watch the macabre liturgy of the execution of the criminal, but here the purpose of the meetings is very different and very sad…

The meetings of restorative justice are voluntary, they must take place in mutual respect, in a climate of honesty and humility. The mediator or facilitator should meet with the parties separately first to prepare and coach them for the meeting.

Restorative justice aims to help in the recovery of the victim and the reintegration of the offender into the society taking into account community participation and mediation; dialogues and meetings are used as tools directly or indirectly between the parties involved. For retributive justice there were only two instances, the State and the offender; for restorative justice there are three instances: the victim, the offender and the community.

The Victim – The State ceases to usurp the role of the victim; the victim returns to the center stage, expresses the pain that the crime caused him or her, seeks to have the damage repaired and that the crime does not happen again. The victim has a voice, the person who really suffered, was injured and is still in pain; the State, on the other hand, was not really affronted and does not suffer like the real victim because pain cannot be delegated. The victim speaks, face to face, on how the crime affected his life and shows the damage it caused him.

The purpose is to repair the evil done, giving voice to the victim who expresses his or her feelings and needs, making the offender recognize the evil that he did and do something for the victim so not to reoffend. The objective is to achieve reconciliation and decide on what the offender must do to recompense the victim.

Let us see how the role of the victim works in the context of restorative justice in the following example:

A child who smells bad becomes the victim of bullying by his peers in school. In the field of retributive justice, these classmates will be punished, which probably solves nothing, and after some time, they go back to bullying or others copy what they do.

In the field of restorative justice, on the other hand, the bully and his victim, plus the people in their families and the school, as well as community leaders, will be summoned to a meeting. The offender learns the reason why his victim smells bad; he is a poor boy living in subsidized housing, where there is no electricity or running water.

The offender and his family will have a deeper understanding of the problem that lies behind this conflicting situation, so that from this meeting the possibility of mobilizing social forces to seek a solution at the root of the problem can come out. In the field of retributive justice, we would not get so far; it does not solve anything and can create more problems such as increasing violence if it has been exaggerated in the carrying out of the punishment.

The Offender – He now understands the victim, reconciles with him and repairs the damage. The wrongdoer learns the real impact of his action, something that he would not have known in the retributive justice system. In this setting, it is more likely that the offender would be ready to accept the responsibility of his actions, something that rarely happens in the retributive system where he looks to prove his innocence, or to escape justice.

The restorative justice system places great hope in the meeting between the victim and the offender; a crime is always an inhuman and dehumanizing encounter between two persons because they are superficially decontextualized. The meeting seeks to place the people in their living environment with their relationships. Let us look at the following example how the offender can change before a deeper awareness of his victim and how his crime has negatively affected the lives of many people:

A young man who killed a taxi driver was tried under the retributive justice system; in this context, he never knew, nor would ever know his victim and his life, and will be punished, nothing more. In restorative justice system, on the other hand, he will know better the dimension of his crime. In fact, he killed a taxi driver who was married and left behind a widow to raise their 8 children by herself. The clear perception of suffering, which the criminal has inflicted, has an internal effect of transformation because it will likely appeal to his compassion, to his humanity, that surely, he must possess.

Unlike retributive justice, where he did not even know the magnitude of suffering he enacted nor was asked to repair the damage he caused, in restorative justice, he can actively participate in helping to solve the problem his act has created and even change his life in this process. In the field of retributive justice he would remain in prison meddling on what went wrong, on the execution of the crime that he had devised as perfect, how he let himself be caught or what he could have done to escape justice.

The Community – It accompanies and facilitates the process and ensures the fulfillment of the conditions agreed between the defendant and the victim. In retributive justice, the State usurps the role of the victim and the community, only it acts, only it plays an active role in solving the problem. In restorative justice, the problem is resolved where it arose and by those who created it and those who suffered it. In dialogue between the parties, the community mediates the reconciliation and facilitates the process.

In conclusion, in retributive justice the State assumes the role of an abstract victim and punishes the offender. In restorative justice there is an interaction between the real victim disclosing her pain and hurt suffered and the offender coming to know the magnitude of his actions; the end result is healing for both.

A movie called “Conversas” (Dialogues)
The facilitator, through two prior meetings with each party, succeeds in getting the family of the victim and the family of the offender to come to a meeting. Based on a true story, the movie tells the story of a man who rapes and kills a girl while on probation. The criminal is in prison serving his sentence, but sends a videotape to the meeting in which he apologizes for the crime and says that he did not intend to kill the victim and assured that he had left her alive, only that he exceeded the sexual violence and she ended up dying.

