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On Nonviolent Communication
On Nonviolent Communication
if you say “my boss makes me crazy”, you will indeed think your boss is “making” you crazy. If you instead say “I am frustrated because I am wanting stability and consistency in this relationship” you may then think you can control your level of frustration and clearly address what it is you want. If someone else is making you crazy, there’s nothing you can do. If you control your feelings, you can take actions to change how you respond to causes. Words can be windows or they can be walls — they can open doors for compassion or they can do the opposite. NVC uses words as windows. Our language today uses them as walls. More on this later.
If I ask you to meet me at 6:00 and you pick me up at 6:30, how do I feel? It depends. I could be frustrated that you are late because I want to spend my time productively, or scared that you may not know where to find me, or hurt because I need reassurance that you care about me — or, conversely, happy that I get more time to myself.
It’s not enough to blame the feeling on the person whose actions triggered the feeling. That very same action might have inspired completely different feelings in someone else — or even in me, under different circumstances!
Incidents like the friend coming late may stimulate or set the stage for feelings, but they do not *cause* the feelings.
There is a gap between stimulus and cause — and our power lies in how we use that gap. If we truly understood this — the separation between stimulus and cause — and the idea that we are responsible for our own emotions, we would speak very differently.
We wouldn’t say things like “It bugs me when …” or “It makes me angry when”. These phrases imply or actually state that responsibility for your feelings lie outside of yourself. A better statement would be “When I saw you come late, I started to feel scared”. Here, one may at least be taking some responsibility for the feeling of anger, and not simply blaming the latecomer for causing such feelings.
the more we use our language to cede responsibility to others, the less agency we have over our circumstances, and the more we victimize ourselves.
NVC believes that, as human beings, there are only two things that we are basically saying: Please and Thank You. Judgments are distorted attempts to say “Please.”
NVC requires learning how to say what your needs are, what needs are alive in you at a given moment, which ones are getting fulfilled, and which ones are not.
You sacrifice your needs to provide for and take care of your family. Needs are not important. What’s important is obedience to authority. That’s what’s important. With that background and history we’ve been taught a language that doesn’t teach us how to say how we are. It teaches us to worry about what we are in the eyes of authority.
When our minds have been pre-occupied that way we have trouble answering what seems to be a simple question, which is asked in all cultures throughout the world, “How are you?” It is a way of asking what’s alive in you. It’s a critical question. Even though it’s asked in many cultures, people don’t know how to answer it because they haven’t been educated in a culture that cares about how you are.
The shift necessary requires being able to say, how do you feel at this moment, and what are the needs behind your feelings? And when we ask those question to highly educated people, they cannot answer it. Ask them how they feel, and they say “I feel that that’s wrong”. Wrong isn’t a feeling. Wrong is a thought.
When your mind has been shaped to worry about what people think about you, you lose connection with what’s alive in you.
The underlying philosophy of punishment and reward is that if people are basically evil or selfish, then the correctional process if they are behaving in a way you don’t like is to make them hate themselves for what they have done. If a parent, for example, doesn’t like what the child is doing, the parent says something like ”Say you’re sorry!! The child says, “I’m sorry.” The parent says “No! You’re not really sorry!” Then the child starts to cry “I’m sorry. . .” The parent says “Okay, I forgive you.”
Note, I think NVC is productive is for friendships and relationships, or anything where connection is the main goal, not for any work or organizations that primarily serve another mission.
NVC involves the following: 1) how we express ourselves to other people, 2) how we interpret what people say to us, and most importantly, 3) how we communicate with ourselves.
Some have suggested alternatives such as Compassionate Communication, Authentic Communication, Connected Communication.
