Nonviolent Communication and Mental Wellness: Practical Tools for a Healthy Inner Life

by Alan Rafael Seid, CNVC Certified Trainer

Introduction: Nonviolent Communication and its Benefits for Mental Wellness

Mental wellness underpins your ability to do anything effectively in your day.

Nonviolent Communication or NVC — historically rooted in clinical psychology, but developed by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD for everyday people — is a simple and powerful modality with extraordinary benefits for mental wellness.

In this article I give you a very brief overview of NVC and I define mental wellness. Then I cover some of the ways in which mental wellness is impacted negatively followed by how NVC addresses each of them.

What is Nonviolent Communication (NVC)?

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a process for creating the quality of connection out which people naturally and spontaneously enjoy contributing to one another’s well being.

People use NVC to understand their own and others’ deeper motivations, to create more satisfying personal and professional relationships, to defuse, prevent, and resolve conflicts, and to become powerful communicators across different contexts.

NVC grew out of Marshall Rosenberg, PhD’s efforts to distill the essential elements in thought, language, communication, and the use of power that can lead us toward this high quality of connection.

Dr. Rosenberg chose the name Nonviolent Communication in order to align himself with Gandhi’s movement of nonviolence — the original words for which roughly translate into truth-telling and compassion.

NVC has a technique side to it as well as a consciousness and intentionality.

The consciousness involves a basic understanding for how to approach interactions in a way that is more likely to lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. The technique side — the model and the “tools” of NVC — simply support you in being consistently more effective at fulfilling that intention.

NVC can take time to become skilled at. However, my personal experience — and what I’ve witnessed from hundreds if not thousands of people — is that it actually ends up saving you the grief, frustration, broken-heartedness, and wasted time that comes with conflicts, disconnection, and dysfunctional relationships, personal and professional. So in the end, taking the time to develop your NVC skills will actually save you a lot of time!

To learn more about the basics of NVC, go here.

What do we mean by mental wellness?

Mental wellness can be interpreted many ways.

Here are a few ways I’m defining it for the purposes of this article.

1) Mental wellness means having a regulated nervous system.

When your nervous system is disregulated, you feel agitated, nervous, afraid, angry, depressed, upset, aggravated, or any of the so-called negative feelings. Other signs of a disregulated nervous system include sweaty palms, breathing hard, and elevated heart rate — as a stress response, not from exercise. When your system is flooded with adrenalin — or cortisol, another stress hormone — the outward signs of disregulation are evident.

Disregulated nervous systems are also characterized by being in one of the four trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn/ appease.

A regulated nervous system is characterized by a state known as rest-and digest. Any time you are feeling calm your nervous system is regulated. This can include states where you are calm and alert, like in meditation.

When your nervous system is balanced and not in a reactive response, I would call it regulated.

If you want to learn more about some of the terms in this section, I recommend you look up “polyvagal theory,” a model with great explanatory value regarding the nervous system and which is also consistent with NVC.

So this is the first way I would define mental wellness: a regulated nervous system, or one that can get back to being regulated with relative ease.

2) Mental wellness means having an outlook that is morepositive-than-not.

The converse, having a mental outlook that is more negative than positive, can look many different ways — from nihilism to depression to contempt for people and the human condition to outright self-hatred.

In my view, mental wellness leaves no room for self-hatred.

This doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes and then feel disappointed when I do.

Having a more-positive-than-not outlook does not mean having your head in the sand about the state of the world or how hard it is to be a human being. It also does not imply bypassing discomfort in order to “put on a happy face.”

When you can acknowledge the painful and uncomfortable parts of your life and the world, and still see the positive things in your life and in the world — or even summon some modicum of hopefulness — I would say that these are symptoms of mental wellness.

When things are really hard or painful — and I allow myself to grieve and mourn… this is a sign of mental wellness. I don’t store unprocessed grief in my tissues, but instead allow it to discharge through the natural grieving process. This is evidence of emotional maturity and mental wellness. And when I allow myself to do my grief work, I am clearing out more space inside for more joy to come later.

Example: Wisdom Story

There is a story my meditation teacher tells about a mother with three sons.