The most important thing that came out of the dialogue is how the guilt is diluted and shared by both the criminal’s family and the victim’s family.  The mother of the criminal feels guilty for being condescending in the upbringing of her son who was her favorite. His brother confesses that he could have helped the victim and that he tried to speak her and warn her, but she thought that he was making advances at her, so she threw him looks of disdain that froze him in his intent of warning her of the danger.

The father of the victim confessed that his daughter inherited from him her arrogance and snobbery and that he had failed to give her the security device that he had long promised his daughter, because she had already had other incidents of potential danger.

The criminal’s maternal uncle had fired his nephew and gave him the impression that violence is sometimes part of sex; the criminal’s psychotherapist naively believed in his conversion and admitted that she was even infatuated with him. The two families ended up reconciled because both have suffered from the crime and everyone accepts some of the guilt.

In his life as a psychotherapist, Rosenberg gives success of using the NVC philosophy in the area of restorative justice, in a case similar to that of the movie “Dialogues”, he placed face to face a father and the daughter whom he had molested.

Step 1 – Rosenberg begins his mediation by asking the daughter to tell her father how her life was affected by his rape. Without any training in NVC, she accuses her father of what he did:

-    How could you do this, you my own father, you have destroyed my life! You should rot in prison.

At this point the process requires that the father empathizes with his daughter. The normal thing is that he apologizes, but in NVC there are no apologies, but a mourning process. When with the help of the facilitator or mediator, the father can empathize with his daughter of her pain, he feels a great sadness.

Step 2 – The father now enters a process of mourning that is far more important than a formal request for apology.

Step 3 – It is then the father’s turn to expose to his daughter what was happening to him at the level of feelings and needs, and how the act was an inadequate and cruel way of seeking the fulfillment of his needs; a selfish satisfaction that only took into account his needs and not those of others.

The objective of this step is to lead the victim to empathize with the perpetrator. It is not easy in this case for the daughter to empathize with her father, but when it does happen the healing is done without needing to ask for forgiveness nor to grant pardon. Empathy, by itself, has the power to heal both the perpetrator and the victim.

Whenever the offender manages to empathise with the victim and the victim manages to empathise with the offender forgiveness is automatic; it goes without saying. On the contrary, if there is no empathy between the parties, the offender may even ask for forgiveness and the victim grant it formally, but since it is not from the heart, it is not real forgiveness. There won’t be healing without true forgiveness and vice versa; both can only happen with empathy.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

NVC - A New Relationship With God

Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:8

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Deuteronomy 6:4-8

The matrix of nonviolence
When we open the desktop case of a computer, we see all its principal components fixed on a board called the motherboard. The physical storage or the hard drive, the operating memory or RAM, the processor, the sound and the video cards work by themselves and in relation with other components as long as they are connected to the motherboard. A change in the motherboard makes all other components obsolete, because they do not adapt to the new board; for example, the motherboard of a PC is different from the motherboard of a Macintosh.

We believe that Nonviolent Communication is the new motherboard for the world and society at large, a new social order. Upon this new matrix lies a new law, a new ethic, a new way to educate, a new way to relate to ourselves, to others and to our planet. We also believe that on this very matrix lies a new religion, that is, a new way of relating to God.

Similar to the theory of the Anonymous Christians of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, we have come to discover that many known facts, even without the knowledge of this new matrix, have on their own accord realized that they have operated inadequately under the principle of violence. Within the law there are those who question retributive justice and want to replace it with restorative justice. In philosophy Socrates saw indoctrination as a violent way of educating people, instead he used maieutic – the art of helping to give birth to new ideas – with his disciples as a way of reaching the latent wisdom in each person and that each person would discover this for himself with the help of a philosopher or psychotherapist who facilitates or helps the person give birth to this knowledge, that is, to become aware of it.

Similarly, Carl Rogers puts forward his non-directive psychotherapy against the directive and therefore violent method with the understanding that the solution to each person’s problem is within himself. Ethics questions the principle of just war and believes that there can be a world beyond good and evil. Additionally there is no longer a question of a heteronomous morality based on moral principles and rules established by one for all, but an autonomous morality based on the primacy of moral conscience, well-formed and informed, above all other instances. Brazilian sociologist Paulo Freire believes in a sort of maieutic way of bringing literacy to rural areas, while Teilhard de Chardin and Walter Wink believe in a different way of relating to God, a new religion.