#communication#difficult-convos#mental models#narratives#rhetoric#introspection#existential#themes#writing/characterization#storytelling
·substack.com·
On Nonviolent Communication
How To Be A Good Listener
How To Be A Good Listener
We want to know what the other is thinking. We want to know what our whole species thinks (written language) and has learned (school). And yet, minds are not directly observable. We have to talk about them. We have a seemingly endless interest in stories, because there is information there we crave—how to be. Sharing stories of events and people, whether real or fictional, synchronizes our values, provides (perceived) control over this insane world via meaning and causal explanations, and creates—not reinforces, but creates—the basic, primal social bond humans have as we, as listeners, all tune into to one point of attention.
a good listener is actually someone who is good at talking.
the really good advice, the secrets that will make you much better at listening to a degree that your relationships are significantly more successful, peaceful, gratifying, intimate, and trusting, have to do with what you say.
Some simple and powerful phrases to use when someone is feeling feels: “I hear you.” “I bet it is hard.” “That makes sense.” Ones to strike from your vocabulary: “You have no reason to feel that way.” “Don’t be silly!” “I’m sad/mad/whatever too!” (see #5).
Don’t allow lies you want to correct, or generalizations you want to protest, or insults you want to decry, or any angry words to manipulate you into engaging. This is not a real conversation. Real conversations and problem solving don’t happen in yells or insults.
Replace all of the shocking, mean, hateful, incorrect, ignorant, offensive, cruel things coming out of this person’s mouth with “I’m hurt! I’m hurt! I’m hurt! I’m hurt. I’m hurrrrt.” Summon your best pity, then disengage. END this moment with “I’ll be up for talking another time about this if you want.” Don’t say “…when you are less angry.” It will make the person angrier.
Don’t let “what do you want to be when you grow up?” be the first thing you say to a child. It reinforces the message that children, in the eyes of all the adults they meet, have no real value until they grow up. Ask instead what the child is interested in now—favorite books, hobbies, subjects in school, etc. If it’s a female child, be aware of avoiding remarks on only her appearance or clothing. If you only heard compliments on your hair or dress or whatever from everyone you met, you’d start to think your looks are your most important feature, too. Maybe your only important feature.
If it’s a male child, try an unguided, open-ended invitation like “what’s on your mind today, buddy?” What a different world we’d live in if more boys felt safe sharing feelings, in their own way, right from the start.
Empathy is not “hey that happened to me too!” or “I also know what you are talking about—in fact I know a lot more than you do!” This is more like someone has just brought out his bowling pins to juggle but you grab them and juggle obliviously away from him. Not empathy. Empathy is just the opposite: turning away from your ego, for just a minute (don’t worry, you can have it back soon!) in order to imagine, really imagine, what it’s like for someone else to be alive.
Ask “What happened?” “What kind of place was that?” “When did you first…?” or other non yes-or-no questions.
Asking why can lead to defensiveness, and a sort of shallow string of quick justifications for behavior that aren’t actually insightful or productive. You can sit for days and discuss whys without any real benefit or helpful solutions.
Questions say, “I’m interested. You are valuable.” And they are my go-to solution whenever I have no idea what to say.
#relationships#conversation#difficult-convos#social
·tomblog.rip·
How To Be A Good Listener
The Signal and the Corrective
The Signal and the Corrective

A technical breakdown of 'narratives' and how they operate: narratives simplify issues by focusing on a main "signal" while ignoring other relevant "noise", and this affects discussions between those with opposing preferred signals. It goes into many examples across basically any kind of ideological or cultural divide.

