Marshall Rosenberg's groundbreaking
work in helping us connect with ourselves and others in meaningful
ways often generates many questions. Where did this process
come from? How is it different from what I do now? How widespread
is its practice?
Hearing about the NVC process for the first time, people
are often surprised at how different it is from the way they
learned to communicate. As with all revolutionary ideas,
people often ask how Marshall developed his approaches to
successfully connect with others, and his reasons for using
some unusual techniques to get his message across.
The process of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and how it
is presented is the product of decades of study, direct experience
and personal involvement in the lives of others. For that
reason, below are several questions that Marshall has fielded
over the years, questions that might occur to you as you
learn more about Marshall Rosenberg and the NVC process.
Marshall's answers are his own words, responses that have
been excerpted from talks, interviews, workshops, presentations
and published works.
FAQ Quick Links
To jump to a question of your interest, simply click on
the links below:
Questions and Answers
Q:
What led you to start the work you are doing with NVC?
MBR: It’s pretty
clear to me that I got started in the work that I’m
doing in 1943 in Detroit, Michigan. My family moved into
Detroit just in time for the race riots of 1943. They were
the second worst race riots in United States history. About
33 people were killed in three days. That was my first exposure
to that kind of violence. I realized that this is a world
in which you can be hurt simply for your skin color. Then
there was a good deal of violence directed at me for being
Jewish.
It was frightening and depressing never feeling safe, wondering
how to get home from school without being beaten or humiliated.
My family would say to me, “Just be glad we’re
here. If we were living in Germany now we’d be put
into an oven.” That didn’t make me feel very
secure about this world.
During this time I discovered that there were two kinds
of smiles. One kind of smile was on the face of people watching
as I was being beaten by a group. As much as the beating
was frightening, I remember looking up and seeing the observers
enjoying it, enjoying watching me being hurt and humiliated
because I was a Jew. When I came home, I saw a different
kind of smile. My Grandmother was paralyzed. An uncle would
come over every evening to help my mother take care of my
Grandmother. While he was cleaning up my Grandmother, which
to me would be a horrible job, I saw him smiling the whole
time he did it, with a beautiful smile!
So there are these two kinds of smiles in the world. There
are the people like my uncle who get joy out of serving in
some way, and the other kind of smile of those people who
enjoy people’s suffering. That started this question
in my mind: How could that be? Why do some people enjoy contributing
to other people’s well-being and others want people
to suffer? Slowly I discovered that my uncle was expressing
our true nature. I’m convinced that there’s nothing
that human beings like more than to contribute to one another’s
well-being. And the other kind of smile, the kind that teaches
us to enjoy other people’s pain, we get that from education,
education that’s left over from domination systems
in which a few people dominate many. That history has trained
us to think in ways that support those systems and their
violence.
I wanted to study these questions of what gets into people
that makes for violence. When it came time to decide what
I wanted to do I picked clinical psychology, thinking that
there must be an illness that leads people to be violent.
So, I got a doctor’s degree in psychology, but in the
course of my studies I saw that that way of looking at things
was part of the problem. This concept of mental illness is
just another way of judging people. Instead of evil and good,
we now think of them as sick and normal. But it’s the
same way of thinking and it’s that way of thinking
that I’m concerned about.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, Nonviolent
Communication: A Language of Life or Speak
Peace in a World of Conflict.
Back to the top
Q:
How did you start developing the NVC process?
MBR: I was very dissatisfied with clinical
psychology because it is pathology based and I didn’t
like its language. It didn’t give me a view of the
beauty of human beings. So, after I got my degree I decided
to go more in the direction of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.
I decided to look at this side and ask myself the scary
question, “What are we and what are we meant to be?” I
found that there was very little written about this in psychology.
So I took a crash course in comparative religion because
I saw they talked more about this question. And this word “love” kept
coming up in each of them.
I used to hear the word love as many people use it in a
religious sense like, “You should love everybody.” I
used to get really annoyed at the word love. “Oh yeah,
I’m supposed to love Hitler?” I didn’t
know the words “New Age Bullshit” but I used
what was my equivalent then. I tried to understand better
what love means because I could see it had so much meaning
for millions of people in all of these religions. What is
it, and how do you do this “love”?