Religion or revelation
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3:16

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1John 4:10

Christianity is not a religion because religion, from the word “religare”, refers to the efforts, deeds and liturgies that human beings perform to relate with this superior and omnipotent being to obtain His favor so that He is on our side against our enemies'. Christianity is instead a revelation in as much as the kick-off given by this same God who, because He is love, first loved us. The initiative was, therefore, from God who so loved us that He sent us His Son. Following this same philosophy, Jesus chose his disciples, he was not chosen by them (John 15:16).

Contrary to Judaism which is negative with commandments that tell us what we should not do, Christianity is positive because it is based on the commandment of love. Judaism is to avoid evil while Christianity is to do good because one is NOT good just because he avoids evil. In fact, the human initiative in Judaism, as in all other religions, is based on the famous golden rule of which all beliefs on this planet have a version: Do not do to others what you do not want others do to you.

The Christian golden rule, however, is positive: In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)

Christianity is the “religion” of initiative for we do not expect others to come to us -- instead, we go out to them moved solely by the intention of loving them.

“Love is repaid with love” – Or, in the context of the NVC philosophy, the compassion we use with ourselves and with others produces in others compassion that they, in turn, will use with themselves and with us. In this way a circle is formed which progressively widens its reach like the circles formed on water when a rock is thrown in the middle of a lake.  If, as they say, laughter is contagious then love is even more so.

Nonviolent Christianity
The initials NVC which stand for Non - Violent - Communication may as well stand for Non - Violent - Christianity. Christianity is in fact nonviolent in its essence and in its historical origin. No one would deny that the concept of active nonviolence has its origin in the doctrine and praxis of Jesus of Nazareth. It is true that Christianity has not always been nonviolent throughout its two millennia of history; we cannot hide the realities like the Crusades, and its concept of just war, as well as the Inquisition or the violent ways chosen by some to impose and protect the true doctrines.

Historically, Christianity has not followed the path of its Master and Founder, Jesus of Nazareth, neither in his human demeanor nor in his gospel. Especially after the rule of Emperor Constantine, the Church was akin to the dominant power, and on many occasions followed blindly the Babylonian myth as if it was a gospel; and if in some ways she followed the other, the true Gospel of Christ, she read it in light of the Babylonian myth.

But this was not so in the beginning with Jesus of Nazareth, and until the fifth century. Jesus, in fact, was the first human being to confront the Babylonian myth of redemptive violence and proved with his own death that violence is not desired by God. Violence not only does not redeem, but it also turns into a vicious circle that moves like a hurricane, creating more violence along its path, increasing spirally and exponentially with each act of violence practiced.

With his death, Jesus proved that only nonviolence is redemptive. That is why Jesus, the founder of Christianity, is also the founder of nonviolence. We already had the occasion to explain Jesus’ proactive ideas of nonviolence, a term that many thought was created by Gandhi who achieved India’s independence by nonviolent means. According to Martin Luther King, Gandhi did not create the concept of nonviolence, but was the first person in history to raise and lead the ethical love of Jesus beyond the interactions between individuals, making it into a powerful and effective social force at large scale.

Gandhi even said, “Everyone knows that Jesus was nonviolent, only the Christians do not”, true enough that this is not a sarcastic criticism of Christianity. Christians in fact never gave importance to Jesus’ nonviolence and they themselves laughed at the saying of turning the other cheek by interpreting it as an innocent and naïve utopic idealism. Gandhi himself was certainly referring to Jesus when speaking for the cause of independence of India when he said, “For this ideal, I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill”.

Jesus and the Temple of Jerusalem
(…) Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!” John 2:15-16

Jesus entered Jerusalem “ridiculously”, one could say, riding on a donkey (Luke 19:28-40), an animal of peace and of the poor, for it serves to carry loads to marketplace, even to this day in Ethiopia. The horse, on the other hand, is an animal of war and of the rich, for it serves only for ostentation and war. Maybe people laughed because someone who intended to be a king came riding on a donkey instead of on a horse… but in so doing Jesus laughed at the violence and the system of government, he had neither fear nor shame in being acclaimed a king mounted on a donkey.

Much has been written about the expulsion of the merchants from the Temple, from which some dare to say that at last Jesus was also violent. First, it is necessary to take note that the least historic of all the gospels is precisely that of Saint John; of this incident, the synoptic evangelists Mark, Matthew and Luke make no account.