AI summary:

  • The article explores how different people can derive opposing narratives from the same set of facts, with each viewing their interpretation as the "signal" and opposing views as "noise"
  • Key concepts:
    • Signal: The core belief or narrative someone holds as fundamentally true
    • Corrective: The moderating adjustments made to account for exceptions to the core belief
    • Figure-ground inversion: How the same reality can be interpreted in opposite ways
  • Examples of opposing narratives include:
    • Government as public service vs. government as pork distribution
    • Medical care as healing vs. medical care as harmful intervention
    • Capitalism as wealth creation vs. capitalism as exploitation
    • Nature vs. nurture in human behavior
    • Science as gradual progress vs. science as paradigm shifts
  • Communication dynamics:
    • People are more likely to fall back on pure signals (without correctives) when:
      • Discussions become abstract
      • Communication bandwidth is limited
      • Under stress or emotional pressure
      • Speaking to unfamiliar audiences
      • In hostile environments
  • Persuasion insights:
    • It's easier to add correctives to someone's existing signal than to completely change their core beliefs
    • People must feel their fundamental views are respected before accepting criticism
    • Acknowledging partial validity of opposing views is crucial for productive dialogue
  • Problems in modern discourse:
    • Online debates often lack real-world consequences
    • When there's no need for cooperation, people prefer conquest over consensus
    • Lack of real relationships reduces incentives for civility and understanding
  • The author notes that while most people hold moderate views with both signals and correctives, fundamental differences can be masked when discussing specific policies but become apparent in discussions of general principles
  • The piece maintains a thoughtful, analytical tone while acknowledging the complexity and challenges of human communication and belief systems
  • The author expresses personal examples and vulnerability in describing how they themselves react differently to criticism based on whether it comes from those who share their fundamental values
narratives contradicting each other means that they simplify and generalize in different ways and assign goodness and badness to things in opposite directions. While that might look like contradiction it isn’t, because generalizations and value judgments aren’t strictly facts about the world. As a consequence, the more abstracted and value-laden narratives get the more they can contradict each other without any of them being “wrong”.
“The free market is extremely powerful and will work best as a rule, but there are a few outliers where it won’t, and some people will be hurt so we should have a social safety net to contain the bad side effects.” and “Capitalism is morally corrupt and rewards selfishness and greed. An economy run for the people by the people is a moral imperative, but planned economies don’t seem to work very well in practice so we need the market to fuel prosperity even if it is distasteful.” . . . have very different fundamental attitudes but may well come down quite close to each other in terms of supported policies. If you model them as having one “main signal” (basic attitude) paired with a corrective to account for how the basic attitude fails to match reality perfectly, then this kind of difference is understated when the conversation is about specific issues (because then signals plus correctives are compared and the correctives bring “opposite” people closer together) but overstated when the conversation is about general principles — because then it’s only about the signal.
I’ve said that when discussions get abstract and general people tend to go back to their main signals and ignore correctives, which makes participants seem further apart than they really are. The same thing happens when the communication bandwidth is low for some reason. When dealing with complex matters human communication tends not to be super efficient in the first place and if something makes subtlety extra hard — like a 140 character limit, only a few minutes to type during a bathroom break at work, little to no context or a noisy discourse environment — you’re going to fall back to simpler, more basic messages. Internal factors matter too. When you’re stressed, don’t have time to think, don’t know the person you’re talking to and don’t really care about them, when emotions are heated, when you feel attacked, when an audience is watching and you can’t look weak, or when you smell blood in the water, then you’re going to go simple, you’re going to go basic, you’re going to push in a direction rather than trying to hit a target. And whoever you’re talking to is going to do the same. You both fall back in different directions, exactly when you shouldn’t.
It makes sense to think of complex disagreements as not about single facts but about narratives made up of generalizations, abstractions and interpretations of many facts, most of which aren’t currently on the table. And the status of our favorite narratives matters to us, because they say what’s happening, who the heroes are and who the villains are, what’s matters and what doesn’t, who owes and who is owed. Most of us, when not in our very best moods, will make sure our most cherished narratives are safe before we let any others thrive.
Most people will accept that their main signals have correctives, but they will not accept that their main signals have no validity or legitimacy. It’s a lot easier to install a corrective in someone than it is to dislodge their main signal (and that might later lead to a more fundamental change of heart) — but to do that you must refrain from threatening the signal because that makes people defensive. And it’s not so hard. Listen and acknowledge that their view has greater than zero validity.
In an ideal world, any argumentation would start with laying out its own background assumptions, including stating if what it says should be taken as a corrective on top of its opposite or a complete rejection of it.
#narratives#mental models#communication#storytelling#misinfo#persuasion#difficult-convos#themes#bias#capitalism#psychology#politics#rhetoric
·everythingstudies.com·
The Signal and the Corrective