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Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

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Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#331

Post by kiliantics »

roystonvassey wrote: post #299

The older I grow, the more I realize that, in its barest essence, we are all 'good' human beings. But, thanks to self-help advice of the kind that aspires to teach you to be 'powerful', 'assertive', 'effective', 'take no for an answer', we are fed ideas that we need to behave/talk differently to be successful. But, it is not what we should be striving for. It is meaningful connections. By treating others the way you…

If you read Marshall Rosenberg's book on Nonviolent Communication, you will see that it is not this "self-help advice" that prevents us from being "good". There are many causes that are pervasive throughout our social structures, language use, customs, etc. that lead to the "default" forms of communication which everyone tends to use being inherently "violent" -- i.e. our common modes of interaction are not based in an acknowledgement of our own and others' goodness and of the love we deserve to be shown by each other.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#332

Post by temp1999 »

bovermyer wrote: post #294
homonculus1 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence is always physical, by definition. Sometimes the word is also used for poetic effect though.

May I refer you to the second definition of violence, per Merriam Webster? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violence Violence, by definition , is not always physical.

The same dictionary that defines literally as both literal and not literal. Dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive, and so they also account for incorrect but common usage.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#333

Post by catalogia »

ben_w wrote: post #261
catalogia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do many people earnestly want to work with Vulcans? Comparing users of NVC to vulcans seems more derogatory than complimentary.

Vulcans as exposited by the script, Vulcans as demonstrated by their on-screen behaviour, or Straw Vulcans that Joe Average thinks Logical types are supposed to be? Because for all that the script claimed, TV Vulcans repeatedly demonstrated emotions. Nobody likes Straw Vulcans though, not even the actual Vulcan characters in Star Trek.

Vulcans are portrayed as suppressing their emotion, not being emotionless. In humans, suppression of emotion is generally viewed dimly. It's associated with behaviors like "bottling up your anger until you finally snap", which seems to be a theme some star trek portrayals of Vulcans have explored as well. In our society people are generally encouraged to talk about how they feel and to express their emotions openly.

I think there is a certain mindset (seemingly more prevalent among engineers...) that admires Vulcans for their suppression of emotion. But I think that's a minority mindset that most people consider aberrant.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#334

Post by ergothus »

roystonvassey wrote: post #299

The older I grow, the more I realize that, in its barest essence, we are all 'good' human beings. But, thanks to self-help advice of the kind that aspires to teach you to be 'powerful', 'assertive', 'effective', 'take no for an answer', we are fed ideas that we need to behave/talk differently to be successful. But, it is not what we should be striving for. It is meaningful connections. By treating others the way you…

> we are all 'good' human beings.

Barring a few exceptions, agreed, but:

* 0.0001% of the population leaves a LOT of jerks in the world - jerks that tend to rise in power and influence by exploiting social systems made for non-jerks.

> thanks to self-help advice

Pretty sure the world had jerks and insensitive people prior to self-help advice.

As _I've_ grown older, I've learned a lot about how "being a good person" is NOT about having good intentions. Treating someone a I want to be treated isn't enough, if that person isn't me. Someone telling me (male) to "smile more" gives me an inherently different experience than a woman that is told it. I've said that to people when I was younger, and my intentions were all rosy-good. But I made a bad experience.

Being a good person is not "do I mean well". It is not "I should only have reactions based on what others intend, not how I actually feel about it". Being a good person means caring about the impact of my words and actions AND working to make those better. We won't always succeed (I certainly don't!) but we should try.

Consider: When someone points out that we've offended them, our natural reaction is to defend our intent - we are worried about ourselves and how we are perceived. We are NOT first worried about the fact that we made someone feel bad.

I think if we got over the idea that we're basically "good", and stopped acting like creating some small sadness in the world is a claim we need to defend ourselves from, if we just focused on reducing that number of small (and occasionally large) sadness/rage/jealousy/shame that we create, THEN we'd actually be "good".

I'd rather treat people the way I'd want to be treated if I were actually them, than to treat them the way I would treat myself and expect that that should work for them.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#335

Post by roenxi »

User23 wrote: post #325
roenxi wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There obviously is a general algorithm for social skills; otherwise humans couldn't socialise. However there is no algorithm independent from what other people say and do. So any strategy that doesn't involve carefully considering what other people say and do is bound to fail.

You’re implying human social interaction is decidable. That’s a pretty bold claim and I’m not aware of any evidence for it. Please elaborate.