As for the Gospel of John mentioned above, the problem began with the erroneous translation that St. Jerome made of the original Greek. “All” refers according to the Greek original to the oxen and sheep that Jesus expelled with the whip and not the sellers. So the text should be read as, “Making a whip of cord and he drove all the sheep and cattle from the Temple”. In fact, when he came to the sellers of doves, he did not drive them out with the whip, but by telling them to take their goods out of there. The impact of entering Jerusalem riding on a donkey instead of a horse would have been deflated if Jesus had used the whip to flog people instead of the animals.

It is true of course that Jesus was angry, but he did not act violently, his rage, on this occasion as in others, was just and justified; in this case it was to defend the true religion, and in other cases to defend the poor, the widows, the sick and the destitute against those who took advantage of them. Contrary to our anger, which we exhibit when our interests are affected, Jesus never got angry, nor did anything for his own sake, to advance his own self-interest, he had none.

His was a prophetic gesture, in the style of the Old Testament prophets who never tired of repeating that what God wants is love, mercy and compassion rather than sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). Like many prophets before him, Jesus questioned and opposed the whole violent sacrificial system. The religion, or relationship, that Jesus came to establish is the relationship of love that existed between the people and God during the crossing of the desert.

Jesus tells the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-42) that God is not worshiped in Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim, but everywhere because God is spirit and the only condition is to be in the truth. Jesus in the temple performed a symbolic act to invite believers to cease participating in the sacrificial system, since it absolved or exempted believers from converting in their minds and hearts.

Furthermore, the sacrifices had been in fact transformed into a shameful and corrupt business during the time of the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. Since they were owners of large flocks, they instructed the temple guards to inspect and reject the sacrificial animals that were brought to the temple so that people could not offer their own animals, because the inspectors always found some defects in them and declared them unfit to be offered to God. In this way, people had to buy new sacrificial animals at the temple, those that were coming from Annas’ and Caiaphas’ flocks.

The ancient nomadism of the people of Israel was conducive to a nomadic spirituality, that is, in not grasping onto false security and thus always depending on God. It was this type of spirituality that inspired the people during the years of the desert crossing to the Promised Land. Jesus in his “modus vivendi” returned to these times, in fact he was himself a nomad, he never settled down and had nowhere to lay his head. (Luke 9:58)

The sedentary lifestyle led to the creation of structures of power and the use of religion as the justifier or spiritual mentorship of these same structures. They locked God, who before was spirit, into the Temple where only the priests had access to Him, as only they had the key, and set themselves as intermediaries between God and men, selling salvation at high cost to the people.

Some time before Jesus, the Essenes had already taken notice of this fallacy so they broke away from the main stream Judaism because they considered it corrupt, and formed a community on the shores of the Dead Sea; in this community, salvation was obtained through the conversion of life by physical and ritual purification, by means of water, the symbol of spiritual purification.

The Essenic movement was an elitist one as salvation was offered only for some; so what John the Baptist did was to democratize salvation by bringing it out of the Qumran community and making it available to all by means of a baptism of water, symbol of a heart and mind purification and conversion. Being the son of a priest and therefore a priest himself, John rebelled against the Temple, since the free baptism he was proposing would replace the costly offering of animals in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins.

Finally, Jesus in the beginning also followed the steps of the Baptist, and that is why we see him further down the river baptizing at the same time as John (John 3:22-26). However, after the death of John the Baptist, Jesus brings salvation to the towns and villages by the laying on of hands. Jesus’ religion is a street religion and not of the temple, or synagogue, or church, for these quickly establish themselves as structures of power, and not even of specific places like the Jordan River as in the case of John. Salvation is offered by Jesus wherever humans live and need it.

At the time Jesus was dying on the cross, more than three thousand lambs and goats were being slaughtered in the temple; after Jesus’ sacrifice, the temple sacrifices ended because the Temple veil was torn at the same time as the Lord’s death. The Temple which at the time of Jesus had just been rebuilt by Herod and was at its height of beauty and splendor (Mark 15:38), was later destroyed by the Romans and to this day has never been rebuilt.

It is interesting to know that the word “Guadalupe” means “the one who crushes the serpent”; it is a reference to the god Quetzalcoatl, or stone serpent, to which the Aztecs used to offer human sacrifices. In 1487, due to the dedication of the new temple in Tenochtilan, about 80,000 captives were sacrificed in a single ceremony which lasted four days. Interestingly, with the arrival of Christianity there, human sacrifices also ended.