One day the mother sends one of her sons to the store to refill a bottle with cooking oil. On the way somebody bumps him and the bottle falls. Half the oil flows out. He comes home distressed, crying, “mother, I have lost half the oil.” For him the bottle is half empty, so we could describe his view as pessimistic.

The mother sends the second son with an empty bottle to get it filled with cooking oil, and the same thing happens: he gets bumped, the bottle falls, and half the oil flows out. He picks it up smiling, and runs home excitedly, “mother, I have saved half the oil!” For him the bottle is half full, so we could describe his view as optimistic.

Then the mother sends the third son who also takes an empty bottle to get it filled with cooking oil. The same thing happens: he gets bumped, the bottle falls, and half the oil flows out. He acknowledges, half the oil has flowed out: realistic. But he has also saved half the oil: optimistic. He goes home, tells his mother what happened, delivers the half-bottle of oil, and then goes back out with another empty bottle. While he’s out, he works to earn the money to fill this last bottle completely, and delivers it to his mother: “workistic” — a made up word that connotes the willingness to work to improve conditions.

In this story, the first son is pessimistic: the bottle is half empty.

The second son is optimistic: the bottle is half full.

But the third son is realistic, optimistic, and workistic — willing to put in the effort to make things better. The second and third, but especially the third, exemplify what to me are hallmarks of mental wellness. I want to be realistic about what is hard, and also optimistic about possibilities. And I also want to be active and engaged in being part of the solution.

3) Mental wellness means being self-connected.

Being self-connected can mean being able to count on yourself, having self-trust, being able to give yourself self-empathy, and/or having an experience of self-love. I unpack each of these below:

a) Being self-connected means being there for yourself.

There is an exercise I give my clients which they have found to be beautiful and empowering. Though it does not come from NVC, it is consistent with it. This exercise has two parts.

In the first part, you look at yourself in the mirror, but not at your features, vaguely. You look yourself in the eyes. And you say out loud, to yourself, you can count on me, I’m here for you.

You do this twice a day.

I had one client who could not look herself in the eyes for three weeks!

This is a great exercise for the phrase, “fake it ’til you make it.” If you are unfamiliar with this phrase, it means that you try — and act as if — until you find success.

The second part of the exercise involves engaging the more creative, artistic part of you. In this part you are going to draw a picture or make a collage, answering the question, what would it look like if your relationship with yourself were a long-term committed relationship?

It’s likely that most people have never considered that they are stuck with themselves for the rest of their life! You cannot divorce yourself! I have made a practice of being my own best friend, and to be able to be here for myself and count on myself!

This leads to the next point, because they are so closely related:

b) Being self-connected means developing, having, and maintaining self trust.

Somebody breaking your trust does damage to the relationship.

Even more painful and consequential is breaking trust with yourself!

How many times have you told yourself you’re going to do something and you don’t? That damages self-trust.

If this goes on for some time, after a while you stop believing in yourself. Whenever you set a goal, another part might chime in yeah, right — what about the time that…

Losing self-trust negatively impacts your mental wellness.

Of course, there are strategies and tactics that make it easier. Setting goals that are achievable within doable time-frames is one example. When I set goals that are out of reach — like starting my day with a to-do list of 200 items — I end up disappointed with myself, and I lose a little self-trust if I only accomplished 20 out of the 200. If I start my day with a manageable list, I can still go beyond it, and leave my self-trust and self-confidence intact.

It can take time to build self-trust and, for me, it requires some vigilance to maintain it!

c) Being self-connected means noticing when you need self-empathy — and giving it to yourself when you need it.

Self-empathy is a foundational practice in NVC — and one that people become more adept at over time.

Self-empathy involves connecting to your feelings and needs, often through the body. In other words, while I am also using my mind, I’m engaging my whole being — it can be an embodied practice.

Self-empathy is also a beautiful practice for self-regulation. All of these pieces fit together!

When I connect to my feelings and needs, rather than the thoughts about who’s right and who’s wrong, my system settles and I feel more regulated, calmer, secure in myself, safe in my own body.

Self-empathy can often involve translating “violent” thinking into the feelings and the needs underlying the thoughts. This in itself leads to more mental wellness!