So the Nonviolent Communication process really came out
of my attempt to understand this concept of love and how
to manifest it, how to do it . I came to the conclusion
that it was not just something you feel, but it is something
you manifest, something you do, something you have. And what
is this manifestation? It is giving of ourselves in a certain
way.
I was also helped by empirical research in psychology that
defined the characteristics of healthy relationships, and
by studying people who were living manifestations of loving
people. Out of these sources I pulled together this process
that helped me to connect with people in what I could understand
is a loving way.
And then I saw what happened when I did connect with people
in this way. This beauty, this power, connected me with an
energy that I choose to call Beloved Divine Energy. So the
Nonviolent Communication process helps me stay connected
with that beautiful Divine Energy within myself and to connect
with it in others. And certainly when I connect that Divine
Energy within myself with the Divine Energy in others, what
results is the closest thing I know to being connected to
God.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, Nonviolent
Communication: A Language of Life or Speak
Peace in a World of Conflict.
Back to the top
Q:
Is there a spiritual basis to the Nonviolent Communication
process?
MBR: I think it is important that people
see that spirituality is at the base of the Nonviolent Communication
process, and that they learn the mechanics of the process
with that in mind. It’s really a spiritual practice
that I am trying to show as a way of life. Even though we
don’t mention this, people get seduced by the practice.
Even if they practice this as a mechanical technique, they
start to experience things between themselves and other people
they weren’t able to experience before.
Eventually they come to the spirituality of the process.
They begin to see that it’s more than a communication
process and realize it’s really an attempt to manifest
a certain spirituality. So I have tried to integrate the
spirituality into the training in a way that meets my need
to not destroy the beauty of it through abstract philosophizing.
The spiritual basis for me is that I’m trying to connect
with the Divine Energy in others and connect them with the
Divine in me, because I believe that when we are really connected
with that Divinity within each other and ourselves, and we
enjoy contributing to one another’s well being more
than anything else. So for me, if we’re connected with
the Divine in others and ourselves, we are going to enjoy
what happens. That’s the spiritual basis of the Nonviolent
Communication process. In this place, violence is impossible.
For more on this topic please consider our publication, The
Heart of Social Change, or Practical
Spirituality.
Back to the top
Q:
Does violence come from a lack of connection to Divine
Energy?
MBR: I would say it this way: I think
we have been given the gift of choice, and we can create
the world of our choosing. We’ve been given the whole
of this great and abundant world for creating a world of
joy and nurturing. To me, violence in the world comes about
when we get alienated or disconnected from this Energy. How
do we get connected when we are educated to be disconnected?
And of course, when we’re not connected to this Energy,
it makes it easier to do violence to others.
For more on this topic please consider our publication, The
Heart of Social Change, or Practical
Spirituality.
Back to the top
Q:
What is your definition of violence?
MBR: Most people refer to violence as
physically trying to hurt another. In the NVC process we
also consider violence to be any use of power over people,
trying to coerce people into doing things. That would include
any use of punishment and reward, any use of guilt, shame,
duty, or obligation. Violence in this larger sense is any
use of force to coerce people to do things. Violence is also
any system that discriminates against people and prevents
equal access to resources and justice to all people.
John Holt wrote a book about education, How Children
Fail . I got to know John during his lifetime and
we worked together at times. He said, “If we taught
children how to speak, they’d never learn.” We
don’t use punishment and reward to teach children
to speak. Why do they learn to speak? Because it enriches
their life, it opens up possibilities. Why would we ever
want to teach anybody anything except for that reason?
And if it does enrich life, you do not need punishments
and rewards.
At the time we met I had written a book called Diagnostic
Teaching . I was in private practice and was seeing
lots of children who didn’t want to go to school,
who weren’t enjoying school, who weren’t learning
very well. John helped me to see that the learning environment,
the structure itself, was set up in a way that prevented
the majority of children from doing well. He helped me
see that the structure was the problem, not the children.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, The
Compassionate Classroom, Life-Enriching
Education and Teaching
Children Compassionately.
Back to the top
Q:
When did you discover this connection between language
and violence?
MBR: While I was still in graduate school
I saw the limitations of a field that was based in psychopathology,
especially when the field was so mixed up with value judgments.