Religion without sacrifice
NVC opposes the theology, philosophy and psychology of sacrificing oneself and one’s needs for the sake of others. It regards it as part of the instituted powers, ideology of redemption through violence: in this case violence against oneself. The ultimate sacrifice of a man for his country, his homeland, his flag or his king or a woman's self-sacrifice to attend to the needs of her husband or as a mother to attend to the needs of her children, all perpetuate the myth of redemptive violence which says that violence is needed to achieve goodness.

Any action that is done out of the sense of duty, or obligation, shame or guilt; to buy love or popularity or because one feels responsible for the happiness of the other, goes against NVC philosophy. Anything done out of these reasons has a very high price to pay both by the doer and the receiver of such actions.

"Please do as I requested, ONLY if you can do so with the joy of a little child feeding a hungry duck. Marshall Rosenberg

Never give anything that is not from the heart. Marshall Rosenberg

In NVC whatever we do, we do it free of charge, we make no debtors in the act of giving and are not in debt in the act of receiving; whatever we do, we do it out of love and the joy of contributing to our and the other’s happiness. Whatever we do, we do it to make our and the other's lives more wonderful; whatever we do, we do it because we like to do it and because it satisfies our needs and the needs of others. In NVC there are no extrinsic motivations in whatever we do.

No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. John 10:18
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13

Since for Jesus what is really redemptive is non-violence and since he was against the Temple and its sacrifices, we believe he was also against the whole idea of sacrificing oneself for whatever reason. Despite playing very well into the ideology of “Redemptive violence”, the whole idea of sacrificing oneself makes Christianity a non-less-violent religion than its mother, Judaism. Maybe this is the way the instituted powers look at Christianity and even the way many Christians conceptualize their faith; but it is not the religion that Jesus instituted and certainly Jesus did not look at his own death as a self-inflicted violent act - a sacrifice.

First, as we quote above, Jesus died for us out of his own free will and not because he was destined and required to die either by God the Father or because of the circumstances in which he lived. Second, and in concordance with the principles of NVC, he died for us not because it was required but because he loved us. Third, for NVC, needs, values or ideals are one and the same thing; so, in dying for us Jesus was satisfying his need to love each of us individually and humanity as a whole.

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself . Leviticus 19:18
At the first glance, this commandment seems to be only about the love of neighbor. However, when we look at it closely we discover that the measure by which I am to love my neighbor is my self-esteem, the love I have for myself, I can only conclude that the commandment not only implies that I should love myself, but that the love I am to have for myself is to come first, and then second the love for my neighbor the way I love myself.

For NVC our world is very plentiful and in it there is enough resources to meet everyone’s needs, so in any given circumstances we never have to compromise our needs in order to meet the needs of someone else. If ever my needs are on a collision course with the needs of another person, Nature will surely inspire us with ways or strategies to meet both of our needs.

Religion without Hell without Heaven
No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido,
ni me mueve el infierno tan temido
para dejar por eso de ofenderte.

Tú me mueves, Señor, muéveme el verte
clavado en una cruz y escarnecido,
muéveme el ver tu cuerpo tan herido,
muéveme tus afrentas y tu muerte.

Muéveme, en fin, tu amor, y en tal manera
que, aunque no hubiera cielo yo te amara
y aunque no hubiera infierno, te temiera.

 No me tienes que dar porque te quiera,
pues, aunque lo que espero no esperara,
lo mismo que te quiero te quisiera.

I am not moved, my God, to love you
by the heaven you have promised me
Nor am I moved by the dread of hell
To cease, out of fear, from offending you.

You move me, my God, it moves me to see you
nailed to that cross and mocked
It moves me to see your tortured body.
It moves me to see the anguish of your death.

In sum, your love moves me in such a way that
even if there were no heaven, I would still love you,
and though there were no hell, I would still fear you.

You do not have to give me a reason to love you,
Because even if I were not hoping for all I hope for,
I would love you the same way as I love you now.

Sonnet to Christ crucified by an anonymous Spanish poet of the 16th Century

This sonnet, by an anonymous Spaniard in the sixteenth century, reveals that already in that century there were people who thought that the true religion, that is, their relationship with God should not be motivated by the eagerness to gain Heaven or the fear of going to Hell. As we have learned from NVC, everything we do that is motivated by the fear of punishment or the hope of getting a reward is violent..

Salvation is by faith and not by works. Once we are saved by faith, the Heaven is already “ipso facto” guaranteed, we do not have to earn it; therefore, whatever good works we do is to respond with love and for love to the One who first loved us. Saint Paul had already intuited that Christianity is pure and unconditional grace, but in the centuries that followed the Catholic Church buried this theology and instituted the violent theology of salvation through works, and the purchase and abuse of indulgences.

