In NVC practice, where the feelings come from is completely secondary to the feelings themselves. Seriously, the only way to believe in this process is to witness it first hand. What happens, if it is done right, with heart, is not alignment or agreement. It is softness. Where there is softness toward the other, there is a chance of change, of openness. Not a guarantee, merely a chance. I think we can all agree that it looks pretty fucking hopeless right now, so what do you have to lose?
To engage in this kind of listening with your enemies takes training, some natural talent, courage, and a lot of practice with easier challenges.
In all sincerity, the best way to start the process is to train yourself in empathetic listening. It is, frankly, a spiritual practice, in that you have to give up a lot of your ingrained egocentric habits of mind, at least while you are listening. While at the same time you have to have boundaries and take care of your own heart.
It sounds like “therapy” but it is more like therapy as currently practiced partakes of these skills, which have been around for as long as people have been, I imagine.
Of course not. You should vote for people who seem to be the best chance for representing the whole country and all its diverse interests. We should hang together, or else … we’ll all hang separately.
Years ago, I attended a two-day seminar in Bowen Family Systems Theory. It was for clinicians – social workers and psychologists. I was a guest of a guest and thoroughly enjoyed the presentations.
I was chatting with a psychologist during a break about her practice. I mentioned that her patient population must be a heckuva self-selecting sample – only a certain kind of person gravitates toward talk therapy.
Her response sticks with me decades later: “Oh, I fall in love with every single one of my patients the minute they walk through the door.”
On the “MAGA” side of this equation … what is the likelihood that they would engage ? Under what circumstances ? How would they be invited, persuaded, or enticed to engage ?
This is really the domain the pointy-headed Liberals in the first place, almost by definition, no ? I can easily see it being derided and ridiculed by the exact people with whom the bridges most desperately need to be built.
I’m guessing that SA offered ‘restorative justice’ as a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the perpetrators. The consideration for the victims was a bit more obvious and a bit less cynical: healing.
Where’s the compelling consideration for the Trump supporters in this equation ?
I’m not feeling any empathy from you. Clearly urbanredneck2 is expressing his anxiety over identity politics and feels like his son is being denied work due to those factors. I’d like for you to use NVC training to make him feel heard and validated.
I am not sure it works over the internet. I have a hard time even doing it face to face. I suspect that is part of the overall problem – it is so easy to “otherize” people whom you can’t even see. Empathy is a face to face thing. It isn’t even as much about words as one would think. But there are a few NVC guidelines that are helpful, about structuring sentences so that they are not inherently antagonistic, identifying the differences between emotions and things we label emotions but are not, following an artificial but useful pattern for problem solving (the problem-solving part is the very last thing that happens). There’s a lot to it. And, if even one of the participants has not been exposed to these skills, you’ve got a huge headwind right there. You have to start with primary concepts.
Another thing that is true for me is that generalities only overwhelm and make me miserable. There cannot be a they, and their ideas, their actions, their awful awful everything, for there to be any empathy. Generalized empathy is a liberal cop out, verging on meaningless (that’s not the same as compassion in policy-making, but it is easily entangled there) There can only be a you, a this, a now. Empathy only happens in the present moment.
I spent a year working in Kansas City one week. I’m not doing that again.
Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I don’t see your approach is being a workable solution under 98% of circumstances. Certainly not as a solution for the socio-political divide. We didn’t get ourselves into this situation because we had an argument and are no longer on speaking terms with the other side. We are in this situation because we no longer share a common understanding of the world in which we live. Here is an example:
What is your understanding of the claim that his son can’t get a job because he’s white? Where do we even begin? I mean, it would take some serious effort to unpack that statement alone.
I get what you are saying. But using your urbanredneck example, I would start with guessing the emotion. “Care enough to guess” is one of the NVC adages. That is, never assume anything, ever. Ask, and listen to the answer.
With “… my son doesn’t deserve a job because he is a white male?” I would guess the emotion is FEAR (never guess anger, guess the emotion causing the anger. Guessing anger turns out badly), and the need behind the fear (another concept) is FAIRNESS.
There’s even a list of emotions we all are capable of and a list of needs almost everyone has, on the NVC site somewhere. We all need fairness. And we all can be afraid.
So that would be where I would start. In an artificial way, I could say, “I am guessing you are feeling a lot of fear about your son making his way in the world, and you are expressing a need for fairness that isn’t being met for your son.”
Note here that there is nothing about me and my beliefs about whether his son is being treated fairly or not. It is completely about urbanredneck and HIS emotions and needs. Not his beliefs either.