Story/example:

The following story from my own life highlights the value of translating judgments into feelings and needs.

I tell this story in several places. Below, I offer it to you as an excerpt from my forthcoming book on NVC:

I was filling my car up at a local gas station when someone pulled in. (This was years ago when I still drove a gas car.)

I noticed the person who pulled in toss a lit cigarette out of the window of their car in the direction of the gas pumps.

I thought something might blow up, so I immediately thought that I had to duck and cover!

I noticed that my heart was pounding and my palms were sweaty. I immediately realized that I had fear in my system coming from a need for safety.

The next thing I noticed was thinking, “what a f***ing idiot!”

When I noticed these judgments, my NVC training kicked in. I started to translate the judgment, “what a f***ing idiot!” into the four components of the NVC Model: Observation, Feeling, Need, and Request.

“When I noticed this person throw their cigarette in the direction of the gas pumps, I felt really scared, and I noticed my heart was beating hard. I have a need for safety. I also really value selfawareness and self-responsibility.”

This resulted in a big emotional shift. Rather than emphasizing the judgment I had, I was now connected to my needs and values: safety, self-awareness, self responsibility. I already felt more grounded. I breathed a sigh as my nervous system became more regulated.

At that point, as I was about to get in my car and drive off, I realized that I had a choice whether or not to give that person feedback.

I remember thinking “what if he does it again next week and blows up a family — and by saying something now I could prevent something like that in the future?”

So I decided to go into the convenience store and give him feedback.

I was super nervous! After all, this was a big guy, and I was risking getting my butt kicked! Not only that, people get shot in the US for less than that!

Acknowledging my nervousness, I gave myself some encouragement as I walked toward the store: “Alright, you can do this! You’ve got black belt communication skills!”

So I walked into the convenience store, I opened the door and he was right there at the front of the line.

I said, “Excuse me, I feel a little nervous saying this, but when I noticed you throw your cigarette in the direction of the gas pumps, I felt very nervous, because I really value my safety…”

Before I could finish, the woman who was with him looked out from behind him in the line and shouted to him: “WHAT’S HE SAYING TO YOU!?!!?” (referring to me).

I assume she heard some kind of attack, but he turned to her and said: “No, it’s okay. He’s right.” And then he turned to me and he said “Thank you.”

I had risked triggering this person and creating more of a conflict, more of a disconnection. When he turned to me and said “Thank you,” I knew that he got it.

My request — for him to consider what I had to say — was met before I even had a chance to voice it. I love when that happens!

The first thing that oriented the situation to a more positive possibility was that I translated my initial judgment, “What a f***ing idiot!” to the underlying feelings and needs: I feel scared because I have a need for safety, and I feel irritated because I value self-awareness and self-responsibility.

If I had gone to give him feedback with that judgment still in my head, I might have begun the conversation with, “What the f*** is wrong with you?!? What’re you f***ing stupid?!?”

That would have neither helped him connect with my needs, nor would it have contributed to him being open to self-reflect about his actions.

The first step in de-escalating a situation is de-escalaten yourself.

Self-empathy is a high level way of de-escalating yourself based on self-connection. You’re not forcing yourself to be calm. When you connect with what’s important to you — your needs — you automatically feel more centered and grounded.

NVC gives you the skills to do this consistently, even in charged situations.n This does not happen automatically — it takes practice.

Being connected with your needs also means that you understand your underlying core motivations. This translates into being better able to select among strategies that could contribute to your needs — as opposed to thinking that one specific strategy, tactic, or solution is the only thing that can result in your needs being met.

This, by itself, is useful when resolving conflicts, since we all share the same needs, and conflicts only happen at the level of strategies.

Differentiating between the needs and the strategies is also a powerful way to, not only resolve but, prevent conflicts.

And it’s an extremely useful approach to resolving conflicts within yourself. Transcending one specific strategy and connecting with the needs first means you can then look at the abundance of potential strategies that could meet all the needs.

This is a very grounding and reassuring way of handling what for many people is confusing and anxiety-inducing!

I hope the concepts and examples above make the links between self-empathy, self-connection, and mental wellness abundantly clear!

d) Being self-regulated, in a self-connected way, also means loving yourself.