I disagree that a thing has to be decidable for there to be a relevant algorithm; an algorithm is a defined set of steps to take for a given input. And there is always the option of modelling social interaction as a decidable system then come up with an algorithm for the model (which is how most algorithms are used in practice, any decidable algorithm performs strangely in a physical world when it has to cope with cosmic rays hitting the CPU).

For people to be able to interact socially they have to make predictions about the consequences of their actions. That can be formulated as some sort of stochastic model. This is enough of a hook that algorithms can be used.

Anyway, that is fairly academic because in practice humans are obviously very predictable and tend to have quite stable personalities over time. There is a wealth of psychological literature classifying major personality traits [eg, 0] and most people respond in a normal way to incentives and social hierarchy with some adjustments for their cultural background.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Personality_traits

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#336

Post by temp1999 »

sethammons wrote: post #286
Sammi wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah for sure. One fundamental rule of NVC is to never state a feeling as being caused by anyone. Instead you state that something happened and what you felt when that happened. So the template is "this and this happened and I felt this and this emotion". Not "you did this and this and you made me feel this and this". This way you take responsibility for your own emotions, and don't make anyone else defensive or conf…

I'm unfamiliar with NVC, but I've always held that you are, like you said, responsible for your emotions. I've tried with all my kids to teach them that. "She made me angry!" "No, nobody can make you feel anything, you are in charge of how you feel. What did they do that made you choose to be angry?"

It's good to teach children (and sometimes adults unfortunately) to be responsible for their emotions and explain what happened instead of vague statements like "She made me angry!", but you don't choose your emotions to situations, only how you respond to them.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#337

Post by musicale »

eikenberry wrote: post #17
woodandsteel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you recommend a person in that situation say instead?

Maybe just "would you only eat the food that you buy?” I'm not sure I agree it sounds passive aggressive. But couching everything with "would you be willing to" sounds odd.

Personally I'd greatly prefer something like "Hey Amina, I think you ate my lunch!" (or "did you eat my lunch?" as someone else suggested above) which clarifies the situation at hand and leaves the response open without demanding a specific remedy immediately.

You could also ask "hey, do you know what happened to the brown bag that was in the fridge this morning? That was my lunch but now I can't find it." That feels a bit parental maybe, but it also explains what happened and leaves it open-ended "oh, it probably got thrown out when we cleaned the fridge" or, "oh I totally thought that was a leftover sandwich from the meeting so I ate it" or whatever.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#338

Post by lazyasciiart »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #267
lazyasciiart wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you'd expect something called "Non-violent communication" to be an appropriate methodology to use in actual fighting.

Regardless of the nomenclature, the purpose and intent of the methodology is to build robust working relationships. If the methodology is sound, it should hold up when stress-tested. If he doesn't hold up, then there's negligible benefit from advocating for it. If the expectation is that the organization will never be subjected to such high levels of stress anyway....than almost all management styles are equally vali…

Practices that are intended to build skills (or "robust working relationships") don't actually have to work in crisis situations - the goal is that the skill or relationship was developed to the point where it can be relied on in a crisis.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#339

Post by gotrythis »

getpost wrote: post #323
gotrythis wrote: post #295

I discovered NVC decades ago and have been using it ever since. Many people complain that NVC sounds unnatural. This is because it is like learning a new language. It sounds unnatural when any native speaker teaches someone their language, because they speak slowly, in simple phrases, and repeat everything at least twice. That is exactly what Marshal did when teaching NVC. Once you are fluent, it sounds very differen…

At a Marshall Rosenberg event I attended, he was asked about the unnatural speaking style. His reponse was that it was like "training wheels" for learning the process and, like you say, it doesn't sound like that once you learn to practice NVC natually. And that may be, but my experience with various NVC teachers and practitioners is that they don't know the training wheel analogy and they do speak in an unnatural wa…

I think this is it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRkRHAyI2xHN6UUD53X7...

I think it's really hard to get natural with it. Just like any new language, it takes years of immersion to speak like a native, and there's nowhere in our society to get that kind of immersion in NLP.

Re: Interested in improving your relationships? Try Nonviolent Communication

#340

Post by bovermyer »

temp1999 wrote: post #332
bovermyer wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I refer you to the second definition of violence, per Merriam Webster? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violence Violence, by definition , is not always physical.

The same dictionary that defines literally as both literal and not literal. Dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive, and so they also account for incorrect but common usage.

In the same vein, language is constantly in flux, so defining a thing as "just so" is at best a temporary accuracy.
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