Whose to Blame?

One of my NVC students had the realization which is basic to both NVC (this was only the third class) and to my Teamwork Marriage Mediation method:

"What a magnificent realization that another person isn't ever be the real source of my feelings. The real source of my upset is always my own unmet needs. That realization puts me in a much more resourceful state to solicit the other's help instead of alienating him or her. Who wants to help when they're feeling blamed? Everyone wants to help when they're valued as a resource, rather than vilified as the problem's source."

Who indeed?

Married, and Becoming Friends Again

What I told the couple who realized they were so alienated that they no longer were even friends anymore, was to start appreciating each other.

Appreciations reach across any gap, and let the other person see inside of you (“In to me you see” = intimacy).

NVC appreciations have three parts:

1.  Observation: what action you are appreciating

2.  Feelings: how their doing that felt to you

3.  Needs: what needs of yours got met by that action

So if you like it when the kitchen sink doesn’t have dishes in it, and your partner cleans the dishes, you could say: “When you did the dishes after dinner last night, I felt delighted because it met my need for cooperation and teamwork.”

Or, if you’d rather do it less formally: “Wow! I really liked it when you did the dishes last night and I just wanted to thank you. I love it when we work together.”

Research shows that the single best indicator of whether a marriage will last is how many appreciations they couple gives each other.

And they’re free!

Married But No Longer Friends

The couple I started working with last night asked me this touching question: “How do we become friends again?”

After all the fighting, the busyness of raising kids and work, this couple, like so many others, has become roommates who don’t really even have a friendship anymore. A gap has opened up between them which they don’t know how to bridge.

What would you suggest?

See my next blog entry for my answer.

You Are a Self-Satisfying Needs Machine

When any situation falls short of satisfying you deeply, there is a fork in the road:
- The low road first asks and then demands that the other person change (regardless of how this might affect their satisfaction) so that you can feel okay.
- The high road steps outside the feeling of dissatisfaction and traces it back to its real origins: what this means to you: discovering what the missing satisfaction is about. Somehow, touching into the satisfaction which exists within you, even just momentarily frees you from the victim role - the idea that drives so much of our unhappiness - that other people are boorishly withholding our only chance at happiness.

Thus freed from the blind-puppy-lapping-at-its-bitch's-teat-for-survival view of relationship, two changes miraculously happen:

1.    We become not only relaxed and stress-free, we suddenly become amazingly articulate about what it is we actually want; and…
2.    The other person appears before us, as if by magic, with their own desires and needs, which we now have the resource and curiosity and actual desire to include in the conversation.

That conversation, by the way, is not only fun to have; it creates connection and intimacy, even if none of the issues are resolved!

Because although your mind would refuse to accept this thought anywhere along the low road - the issue (the laundry, the tooth-paste tube, whatever) that you were convinced needed to be resolved and were further convinced that only the resolution of that issue would bring about your happiness - was never what this was about at all.

Satisfaction, serenity, stresslessness - are available without the outside world changing one iota. You are a self-satisfying machine.

And as such, you can be a delight to be around for other self-satisfying machines.

If Your Marriage Isn't Sick, You Don't Need a Doctor!

And they lived happily ever after. That's what they seem to be promising when you first learn about marriage.

But in reality, what most people actually get is "tired of having the same old argument" instead. How did this happen?

If you are mentally or psychologically too ill to be married, then going to a therapist for your marital woes makes sense.

If your problem is that you are arguing, however, then you should go to an argument specialist, in other words, to a mediator.

Going to a therapist for arguments is like going to a cardiologist because you are sad. Yes, they help heal heart pain, but they treat illness.

Your marriage isn't sick, you're arguing because of differences you don't understand or know how to benefit from.

How Open Should a Healer Be to the Suffering?

How open should I keep myself to the suffering of others as their healer?

Each new man comes in unable to breath, chest reified into stone with their certainty about how wrong their wife is. 

They bluster their fear at these women who love them, thinking they are solving the thing they are creating.

The little girl in their wife looks out of the outraged woman's eyes, so sad and bewildered at the betrayal. Both girl and woman convinced by the silly mask the terrified man wears, writing epoch poems of injustice which are justified and just as off the mark as is his "logic.”

I watch them take pot-shots at each other, only half trying to hurt - really trying to help the other back to a better time.

Time. So much of it lost in the snake biting its own tail and rolling down the years.

I feel the weight of that lost time, and its heaviness feels like sadness in my heart. But perhaps it's just weight.

Maybe I'm misreading my feelings. Maybe the weight is just the love I feel: for the scared boy, for the betrayed girl, for the little bits of man-flesh that haven't yet turned to stone, for the angry woman fighting for her life; for myself, who volunteers to go into this nuclear reactor of relationships, over and over, with the tools to collect the radiating energy, and cool the fires down to one man and one woman who love each other but don't know how.

Violently Using Non-Violent Communication

Anything which can be used can be misused, and therefore anything powerful can be powerfully misused.

It's important to avoid the trap of using Non-Violent Communication as weapons instead of as tools. For instance, knowing that your partner (or anyone) has just spoken a judgment is not a license to judge them! That will just create an unmet need in them, which they will likely throw back at you as a judgment, and the only benefit you'll have gotten out of NVC is using it to have arguments at a higher level - about process instead of about content. But they're still arguments, and they will leave everyone's needs just as unmet.

And eventually you'll get the "You're doing that thing again, that NVC thing. Stop doing that to me!"

If you hear this or some phrase like it - sometimes the person says, "You’re not my therapist," what they are communicating is that you are using the techniques of nonjudgment from a judgmental place. The idea here is not to change your words or to change your partner. The idea is to change where you stand in the world, so you really see your partner as your equal and on the same side as you, and to communicate FROM there. All the techniques are aimed at helping YOU notice where  YOU are.

So if you notice your partner talking in judgments, you haven't caught them in a mistake, you've just noticed they have an unmet need and so now you're in a position to help them get it met.