Two qualities seemed to be present when people were acting
like real human beings. People were honest without criticizing
or insulting. Their honesty came from the heart. And there
was a certain quality of understanding. Not a mental understanding,
but an understanding that involved presence, fully being
with another person through empathy. Those two things were
very important: honesty and empathy. But how do we manifest
this? That’s where I learned about the importance of
language.
If our head is filled with certain kinds of language and
a certain way of thinking, it becomes very hard to be honest,
very hard to be empathic, understanding of the other person.
I started to identify those language patterns and communication
patterns that got in the way of this quality of connection.
For more on this topic please consider our publication, We
Can Work It Out.
Back to the top
Q:
What do you see are the main issues behind violent conflicts,
say, in the Middle East?
MBR: If you really look at the conflicts
themselves, the kinds of issues that lead nations to war
where hundreds of thousands of people get killed are issues
that most teenagers or even grade school children could solve.
They’re not that complicated. What’s complicated
is that people are thinking of each other in enemy images .
They don’t see the humanness in one another. If you
get beyond the posturing and defensiveness, if you can just
get people to see the humanness in one another—even
for a moment—it’s amazing what miracles happen.
For more on this topic please consider our publication, Getting
Past the Pain Between Us.
Back to the top
Q:
I'm not violent. How will I benefit from using the Nonviolent
Communication process?
MBR: Nonviolent Communication is a process
that enables us to give to other people, and to give to other
people for reasons that we enjoy. That is, we’re not
being forced into it. The Nonviolent Communication process
identifies where we need to keep our attention focused to
get our own needs met and to give to one another in a humane
way. We give willingly because of the joy that we feel as
human beings enriching life. It helps us to just stay human
even in the face of conflict. The NVC process makes it easy
for people to both give and receive willingly, and that makes
life more wonderful for everyone.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, Speak
Peace in a World of Conflict, or Nonviolent
Communication: A Language of Life.
Back
to the FAQ
Q:
How does the NVC process help me communicate, compared
to what I do now when I communicate?
MBR: The Nonviolent Communication process
identifies where we need to keep our attention focused in
order to give to one another in a humane way. We give willingly
because of the joy that we feel as human beings enriching
life. This is in stark contrast to what most people grow
up with. Other forms of communication, which often direct
our attention to how bad people are, can make violence seem
very attractive. This is very apparent in the conflict resolution
work we do. For example, I was once in a city in a little
village in Africa working with two tribes that were at war,
and there had been about a hundred murders between these
two tribes in the previous year. I asked the chiefs of both
tribes that I was with, “Can you tell me what your
needs are that aren’t getting met, and what you’re
wanting from each other?” This is the heart of the
Nonviolent Communication process, to identify human needs
and what can be done to meet those needs. So, I asked this
question to the chiefs and one chief looks over at the other
and says, “You people are murderers.” You see,
I asked, “What are your needs?” and he made a
diagnosis.
I was once involved in a family quarrel between a husband
and wife who were having serious conflicts. I asked them
the same question, “What do you need from one another
that you’re not getting, and what would you like the
other person to do about it?” And he looks at her says, “You’re
totally insensitive to my needs.” So, any language
that identifies wrongness on the part of others, that sounds
like a criticism, judgment, analysis, diagnosis, is tragic
communication in my experience, but that’s what most
of us grew up with.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, Speak
Peace in a World of Conflict, or Nonviolent Communication:
A Language of Life.
Back to the top
Q:
What are some frequent mistakes you and others make when
trying to use the NVC process?
MBR: I find myself in that situation very
often, especially with the people that I want to connect
with the most—namely myself, my family, my friends
and my associates. An example is the difficulty in giving
and receiving criticism. In either case the mistake that
we make in offering or receiving criticism is thinking in
terms of what we or other people are. My
experience is that people respond very negatively to anybody
telling them what they are.
Another example of a mistake I make is in offering help.
I offer chicken soup without checking to see if the person
wants chicken soup. What I mean is that we give help that
we think the person wants without first getting their permission
to do it. I think very often when somebody is in pain, we’re
in such pain to help them that we can’t rest until
we’ve done something that will help them. For example,
one of my daughters was once looking in the mirror and she
says, “I’m as ugly as a pig.” And I said, “You’re
the most wonderful, beautiful creature that ever lived on
the face of the earth.” And she says, “Daddy!” and
she storms out of the room. I had offered her some help that
she didn’t want at that moment. I offered it out of my
desire to make her feel better. In our publications
and workshops we show some skills that enable you to check
out with people in pain, to help them easily tell you what
it is they want so that you’re protected against this
awkward situation of offering something that might please
you to help the other person, but isn’t what they need.