Just as for nonviolence it was necessary that a Gandhi had to come to make us look back at our nonviolent roots, in this case it was also necessary for a Martin Luther and a schism in the Church to come to reconcile us with the Pauline theology of free salvation by faith and not by works.

For this Christian poet of the sixteenth century what moved him, the motive of his love for Jesus, is not an interested love, the kind where I give you something in order to get it back with interests, it is rather a free love. It is the answer to the one who loved me first and delivered himself up for me; it is not the fear of hell, nor the eagerness of Heaven, for even if these did not exist, his love would still subsist because it is a love that is moved by compassion and empathy, concepts so dear to NVC.

This sonnet, the most renowned of all Spanish literature, also had the ex-libris of the counter-reformation ironically accepting the postulate of salvation by faith. It had, and is in fact, an encounter of the love of God manifested in the passion, for no one has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13), an unconditional love, for Jesus gave his life for all of us while we are still sinners (Romans 5:8). It is the response of human love, also unconditional, without the “contamination” of Heaven or Hell.

Without doubt all love presupposes a hope, or rather, a purpose. Love, even when understood as a feeling, as in Plato’s banquet, is also a means (in the voice of Socrates) of reaching the absolute good and overcoming the state of being parentless, because human beings are, in themselves, incomplete.

The love of God, however, has neither a beginning nor an end, it is completely free. This sonnet makes a blank sheet of all expectations. He tells Christ that his love is not guided by any interest in the reward of Heaven or the fear of punishment of Hell. Human love is inspired by the suffering of Christ. Therefore, the absolute love of God has the capacity to generate a similar love in us.

It is true that the poet believes and does not deny his faith in life after death, but he insists more than once to manifest his love free of any expectation or retribution, exempting God from all obligations and even from blessings or prosperities that He may bestow upon him during his earthly life. The poet lives of love and for love, he has nothing to ask for in this life or in the next.

Salvation through faith alone
You pay love with love. (Portuguese proverb)

God is love and so all He does is loving. He created us out of love and when we went astray, He loved the world so much that He sent his only Son to save us through him. (John 13, 16) All this love cannot be retributed by deeds or good behavior; God created us and saved us out of free love and this love is always unconditional, it does not requires love from our part.

Consequently, we don’t have to do anything to achieve salvation, which cannot be obtained through our own efforts anyway, otherwise Jesus did not need to come. We can only reach God the Father through the Son (John 14, 6) and without him we can do nothing. (John 15, 5)

Love and do whatever you will, said Saint Augustine. We can only pay God’s love with our own love, not with deeds or good behavior. Deeds and good behavior indeed these will happen but they are not enforced by our strong will in repressing our needs in an effort to comply with the commandments in order to attain Heaven and avoid Hell, but simply as the result of our feedback love for God.

Oftentimes in sermons I like to provoke the people by saying that God only loves those who love Him. The reaction is immediate, the congregation throws at me that God loves everybody the same way, the sinner as much as the saint; that He makes the sun rise for the good and evil alike and sends rain on both the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:45)

But then I say yes, in theory God loves everybody but in practice, or in reality He loves only those who love Him. What I mean by this is that it is only when you echo the love of God, and the only way you can echo or feedback the love of God is by loving Him back, that you feel the effects of God’s love in you and in your life. If you turn your back on God, that is, if you don’t love Him, God cannot force His love on you so you don’t feel the effect of His love. Loving God is accepting His love, not loving God is rejecting His love.

The Sun before reaching us on our planet crosses a vast space but does not heat nor light it; space is black and its temperature is around -300 C. This happens because space is empty, there is nothing in there to receive and reflect back the light and the heat of the Sun. The same with the love of God, only those who receive it and reflect it back to God by retributing love with love will feel the effects of God’s love in their lives.

This leads straight into NVC in the chapter on gratuity and giving from the heart. Let us be reminded of Rosenberg maxims: Don’t do anything that is not from the bottom of your heart. Do as I request only if you can do it with the same joy as a child feeding a hungry duck. Don’t do anything out of any other energy such as: out of duty, or obligation, anger, guilt, shame, to buy the love of others, or heaven, for fear of being punished or Hell, or because you feel responsible for somebody’s happiness and would feel guilty if you don’t do something…

Freely you have received; freely give. (Matthew 10:8) - God did not make us to put us in His debt, we receive from Him with grace and we give to Him not with pay but also with grace.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

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