Loving yourself does not mean loving only yourself, being selfabsorbed, or being so far on the narcissism spectrum that you believe only you matter — all of this would be far from the selflove I’m talking about.

NVC acknowledges that we can do things that contribute to one another’s needs — and we can recognize and celebrate it!

Gratitude and appreciation — celebrating that we have this nimmense power to make life more wonderful — is a potent application of NVC!

More so, what happens when you do things that meet your own needs, not to the exclusion of others, but when you do things that contribute to Life?

In NVC, you celebrate it! What does that look like? Gratitude and appreciation toward yourself! But isn’t that overly self-centered?

We block self-acknowledgment and self-appreciation when we nbelieve the stories that we shouldn’t enjoy the fact that we can do things that uplift and inspire ourselves.

Sometimes the stories that block self-acknowledgment and selfappreciation are stories of guilt and shame: we think we don’t deserve to celebrate our own actions!

Story about self-love: wisdom from my mom

Once upon a time — I was probably 10 or 11 — my mother asked me, “Do you love yourself?”

I felt confused and a little embarrassed — I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

“Do you love yourself?” she repeated.

“Umm… I dunno…”

“Listen,” she said, “it’s very important that you love yourself! It works like this,” she explained. “A fountain cannot share water outside of itself if it is not first filled with water. So fill yourself with love, and then you can share the overflow with others.”

Marshall Rosenberg agreed with the scriptures from all the major religions wherein it says that we were created in the image of the Divine. What is there to not love about that?

In summary, I define mental wellness as:

• having a regulated nervous system,
• having a mental outlook that is more-positive-than-not, and
• being self-connected.

How else do you define mental wellness?

Ways in which mental wellness is impacted negatively — and how NVC helps you address them effectively

There are many things that can impact mental wellness. In this section I’ll cover negative and unproductive cognitive loops, limiting beliefs and negative self-image, behaviors that don’t serve, systems and structures, and toxic relationships.

As I go through each of these I’ll also cover how NVC is helpful in addressing them.

• Negative and unproductive cognitive loops are repetitive and self-reinforcing cycles of negative thoughts. They can drain your mental and emotional energy, compromise your problem-solving abilities, and negatively impact your relationships.

These negative and unproductive cognitive loops show up in many ways. They include:

• catastrophizing (the whole world is going to hell!),
• all-or-nothing thinking (well, he’s either a good person or a bad person!),
• overgeneralization (all [insert group] are like this!),
• diagnosing (the problem with her is she’s an Aries (overthinker, obsessive-compulsive, passive aggressive, etc.)!),
• personalization (climate change wouldn’t be an issue if only I had done more!), and
• “emotional reasoning” (I feel like a fool, therefore I must be a fool!).

To be clear about this last example, there is no such thing as “feeling like a fool” — this is a thought. We sometimes trick ourselves into believing that an interpretation or story is something we “feel” when we have not differentiated observations from interpretations, nor these from feelings, needs, and requests.

NVC helps you translate the negative thoughts themselves into the sensations in your body, your feelings, what you value, and the underlying needs.

For example, I might have the thought, I’m such a loser!

NVC would help me translate this into: when I notice that I struggle to parallel park I feel really discouraged, and wonder if there’s something wrong with me. I really long to feel competent and confident!

Notice that the thinking has shifted from self-judgment to the underlying feelings and needs.

This process of NVC translation into the underlying needs is something you can undertake with any negative cognitive loop.

NVC also reminds you to get more into your body, get grounded, and gives you tools to ask for the support you need when you need it.

• Limiting beliefs and negative self-image

Limiting beliefs are usually thoughts we have about ourselves — including how we ought to behave — that we have taken to be true.

Limiting beliefs are tricky to notice because they hide beneath the surface. They are often as invisible to us as water would be to a fish. The level of thought can be very, very subtle.

Once you identify one of these subtle thoughts it can be very helpful to write it down. Then you can use NVC to translate it and question its veracity.

Sometimes the “trailhead” that can lead us to a limiting belief is through our actions. For example, the act of refusing to ask for help sometimes comes from a fearful belief that others will judge you as incompetent, needy, or a burden.