One more mistake we make—especially when we’re
new to the NVC process—is to think that the Nonviolent
Communication process is the goal. I’ve altered a Buddhist
parable that relates to this issue. Imagine a beautiful,
whole, and sacred place. And imagine that you could really
know God when you are in that place. But let’s say
that there is a river between you and that place and you’d
like to get to that place but you’ve got to get over
this river to do it. So you get a raft, and this raft is
a real handy tool to get you over the river. Once you’re
across the river you can walk the rest of the several miles
to this beautiful place. But the Buddhist parable ends by
saying that, “One is a fool who continues on to the
sacred place carrying the raft on their back.”
Nonviolent Communication is a tool to get me over my cultural
training so I can get to the place. It’s not the place
itself. If we get addicted to the raft, attached to the raft,
it makes it harder to get to the place. People just learning
the process of Nonviolent Communication sometimes forget
all about the place. If they get too locked into the raft,
the process becomes mechanical.
The Nonviolent Communication process is one of the most
powerful tools that I’ve found for connecting with
people in a way that helps me get to the place where we are
connected to the Divine, where what we do toward one another
comes out of Divine Energy. That’s the place I want
to get to.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, Speak
Peace in a World of Conflict, or Nonviolent
Communication: A Language of Life.
Back to the top
Q:
Why do you use giraffe and jackal puppets in your presentations?
What do they represent?
MBR: I chose these animals to represent
two parts of our communication model because I have fun using
them. They’re good teaching devices in many of the
locations I visit. As symbols they help people visualize
what I’m getting at. I use the image of the giraffe
when we’re using the Nonviolent Communication process,
because the process requires coming from the heart, evaluating
in terms of your needs and your feelings, and since giraffes
have the largest heart of any land animal I find it helps
people remember the idea. It’s also because of a giraffe’s
perspective: It sees the big picture and is looking down
the long road, not just for instant gratification. They live
their life with gentility and strength, they stick their
necks out in the service of compassion, and their saliva
digests thorns! And the other side of it, the language that
alienates and leads to violence, I call jackal language.
I picked the poor jackals the symbol for language that contributes
to violence. I chose him for no reason other than that I
like the word jackal. I don’t know why. I just like
it.
I talk a lot about translating jackal language into giraffe.
Jackal talk is any kind of language people use that leaves
us feeling A) as though we’re about to get eaten by
a jackal, B) as though we’re too worthless, ugly, and
disgusting to be eaten by a jackal, or C) ready to eat the
other jackals. In training sessions a speaker may put on
the giraffe puppet to remind him or her to speak non-judgmentally,
but the jackal puppet will be produced if language strays
into evaluation or accusation. At workshops, whenever jackal
talk gets into the air the jacket puppet starts to howl.
Shifting from jackal to giraffe requires changing the way
we think and communicate. We try to make learning as fun
as possible, and those puppets help a lot.
For more on this topic please consider our publication, Getting
Past the Pain Between Us.
Back to the top
Q:
How does your work apply to children and parenting?
MBR: I suggest that we get rid of the
concepts of children and parents. Just seeing somebody that
way can make them less than human. I do parenting workshops,
and I’ve taken half the parents and put them in one
room, half in another and I give them a role-play to work
on. They’re supposed to predict what the other person
would say if a person has borrowed something of yours and
didn’t return it to the place you would have liked.
I tell half of the parents the other person is their next-door
neighbor and I tell the other half it’s one of their
children. We have their response up on the board and don’t
tell the other side that there’s a difference. Then
we ask which group showed the most love and respect to the
other person? And everybody agrees every time that the neighbor
gets more love and respect. In a domination culture we learn
all kinds of things about children that allow us to dehumanize
them.
