Nonviolent Communication, abuse, social justice, and ... communication

The Nonviolent Communication toolset is powerful and useful in many situations. I think everyone can benefit from learing its fundamentals. I have benefitted immensely from exposure to it when I was very young.

And I think everyone needs to understand its limitations. I recommend the Real Social Skills essay Nonviolent Communication can hurt people as a helpful examination of this problem.

That approach is useful in situations in which people basically want to treat each other well but have trouble doing so because they don’t understand one another’s needs and feelings. In every other type of situation, the ideology and methodology of Nonviolent Communication can make things much worse.

I would expand on the description of where NVC serves well to say that all parties in the conversation must have a commitment to working in good faith toward a resolution which serves everyone, and must feel deep confidence that everyone in the conversation shares that commitment.

Those conditions do not apply in relationships with abuse. Lee Shevek <@ButchAnarchy> explains the abuse pattern:

If your conflicts with someone close to you (partner, family member, friend, etc.) regularly result in you feeling confused about the nature of the conflict, you may be in an abusive relationship. Seriously, it’s not spoken about as often as it should be but if your conflicts with someone are regularly leaving you confused / keep you confused throughout the conflict, it is very likely by design.

Your confusion is not, contrary to the other person’s assertions, a result of your own weakness. It is that you are engaging with someone in the assumption of good faith when there is, in reality, no good faith present, and doing so is a wildly confusing experience. You engage in conflict with the assumption that the person you’re in conflict with is raising whatever concern they have raised in good faith because that is the basis upon which mutual relationship is formed. But that is not the basis of abusive ones.

Abusers engage in conflict (and create conflict) in order to dominate and to win, and they do not recognize fair terms of engagement. While you’re still engaging in the assumption of good faith, their only actual goal is to undermine you and gain your submission.

It was exceptionally hard for me to come to a point of understanding my past relationship as abusive specifically because me ex’s particular form of abuse was all about covert manipulation and subtle attacks on my trust in my own perceptions. So while I often felt extremely hurt, anxious, fearful, etc. the overarching emotion I had in our conflicts was intense confusion because I assumed she approached our conflicts with the same mindset I did: to collaborate and come to a mutual decision. I assumed also that her random criticisms, the conflicts she initiated that seemed to aping up from nowhere and spin in circles until I was too fatigued to hold my own ground anymore, etc. where about the subject matter at hand, when they were really just tools of control.

For clarity: occasional confusion and misunderstanding is a part of all relationships. But it should be occasional, and it should also be able to be cleared up via communication and explanation. If it is a consistent feature of your conflicts with someone, it is a big red flag.

Another essay from Real Social Skills, NVC can be emotionally violent, focuses on such systematically abusive people weaponizing NVC patterns.

This abusive partner’s honest expression of his feelings is actually part of how he is abusing his partner. NVC has no way of recognizing the ways in which expression of genuinely felt emotions can be abusive. It also has no recognized way for someone to legitimately say “no, this is not a conversation I want to engage in” or “no, I don’t consider that feeling something I need to respond to or take into consideration.”

Part of what it would take for NVC to stop being an abusive culture it to recognize that NVC-style dialogue and emotional intimacy require consent every single time people interact that way.

I wish I had comparably lucid descriptions of how NVC breaks down with social injustices. I have some incomplete understanding from my own experience.

NVC teaches avoidance of language offering “objective” judgement in favor of describing one’s subjective experience. (“I-statements!”) But speaking this way from a privileged position in a world which overwhelmingly values the feelings of the privileged over the experiences of the oppressed implicitly centers the perspective of privilege. We must diligently avoid this on the merits. And as it generally offends the heck out of people in a marginalized position when they hear it, degrading the conversation.

Consider a white person using the NVC template and saying to a Black interlocutor, “When you told me that my actions were racist, I felt very uncomfortable.” Even if that white speaker does not hold Black people responsible to ensure their emotional comfort, or to ensure the ease of white people in general — even if the Black listener has direct experience demonstrating this commitment by the white speaker — in a world which insists on white comfort every turn, the painful inference is unavoidable.

Or consider a man trying to tell a woman that he is listening attentively in the NVC framework, saying that he recognizes the legitimacy of her anger and saying back his understanding of the grounds of that anger in order to check whether he has heard her correctly. That is easily read as an arrogation of a right to decide whether her anger is legitimate, based on her justifying the particulars to his satisfaction, since denying both of those is a familiar pattern from countless other interactions.

In a position of privilege one must actively counter the expectation that the oppressed must be deferential to the concerns of the privileged. NVC’s grounding in a presumption of goodwill cannot address this need.

