Nonviolent Communication
There are a large number of workshops and clinical materials about NVC, including Rosenberg's book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.
[1][2][3][4] Marshall Rosenberg also taught NVC in a number of video lectures available online; the workshop recorded in San Francisco is the most well-known.
[7] Notable concepts include rejecting coercive forms of discourse, gathering facts through observing without evaluating, genuinely and concretely expressing feelings and needs, and formulating effective and empathetic requests.
Nonviolent Communication is used as a clinical psychotherapy modality and it is also offered in workshops for the general public, particularly in regard to seeking harmony in relationships and at workplaces.
Marshall Rosenberg's motivation for developing NVC was based on his own experiences at the Detroit race riot of 1943, as well as the antisemitism that he experienced in his early life [1].
According to Marion Little (2008), the roots of the NVC model developed in the late 1960s, when Rosenberg was working on racial integration in schools and organizations in the Southern United States.
In its initial development, the NVC model re-structured the pupil-teacher relationship to give students greater responsibility for, and decision-making related to, their own learning.
The model has evolved over the years to incorporate institutional power relationships (i.e., police-citizen, boss-employee) and informal ones (i.e. man-woman, rich-poor, adult-youth, parent-child).
[8] In 2019, a group of certified NVC trainers published a #MeToo statement honouring Marshall Rosenberg's legacy but also acknowledging he had slept with students at some times of his life.
[10] The trainers encourage all facilitators to share a warning with prospective clients and students about the potential risks of empathy work and recommended sexual boundaries.
[11] Nonviolent Communication holds that most conflicts between individuals or groups arise from miscommunication about their human needs, due to coercive or manipulative language that aims to induce fear, guilt, shame, etc.
There are four components to practice nonviolent communication, and in this order: There are three primary modes of application of NVC: A systematic review of research as of 2013 analyzed 13 studies picked from 2,634 citations.
NVC, his creation, is entirely a grassroots organization and never had until recently any foundation nor grant monies, on the contrary funded 100% from trainings which were offered in public workshops around the world.
The training was found to increase equanimity, decrease anger, and lead to abilities to take responsibility for one's feelings, express empathy, and to make requests without imposing demands.
[8]: 31–35 Little suggests The Gordon Model for Effective Relationships (1970) as a likely precursor to both NVC and interest-based negotiation, based on conceptual similarities, if not any direct evidence of a connection.
[38] Martha Lasley sees similarities with the Focused Conversation Method developed by the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), with NVC's observations, feelings, needs, and requests components relating to FCM's objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional stages.
[39][40] NVC has been applied in organizational and business settings,[41][42] in parenting,[43][44][45] in education,[46][47][48][49] in mediation,[50] in psychotherapy,[51] in healthcare,[52] in addressing eating issues,[53] in justice,[54][55][56] and as a basis for a children's book,[57] among other contexts.
[58] Reportedly, one of the first acts of Satya Nadella when he became CEO of Microsoft in 2014 was to ask top company executives to read Rosenberg's book, Nonviolent Communication.
Bitschnau further suggests that the use of NVC is unlikely to allow everyone to express their feelings and have their needs met in real life as this would require inordinate time, patience and discipline.
[18] Chapman Flack, in reviewing a training video by Rosenberg, finds the presentation of key ideas "spell-binding" and the anecdotes "humbling and inspiring", notes the "beauty of his work", and his "adroitly doing fine attentive thinking" when interacting with his audience.
To Flack, some elements of what Rosenberg says seem like pat answers at odds with the challenging and complex picture of human nature, history, literature, and art offer.
The strong sense offers a language to examine one's thinking and actions, support understanding, bring one's best to the community, and honor one's emotions.
In the weak sense, one may take the language as rules and use these to score debating points, label others for political gain, or insist that others express themselves in this way.
As an antidote, Flack advises, "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others," (also known as the robustness principle) and guard against the "metamorphosis of nonviolent communication into subtle violence done in its name.
"[38] Ellen Gorsevski, assessing Rosenberg's book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion (1999) in the context of geopolitical rhetoric, states that "the relative strength of the individual is vastly overestimated while the key issue of structural violence is almost completely ignored.