Now what happens is one of two reactions “YES, that’s it EXACTLY.” or, “You aren’t listening to me, what I mean is --”
In the first case, you almost always have to stop them right there because all the pent up feeling of frustration at not being heard is going to want to make them repeat themselves and go off on a rant. You will have to say, “Is there another piece of this that I’m not getting?” And listen.
In the second case, you say, “okay, tell me again in different words and let me see if I can get it this time.” And listen.
The trouble with me describing this process (and this is only the very beginning of it), is that unless you have actually experienced someone who is furious or absolutely stuck get their emotions and their needs heard and understood and what happens to them, you just cannot get how transformative it can be.
I’ll tell you a odd little story. Once I was driving a carpool of kids to a field trip. They were I think in fifth or sixth grade. Three girls and a boy. The boy was known to be impossible, such a troublemaker and a jerk. None of the other kids even wanted to ride with him. He started in, making strange wild comments to get a rise out of the girls, which he did. I said, just making a wild stab, “you sound like you’re kind of miserable to be stuck in a car with all these girls.”
He said, “I hate girls! They’re so stupid!” in this weird whiny singsong voice he put on.
Me: “maybe you wish you were with the boys right now?”
Him: “I don’t care where I am.” Suddenly his voice had dropped an octave.
Me: “You sound pretty unhappy.”
Him: “I’m just tired of being with girls. At home there’s just my mom and my sister. I wish my dad was there.”
Me: “You’re missing your dad?”
Him: “yeah. He wants to come see me but he’s in jail right now.”
Holy fuck, I thought. Here’s this whiny, obnoxious little boy who apparently doesn’t even have a real voice, just this singsong snarky voice, and suddenly he’s talking in his real voice, a very sad voice. And all I did was a little guessing.
So that really happened. I’m not saying it is always like this because it isn’t. But often enough it is. And notice that I couldn’t help him with his loneliness, or his dad in jail. I didn’t solve his problems. And yet I did something.
Adults, generally speaking, are harder than that. They live more in their heads and have had a lot more practice hardening themselves off from their vulnerability. Still, it is worth doing and I’d do more of it if it wasn’t that I find people extremely exhausting and I just do not have the energy to do much of anything with them anymore.
Masterful as that was, the amount of training and practice required for your technique makes this an impractical solution on a grand scale. I think that people who have come to believe “alternative facts” will come to regret their complicit ignorance and start to behave rationally only when they have exhausted all other options. But until then, it will be a long hard road for everyone.
I agree with Elmer. Of course they can vote for those reasons. The question is whether those reasons are good reasons or not.
Are they voting against the way their parents did because their parents are corrupt local officials, or because their parents made them eat their brussels sprouts? One of those is reasonable, the other isn’t.
Do they have bad memories of school because the teachers were unfair, or maybe because their were no extracurricular activities because of lack of funds? Or is it because they had their grades reduced because they never turned their assignments in on time?
Maybe so. However, NVC has training programs in 30 countries now I think. The guy who started it worked mainly with communities, usually in the worst possible situations, like Palestine, Rwanda, Syria … the programs are to train trainers. There are issues with it, surely. But waiting for your enemies to “come to their senses” is hardly a practical solution either. In fact it is no solution at all, considering they may be waiting for us to do the very same thing.
One of the central tenets of NVC is that everyone shares the same basic needs, but have different strategies for getting those needs met. Strategies can and do change, once they can be seen as simply one strategy out of a number of possible ones.
People become wedded to the belief that there is only one possible strategy out there, and if it gets pounded hard and long enough, it will somehow provide that need, no matter that it never was very efficacious, or proved to have terrible downsides. This is true of whole communities as well.
Simply getting people to grasp that concept – same needs, different strategies, but strategies can change – is surprisingly effective in getting logjams to free up. It bypasses the whole passionate discussion about MY beliefs vs YOUR beliefs.
Who do you see as the vanguard of this effort in American politics? Who are the trainers and who are they training? I’m willing to accept that this is a workable solution but I need some re-assurance that this isn’t just some good idea floating freely without a ground game. Else, what are we really talking about…
Here you may have to do your own research as I was most active in NVC fifteen or more years ago. There’s a lot of this stuff around, though since it is out of fashion now it flies under most people’s radar. Center for NonViolent Communication is an international org with a big website. I think generally that treating the build up of fear, anger, hatred, and violence between the most-opposing sides of the American culture wars is going to take conflict-resolution skills on a micro and macro level.
Obviously, it would also help if the firehose of rightwing false narratives were shut off, if the political process offered something more like representative democracy, and many other seemingly out-of-reach reforms. But none of those things will do anything to heal the rift; it will just make liberal voices a lot more effective.
Also in my area we have a democrat congresswoman named Sharice Davids and her honest to goodness reason for being there is she is a lesbian native american.