NVC’s method of empathetic listening — asking about an interlocutor’s experience, listening, then reflecting back one’s understanding of what they say — can fail badly coming from a position of privilege. I have been in conversations in which I have tried to say that I support the legitimacy of a marginalized person’s anger, saying back my understanding of what the anger was about, and asking that person to tell me more to improve my understanding ... and had it read as arrogating my right to decide whether the anger was legitimate, demanding details of the circumstances before I would consider it justified to my satisfaction, which I understand because denying both of those is a familiar pattern I am sure my interlocutor had experienced in countless other interactions. Our conversations cannot set aside the context of a world which makes unreasonable demands on the marginalized. Pervasive injustices makes an uncharitiable reading of privileged speech and thought natural, even a necessity for survival in a hostile world.

Jeeyon Shim adds a sharp observation about NVC as a style of communication:

It’s also painful to see NVC used in contexts that add racial codeswitching as an element, too. I think of NVC as a very, very white way of speaking, and all that implies.

One very clear cut example is in conversations where not every participant might speak English as a first language. I’ve witnessed this firsthand because my dumb ass, excited by hearing about the technique for the first time from very, very white friends, tried it on my mom. One day I was like, “When you say I need to bring home better grades, I feel like you are exerting parental pressure on me to fulfill unrealistic performance standards.”

She literally said to me, deadpan in English, “Jeeyon, did you forget how to speak English?”

Obviously she is very funny and that was a very fucking funny joke, but also how many times has that gone in a way where people got really hurt? How does NVC perpetuate white standards of behavior and protocol that, ahem, for people of color are often unrealistic performance standards?

More from Shim:

One thing that’s dawning on me from the past couple years is that outside of their original contexts, restorative justice and non-violent communication techniques as applied to interpersonal dynamics are largely advantageous for white people who've had access to higher education.

It’s so easy for the language and tools presented in both to be leveraged against PoC and WoC, particularly people who’ve been raised with wildly different communication styles in their home (e.g. 2^nd gen and 1^st gen PoC).

There’s also an undercurrent (or overcurrent, often) of white saviorism to this idea that PoC communities or individual must be taught restorative justice or non-violent communication techniques in cases where they don’t voluntarily opt in that I’m really, really not a fan of.

I’ve also seen both sets of tools leveraged against various people with mental health needs that made it really hard to be present in the intensely engaged, sensitively-attuned ways that RJ and NVC necessitate, which also sucks to watch happen.

Basically I think, sort of like with laypeople’s use of therapeutic language and concepts (or, sadly, even therapists who utilize their knowledge unethically in interpersonal contexts e.g. armchair diagnoses of ppl they don't know), they are being misused in reductionist ways.

Because of early training in nonviolent communication, am working to break my habit of reflexively turning to its patterns in fraught conversations. I have bitter experience from how it breaks down in social justice conversations. I confess that this comes with a frustration that social justice advocacy culture has not developed a stronger set of protocols for people in privilege to engage responsibly and effectively in hard conversations, much less a practice with the the crisp, teachable quality which NVC has.

We rightly point to an obligation to step carefully when we stand in a privileged position. Much of the discussion around that addresses a long list of land mines to Not Step On, and I think much of that right and necessary. And we need more positive practices, more clarifying principles.

Too often I find myself in moments of confusion. Should I keep my big yap shut? Or is that leaving the work to the marginalized? Should keep my emotions out of this particular point, to avoid an implied demand for caretaking? Or will that land as intellectualizing painful experiences when I should engage from the heart?

How should the privileged act in good faith with people who have every reason to presume bad faith? The liberal-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin tradition does not offer good answers. This requires principles, commitment, and skills. And while the privileged have the greater obligation to change and invest energy in correcting these breakdowns, I presume that a better protocol for the privileged would have to interlock with a matching protocol for the marginalized. I do not have good resources to turn to in cultivating them.

I hope that such practices are possible. I am struck that Charles Lambdin’s essay Listening Creatively: Killing Giants and Catching Shapeshifters addresses related problems in talking about facilitating workplace collaborations where it can be very tricky to cultivate goodwill and equally difficult to spot and respond to hostility.

The second Protean game Sanford calls “The Bird in the Bushes.” This has to do with veiled remarks. Here, someone makes a comment, and you sense an undercurrent, an added, implied meaning. It is like you hear something in a nearby bush that flutters and chirps. You assume it’s a bird, but to really know … you would have to go look in the bush.

[⋯]

Learning to look “in the bush” is, to me, one of the most powerful metaphors in Sanford’s book. It is far more helpful than the oft-repeated nugget of corporate wisdom that you should just “assume positive intent.” Though well-meaning, this advice is naïve. It ignores both the reality of corporate politics and frankly human nature. The fact is that colleagues do not always have your best interest at heart and sometimes do not want you to succeed. Further, at times you must work with toxic people. Another common piece of advice is to “trust your gut.” Well, often you cannot do both. When your gut tells you there is a “bird in the bushes,” to just “assume good intent” is to pretend otherwise.

I want to get much better at this. I want all of us to get much better at this.