Negative self-image is sometimes indistinguishable from limiting beliefs, though it often involves thoughts that originally came from others, but that you or I have internalized and believed to be true about ourselves.

For example, as a child I received from my parents the judgment that I was lazy. When I discovered NVC, I realized that the word “lazy” is a subjective evaluation — a judgment. When I translated it using NVC I learned (1) I value conservation of energy, and (2) I easily put effort into things that have meaning and purpose, but when I don’t see the point I prefer not to.

NVC can serve you powerfully as a self-connection and inner clarity practice!

By identifying and questioning the beliefs themselves, you can then identify the feelings and needs associated with them.

In my case, I sometimes mourn the unmet needs and can then ask myself, what do I need next? Sometimes the belief dissolves by itself.

Other times I realize that I can find a lot of evidence that goes contrary to that belief.

Doing the mourning first, however, is key to getting myself unstuck from thinking this belief is true.

Modalities such as IFS (Internal Family Systems) or Byron Katie’s The Work can also help get underneath and help you assess the veracity of limiting beliefs and negative self-image in a way that is consistent with NVC.

• Behaviors that don’t meet needs, aka behavioral strategies that go against my needs, or meet some needs at the expense of others.

Examples of these include acting aggressively (often the underlying need is safety), talking without knowing why — in other words, filling silence with words, indulging in intoxicating substances, which can reduce mental clarity, compromise wise judgment, and damage trust in relationships.

There are many others.

In many of these cases NVC can act as a behavioral modification strategy. It works by clarifying the needs — those met as well as those not met — so that it’s easier to identify which behaviors would be more in alignment with your needs and values.

Example: my story with smoking.

For many years I struggled with tobacco addiction. I joke that for years I quit right after each and every cigarette (partially true).

I decided to facilitate an NVC conversation — on paper — between the part of me that liked to smoke and that part of me that hated that I smoked.

The hardest part was identifying which needs I was trying to meet through smoking. Once I discovered those it was fairly straightforward to identify strategies that could meet those needs, without also going against my needs for health, integrity, and freedom.

I’m happy to say that I’ve been a non-smoker for over a decade. Having this internal conversation using NVC, clarifying the needs and identifying alternative strategies was key to my quitting.

• Systems and structures, as I’m using the term here, refers to a great part of our shared external world.

Systems and structures can also impact our ability to maintain our mental wellness.

In this section some examples I look at are: our version of capitalism, social media, environmental injustice, and Covid-19 isolation.

There is a version of capitalism that rewards destructive behaviors — such as ecocide — and which also keeps people in debilitating work and-spend cycles. Many people feel exhausted at the end of long work days and fall into behavioral strategies (see above) for coping that do not necessarily provide the necessary down-time and recharge time. As a result, people can be less engaged or willing to participate in a positive and lifeserving reimagining, restructuring, and reformulating of societal systems and structures.

Social media is another example in the realm of systems and structures. For all the needs social media purports to meet, such as connection, it has many shortcomings and the unmet needs are legion. Most people receive a poor proxy for deeper genuine connection, and are left feeling empty and less connected the more they use it. Furthermore, we don’t have control over the algorithms, which have been documented to lead people into conspiracy rabbit-holes or into radicalizing narratives. Here is anarticle on NVC and social media if you’d like to read more about this specifically.

In the end, social media is a strategy rather than a need. By employing a conceptual framework and a language that differentiates between needs and strategies, you can get clear which needs you are trying to meet through your social media usage, and which needs are left unmet.

Our current systems and structures lead to what is known as
environmental injustice — in which poorer people and underrepresented populations, including people of color, are subjected to the most compromised environments in terms of all kinds of pollution, including sound pollution. For example, I noticed in the city in which I grew up that the neighborhoods closest to the airport’s take-off and landing flight-paths tended to be some of the poorest. I have since seen this pattern in other places.

Environmental Injustice Example: Cancer Alley

I’ve known about “cancer alley” for decades, and researching it for
this article made my skin crawl!

Here is what showed up when I did a Google search (on AI mode) for “cancer alley”: