Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life, Second Edition @Team LiB (14 page)
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Authors: by Marshall B. Rosenberg
The Power of Empathy
Carl Rogers described the impact of empathy on its recipients: “When . . . someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good. . . . When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.”
Empathy allows us “to reperceive [our] world in a new way and move on.”
One of my favorite stories about empathy comes from the principal of an innovative school. She had returned after lunch one day to find Milly, an elementary school student, sitting dejectedly in her office waiting to see her. She sat down next to Milly, who began, “Mrs. Anderson, have you ever had a week when everything you did hurt somebody else, and you never intended to hurt anyone at all?”
“Yes,” the principal replied, “I think I understand,” whereupon Milly proceeded to describe her week. “By now,” the principal related, “I was quite late for a very important meeting—still had my coat on—and anxious not to keep a room full of people waiting, and so I asked, ‘Milly, what can I do for you?’ Milly reached over, took both my shoulders in her hands, looked me straight in the eyes, and said very firmly, ‘Mrs. Anderson, I don’t want you to
do
anything; I just want you to listen.’
“Don’t just do something. . . .”
This was one of the most significant moments of learning in my life—taught to me by a child—so I thought, ‘Never mind the roomful of adults waiting for me!’ Milly and I moved over to a bench that afforded us more privacy and sat, my arm around her shoulders, her head on my chest, and her arm around my waist, while she talked until she was done. And you know, it didn’t take that long.”
One of the most satisfying aspects of my work is to hear how individuals have used NVC to strengthen their ability to connect empathically with others. My friend Laurence, who lives in Switzerland, described how upset she had felt when her 6-year-old son had stormed away angrily while she was still talking to him. Isabelle, her 10-year-old daughter who had accompanied her to a recent NVC workshop, remarked, “So you’re really angry, Mom. You’d like for him to talk when he’s angry and not run off.” Laurence marveled at how, upon hearing Isabelle’s words, she had felt an immediate diminishing of tension, and was subsequently able to be more understanding with her son when he returned.
A college instructor described how relationships between students and faculty had been affected when several members of the faculty learned to listen empathically and to express themselves more vulnerably and honestly. “The students opened up more and more and told us about the various personal problems that were interfering with their studies. The more they talked about it, the more work they were able to complete. Even though this kind of listening took a lot of our time, we were glad to spend it in this way. Unfortunately, the dean got upset; he said we were not counselors and should spend more time teaching and less time talking with the students.”
When I asked how the faculty had dealt with this, the instructor replied, “We empathized with the dean’s concern. We heard that he felt worried and wanted to know that we weren’t getting involved in things we couldn’t handle. We also heard that he needed reassurance that the time spent on talking wasn’t cutting into our teaching responsibilities. He seemed relieved by the way we listened to him. We continued to talk with the students because we could see that the more we listened to them, the better they did in their studies.”
When we work in a hierarchically structured institution, there is a tendency to hear commands and judgments from those higher up in the hierarchy. While we may easily empathize with our peers and those in less powerful positions, we may find ourselves being defensive or apologetic, instead of empathic, in the presence of those we identify as our “superiors.” This is why I was particularly pleased that these faculty members had remembered to empathize with their dean as well as with their students.
It’s harder to empathize with those who appear to possess more power, status, or resources.
Because we are called to reveal our deepest feelings and needs, we may sometimes find it challenging to express ourselves in NVC. Self-expression becomes easier, however, after we empathize with others because we will then have touched their humanness and realized the common qualities we share.
The more we empathize with the other party, the safer we feel.
The more we connect with the feelings and needs behind their words, the less frightening it is to open up to other people. The situations where we are the most reluctant to express vulnerability are often those where we want to maintain a “tough image” for fear of losing authority or control.
Once I showed my vulnerability to some members of a street gang in Cleveland by acknowledging the hurt I was feeling and my desire to be treated with more respect. “Oh, look,” one of them remarked, “he’s feeling hurt; isn’t that too bad!” at which point all his friends chimed in laughing. Here again, I could interpret them as taking advantage of my vulnerability (Option 2 - “Blame others”) or I could empathize with the feelings and needs behind their behavior (Option 4).
If, however, I have an image that I’m being humiliated and taken advantage of, I may be too wounded, angry, or scared to be able to empathize. At such a moment, I would need to withdraw physically in order to offer myself some empathy or to request it from a reliable source. After I have discovered the needs that had been so powerfully triggered in me and have received adequate empathy for them, I shall then be ready to return and empathize with the other party. In situations of pain, I recommend first getting the empathy necessary to go beyond the thoughts occupying our heads so as to recognize our deeper needs.
As I listened closely to the gang member’s remark, “Oh look, he’s feeling hurt, isn’t that too bad?” and the laughter that followed, I sensed that he and his friends were annoyed and not wanting to be subjected to guilt trips and manipulation. They may have been reacting to people in their pasts who used phrases like “that hurts me” to imply disapproval. Since I didn’t verify it with them out loud, I have no way of knowing if my guess was in fact accurate. Just focusing my attention there, however, kept me from either taking it personally or getting angry. Instead of judging them for ridiculing or treating me disrespectfully, I concentrated on hearing the pain and needs behind such behavior.
“Hey,” one of them burst out, “this is a bunch of crap you’re offering us! Suppose there are members of another gang here and they have guns and you don’t. And you say just stand there and
talk
to them? Crap!”
Then everybody was laughing again, and again I directed my attention to their feelings and needs: “So it sounds like you’re really fed up with learning something that has no relevance in those situations?”
“Yeah, and if you lived in this neighborhood, you’d
know
this is a bunch of crap.”
“So you need to trust that someone teaching you something has some knowledge of your neighborhood?”
“Damn right. Some of these dudes would blast you away before you got two words out of your mouth!”
“And you need to trust that someone trying to teach you something understands the dangers around here?” I continued to listen in this manner, sometimes verbalizing what I heard and sometimes not. This continued for forty-five minutes and then I sensed a shift: they felt that I was truly understanding them. A counselor in the program noticed the shift, and asked them out loud, “What do you think of this man?” The gentleman who had been giving me the roughest time replied, “He’s the best speaker we’ve ever had.”
Astonished, the counselor turned to me and whispered, “But you haven’t said anything!” In fact, I had said a lot by demonstrating that there was nothing they could throw at me that couldn’t be translated into universal human feelings and needs.
We “say a lot” by listening for other people’s feelings and needs.
The ability to offer empathy to people in stressful situations can defuse potential violence.
A teacher in the inner city of St. Louis related an incident where she had conscientiously stayed after school to help a student, even though teachers were warned to leave the building for their own safety after classes were dismissed. A stranger entered her classroom, where the following exchange took place:
Young man
: “Take off your clothes.”
Teacher (noticing that he was shaking)
: “I’m sensing this is very scary for you.”
Young man:
“Did you hear me? God damn it, take off your clothes!”
Teacher:
“I’m sensing you’re really pissed off right now and you want me to do what you’re telling me.”
Young man:
“You’re damned right, and you’re going to get hurt if you don’t.”
Teacher:
“I’d like you to tell me if there’s some other way of meeting your needs that wouldn’t hurt me.”
Young man:
“I said take them off.”
Teacher:
“I can hear how much you want this. At the same time, I want you to know how scared and horrible I feel, and how grateful I’d be if you’d leave without hurting me.”
Young man:
“Give me your purse.”
The teacher handed the stranger her purse, relieved not to be raped. She later described how, each time she empathized with the young man, she could sense his becoming less adamant in his intention to follow through with the rape.
A metropolitan police officer attending a follow-up training in NVC once greeted me with this account:
I’m sure glad you had us practicing empathy with angry people that last time. Just a few days after our session, I went to arrest someone in a public housing project. When I brought him out, my car was surrounded by about 60 people screaming things at me like, ‘Let him go! He didn’t do anything! You police are a bunch of racist pigs!’ Although I was skeptical that empathy would help, I didn’t have many other options. So I reflected back the feelings that were coming at me; I said things like, ‘So you don’t trust my reasons for arresting this man? You think it has to do with race?’ After several minutes of my continuing to reflect their feelings, the group became less hostile. In the end they opened a path so I could get to my car.
Finally, I’d like to illustrate how a young woman used empathy to bypass violence during her night shift at a drug detoxification center in Toronto. The young woman recounted this story during a second workshop she attended in NVC. At 11:00 p.m. one night, a few weeks after her first NVC training, a man who’d obviously been taking drugs walked in off the street and demanded a room. The young woman started to explain to him that all the rooms had been filled for the night. She was about to hand the man the address of another detox center when he hurled her to the ground. “The next thing I knew, he was sitting across my chest holding a knife to my throat and shouting, ‘You bitch, don’t lie to me! You do too have a room!’”
She then proceeded to apply her training by listening for his feelings and needs.
“You remembered to do that under those conditions?” I asked, impressed.
“What choice did I have? Desperation sometimes makes good communicators of us all! You know, Marshall,” she added, “that joke you told in the workshop really helped me. In fact, I think it saved my life.”
“What joke?” “Remember when you said never to put your ‘but’ in the face of an angry person? I was all ready to start arguing with him; I was about to say, ‘
But
I don’t have a room!’ when I remembered your joke. It had really stayed with me because only the week before, I was arguing with my mother and she’d said to me, ‘I could kill you when you answer “but” to everything I say!’ Imagine, if my own mother was angry enough to kill me for using that word, what would this man have done? If I’d said, ‘But I don’t have a room!’ when he was screaming at me, I have no doubt he would have slit my throat.
Empathize, rather than put your “but” in the face of an angry person.
So instead, I took a deep breath and said, ‘It sounds like you’re really angry and you want to be given a room.’ He yelled back, ‘I may be an addict, but by God, I deserve respect. I’m tired of nobody giving me respect. My parents don’t give me respect. I’m gonna get respect!’ I just focused on his feelings and needs and said, ‘Are you fed up, not getting the respect that you want?’”
“How long did this go on?” I asked. “Oh, about another 35 minutes,” she replied. “That must have been terrifying.”
“No, not after the first couple of interchanges, because then something else we’d learned here became apparent. When I concentrated on listening for his feelings and needs, I stopped seeing him as a monster. I could see, just as you’d said, how people who seem like monsters are simply human beings whose language and behavior sometimes keep us from seeing their humanness. The more I was able to focus my attention on his feelings and needs, the more I saw him as a person full of despair whose needs weren’t being met. I became confident that if I held my attention there, I wouldn’t be hurt. After he’d received the empathy he needed, he got off me, put the knife away, and I helped him find a room at another center.”
When we listen for their feelings and needs, we no longer see people as monsters.
Delighted that she’d learned to respond empathically in such an extreme situation, I asked curiously, “What are you doing back here? It sounds like you’ve mastered NVC and should be out teaching others what you’ve learned.”
“Now I need you to help me with a hard one,” she said. “I’m almost afraid to ask. What could be harder than that?” “Now I need you to help me with my mother. Despite all the insight I got into that ‘but’ phenomenon, you know what happened? At supper the next evening when I told my mother what had happened with the man, she said, ‘You’re going to cause your father and me to have a heart attack if you keep that job. You simply have to find different work!’ So guess what I said to her? ‘
But
, mother, it’s my life!’”
It may be difficult to empathize with those who are closest to us.
I couldn’t have asked for a more compelling example of how difficult it can be to respond empathically to one’s own family members!