We teach a process of human communication that is the same
for everybody. It’s a way of expressing clearly how
you are and what would make life wonderful, hearing how the
other person is, what would make life wonderful. If there’s
a conflict, we search for ways of getting everybody’s
needs met. So we teach people how to respond to their children,
without punishments, without rewards, with what we call a
dialogue, by making a connection.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, Parenting
From Your Heart and Raising
Children Compassionately.
Back to the top
Q:
What do you mean when you say that most schools are structured
to be violent?
MBR: According to Michael Katz and other
researchers, schools were designed to prepare people for
a life within a domination system in which a few people benefit
from the efforts of many. The same problems have existed
since the beginning of public education in the United States.
About every twenty years new reformers come along with new
ideas for fixing it. The reformers, against great resistance,
get their educational ideas into the schools. By educational
standards they’re very successful. Children learn more.
They enjoy learning more. And within five years the reform
programs are gone. Why does this happen? Because the schools
were never set up to educate. They were set up to maintain
an economic system which requires people to work for extrinsic
rewards and not to look at the value of what they’re
doing.
In Michael Katz’s book, Class, Bureaucracy and
the Schools , he states that one of the political
functions of schools is to train people to work for extrinsic
rewards. The economic system needs to prepare workers to
do things that may not really enrich life, may even pollute
the environment, for example. It needs compliant workers
to maintain the system. Schools do this by having young
people believe that the goal is to get grades, to work
for external rewards.
That’s why I have built into our training ways to
liberate ourselves from what we have internalized from these
oppressive structures, but that also show us how we can now
transform domination structures in to life-serving structures.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, The
Compassionate Classroom, Life-Enriching
Education and Teaching
Children Compassionately.
Back to the top
Q:
Have you worked in any inner-city projects or ghettos?
MBR: Lots of them. I’ve been asked
to apply the NVC process often in such areas in the United
States. For about thirteen years I was doing most of my work
in race relations in cities. It was during school desegregation
and there was a lot of racial violence. Frequently, I have
met with both police and street gangs in their war against
each other. They have a very painful history together, and
yes, our training has been very helpful in getting both sides
to see the humanness of the other side and to concretely
resolve their differences without violence.
I was down in the inner city of St. Louis, where I worked
and lived at the time, and I was talking to the minister
of a black church in the heart of the ghetto. The warlord
of a street gang heard there was this white man talking to
people on his turf and he wanted to be in on it. So he just
walked in to this meeting in the minister’s office
and he sat there staring at me while I spoke to the people
about this process of communication that I was willing to
offer them to help in the race relations. After a while he
said, “We don’t need no great white father coming
down to teach us how to communicate. We know how to communicate.
You want to help us, give us your money so we can buy guns
and get rid of fools like you!”
I had heard things like that before and I wasn’t
in a particularly good mood that day, so instead of practicing
what I teach, I got into a competitive harangue with him.
It wasn’t going well and I saw what I was doing so
I stopped and I came back to life and I applied our training.
I tried to hear just what he, the human being, was feeling
and needing. I shifted and I said, “So you’d
like some respect for how the people communicate and you’d
like also some awareness of how other people have oppressed
people that they originally say they’re going to help.” Instead
of competing with him I just tried to understand his feelings
and needs and this shifted things. He just sat there and
stared the rest of the meeting.
When the meeting was over it was dark outside and I started
walking to my car. It’s always a little risky being
a white person in that neighborhood. Then I heard, “Rosenberg!” and
I thought to myself, Uh-oh, I got smart too late . “Give
me a ride,” and he told me where he wanted to go. He
got in the car and said, “What were you doing to me
in there?” And he went right to that moment where I
shifted to try to understand him rather than compete with
him. “That’s the process I was talking about.” And
he said something that changed both our lives for the next
thirteen years. He said, “Can you teach me how to teach
that to the Zulus?” That was the name of his gang. “We’re
not going to beat you white people with guns. We’re
going to have to learn stuff like that.” And I said, “I’ll
trade you. I’ll teach you how to teach this to the
Zulus if you go to Washington with me on Thursday where I’ve
been invited to work with the school system, to show them
why the blacks are burning down the schools.” And he
laughed and he said, “Hey man, I got no education.” I
said, “Look, if you can pick this up the way you did
just now, you’ve got a damn good education. You may
not have had much schooling, but you had a good education.” And
he went with me to Washington and did an incredible job of
helping the teachers understand why the kids were burning
down the schools. And for the next thirteen years we did
a lot of work together all over the south, preparing the
schools for desegregation. The U.S. Government asked us to
go into pretty hot areas and do some conflict resolution
work between blacks and whites. That former warlord’s
name is Al Chappelle, and he became the head of Public Housing
in the city of St. Louis. Another member of the same gang
almost became Mayor of St. Louis a few years back.
So after my own initial pessimism, in the U.S. the NVC
process was useful in helping to prepare communities for
desegregation during the Sixties, in working with youths
and street gangs, and in difficult schools. Before I knew
it our training was in such demand that I had to hire a staff,
and in 1984 I founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication
in California.
For more on this topic please consider our publications, The
Heart of Social Change, Nonviolent
Communication: A Language of Life and Speak
Peace in a World of Conflict.
Back to the top
Q:
How did your organization get to be in so many places?
MBR: World-class giraffes: Women and men
around the world who are unstoppable in their efforts to
share the NVC process with others.
Here’s the characteristic of a world-class giraffe.
They don’t think for one moment that one person alone
can do nothing, or give up because they’ve seen so
much. They don’t ask an unanswerable question like “What
can one person do?” They dream beautiful dreams, and
then they choose what they want to do to make the dreams
come true. An example is Rita, someone I met almost 20 years
ago in Chicago. In the years since Rita met me, she’s
gotten NVC training into 150 agencies in Cleveland. These
are not high-budget agencies, used to having in-service training.
These are agencies on the front lines, the people dealing
with the poor, the oppressed, that have very little or no
budget. So this world-class giraffe heard me speak 20 years
ago in Chicago, and look what’s going on!
There are three great technological devices that have changed
our world. Telephone, television, tell-a-woman. It’s
true. They’re the great communicators. You tell a Rita
and the next thing you know, 120 agencies have got the training.
You tell a Towe or a Nada, and you get training all over
Sweden or Yugoslavia. The Rita’s and Towe’s and
Nada’s are creating teams that are going to be active
in their countries for the next 50 years.
Back to the top
Q:
What are the biggest challenges
for your worldwide operations?
MBR: The biggest challenge really right
now is administrative. We have so many people in so many
countries very eager for NVC training, and often they want
us to train national teams to use in healing efforts left
from their wars and attempts at reconciliation. So at the
moment my biggest problem is administrative: how to get enough
training to all the places in the world that want it.
The NVC process has a way of spreading itself. We’re
in over 35 countries right now. For example, I’m asked
to teach a couple times a year at a place called the European
Peace Studies program in Austria. They bring students from
all over the world who are really involved in peace efforts
in their countries. One of my students was a gentleman from
Rwanda who invited me into his country before the civil war.
He told me what was going to happen there and said if we
don’t develop a team to help educate people very rapidly
to get beyond these tribal prejudices, many people would
die. He told me what was going to happen, and tragically,
he’s been killed. But he had invited me in and I started
training a team of human rights activists in Rwanda. At that
same program a man from Sierra Leon has invited me since
into Sierra Leon. So, one country hears of our efforts and
invites us in.
Back to the top
Q:
How many people are working in support of spreading NVC?
MBR: As of early 2005, we have about
180 certified NVC trainers spread around the world, with
an average of one new certified trainer per month. Additionally,
hundreds more have identified themselves as local supporters.
More than thirty formal teams or organizations around the
world organize local trainers and practice groups throughout
the year.
For more information visit the Center for Nonviolent Communication Trainers
and Supporters List.
Back to the top
Q:
How does one become a certified trainer with your organization?
MBR: The best way to get information on
becoming an NVC trainer is to visit the Trainer
Certification Page on the Center for Nonviolent Communication website.
Back to the top
Learn More:
To learn more about the NVC process, NVC projects around
the world, and the life-enriching benefits of this process,
we invite you to read the following materials:
Key
Facts About NVC 
Life-Enriching
Benefits of the NVC Process
NVC Projects Worldwide
Media Inquiries:
To schedule an interview with Dr. Marshall Rosenberg or any of our other authors,
please contact our publicist using our Feedback Form.
To request additional publicity materials not listed here,
or to request a press kit by mail or email, please contact our publicist using our Feedback Form.
Back to the top
|
