This may be true if everyone does NVC exactly as Marshall Rosenberg describes it, but there’s no guarantee that everyone will do that in the real world.
This is the core of the matter. All methods, all rules, all systems are for nothing if they are not executed with right intention. And who knows another’s intention, or even their own?
If the intention is not sound, connected to the heart, it’s not nvc.
That is good as modus ponens, but bad as modus tollens.
Given that NVC gives you tools for connecting to your heart, it’s useful for evaluating whether or not something is NVC by looking at whether those tools are used.
All methods, all rules, all systems, and all tools. The question to ask is not, is this NVC?, but is this being done not merely with right tools, but with right intention? And even right intentions are not enough, hence the saying about the road to hell. As soon as someone talks about their intentions, they may already have substituted form for substance. No-one is a credible witness for their own probity.
My attitude to someone talking at me with NVC techniques would be similar to Said Achmiz and PDV’s. I would have the same reaction if I recognised Landmark concepts, or even concepts from another such training (that no-one here is likely to have heard of) that I’ve done myself and consider valuable. Or CFAR, or the Sequences (see the thread on Shit Rationalists Say).
You seem to treat “Is this done with the right attention” as being synonymous with “connected to the heart” as if “connected to the heart” would be a metaphor instead of a functional description of a state.
I can’t read anybodies mind and know their intentions but “connection to the heart” is something that’s perceivable with sufficient practice/body awareness.
You seem to treat “Is this done with the right attention” as being synonymous with “connected to the heart” as if “connected to the heart” would be a metaphor instead of a functional description of a state.
Yes, I do, with the minor correction that I said “right intention”, not “right attention”. But right attention is a prerequisite for everything else. “Virtue has many tools, but they are all grasped with the handle of attention.”
Yes, I read “the heart” as a metaphor. Literally, the heart is a blood pump, which works faster or slower, stronger or weaker, according to instructions from elsewhere in the body. “Connected to the heart” is (as I read it) a metaphorical description of a state. What is meant by a literal “connection to the heart”?
As background to this, I have done about 15 years of tai chi and 10 years of taiko (Japanese drumming), and I am quite familiar with the sorts of (as I read them) metaphors and visualisations one must enact in order to obtain the desired results from the body. I follow Crowley’s warning against “attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.”
Disagree: NVC does give one additional tools that they can use to turn their kindness into practice. I say this because originally discovering NVC was something of a mind-blowing event to me, and allowed me to resolve an interpersonal conflict that had been bothering me for a long time, but which would only have blown up if I had tried to address it without the tools from NVC.
Details: a friend of mine was acting in a way which I felt was wrong, both towards themselves and towards others. When I had been trying to bring this up, they had replied that they had no choice but to act as they did—a statement which I felt was blatantly false. I wanted to discuss this with them, but the only sensible sentence that kept coming to my mind was something like “it pisses me off that you’re not taking responsibility for your actions”, and there was no way that starting the conversation like that would have gone well. So I said nothing but still felt occasionally angry about it.
Then I read the NVC book, and realized that I could turn that sentence into a much more constructive and kind one: what I ended up using was something like “when you say that you have to act the way that you do, I get frustrated, because I feel that thinking about it like that prevents you from seeing how you could actually act differently”. This led to a very constructive and useful conversation where we resolved the thing that had been bugging me.
Previously I had felt like if I was upset with someone, my alternatives were to either lash out at them, or keep it in but keep feeling angry. And because I did want to be kind, this often led to a lot of bottled-up annoyance towards other people. NVC taught to me to look for how my needs create my emotions, and how to express that in a way that doesn’t come off as aggressive.
Highlighting that this example had details that pointed me towards the fact that I view saying that sentence as good, right and useful, but telling someone else to talk like that, or that such talk is the only valid talk seems supremely hostile and wrong. It’s the difference between “this is a tool in my box that is sometimes the right tool” and making regulations requiring the tool’s use.
Yes, this. NVC should be treated with a similar sort of parameters to Crocker’s Rules, which you can declare for yourself at any time, you can invite people to a conversation where it’s known that everyone will be using them, but you cannot hold it against anyone if you invite them to declare Crocker’s Rules and they refuse.
Sure. I’d think that in general, anyone claiming that others were only allowed to talk in some particular way would already bear a pretty heavy burden of proof they needed to meet, regardless of whether it was an NVC pattern or any other pattern.
This may be true if everyone does NVC exactly as Marshall Rosenberg describes it, but there’s no guarantee that everyone will do that in the real world.
Definitely. Part of nvc is the intention behind the process. If the intention is not sound, connected to the heart, it’s not nvc.
This is the core of the matter. All methods, all rules, all systems are for nothing if they are not executed with right intention. And who knows another’s intention, or even their own?
That is good as modus ponens, but bad as modus tollens.
Given that NVC gives you tools for connecting to your heart, it’s useful for evaluating whether or not something is NVC by looking at whether those tools are used.
All methods, all rules, all systems, and all tools. The question to ask is not, is this NVC?, but is this being done not merely with right tools, but with right intention? And even right intentions are not enough, hence the saying about the road to hell. As soon as someone talks about their intentions, they may already have substituted form for substance. No-one is a credible witness for their own probity.
My attitude to someone talking at me with NVC techniques would be similar to Said Achmiz and PDV’s. I would have the same reaction if I recognised Landmark concepts, or even concepts from another such training (that no-one here is likely to have heard of) that I’ve done myself and consider valuable. Or CFAR, or the Sequences (see the thread on Shit Rationalists Say).
You seem to treat “Is this done with the right attention” as being synonymous with “connected to the heart” as if “connected to the heart” would be a metaphor instead of a functional description of a state.
I can’t read anybodies mind and know their intentions but “connection to the heart” is something that’s perceivable with sufficient practice/body awareness.
Yes, I do, with the minor correction that I said “right intention”, not “right attention”. But right attention is a prerequisite for everything else. “Virtue has many tools, but they are all grasped with the handle of attention.”
Yes, I read “the heart” as a metaphor. Literally, the heart is a blood pump, which works faster or slower, stronger or weaker, according to instructions from elsewhere in the body. “Connected to the heart” is (as I read it) a metaphorical description of a state. What is meant by a literal “connection to the heart”?
As background to this, I have done about 15 years of tai chi and 10 years of taiko (Japanese drumming), and I am quite familiar with the sorts of (as I read them) metaphors and visualisations one must enact in order to obtain the desired results from the body. I follow Crowley’s warning against “attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.”
If the intention is sound, the value it adds is minimal. Anyone can be kind as long as they are trying to be kind.
Disagree: NVC does give one additional tools that they can use to turn their kindness into practice. I say this because originally discovering NVC was something of a mind-blowing event to me, and allowed me to resolve an interpersonal conflict that had been bothering me for a long time, but which would only have blown up if I had tried to address it without the tools from NVC.
Details: a friend of mine was acting in a way which I felt was wrong, both towards themselves and towards others. When I had been trying to bring this up, they had replied that they had no choice but to act as they did—a statement which I felt was blatantly false. I wanted to discuss this with them, but the only sensible sentence that kept coming to my mind was something like “it pisses me off that you’re not taking responsibility for your actions”, and there was no way that starting the conversation like that would have gone well. So I said nothing but still felt occasionally angry about it.
Then I read the NVC book, and realized that I could turn that sentence into a much more constructive and kind one: what I ended up using was something like “when you say that you have to act the way that you do, I get frustrated, because I feel that thinking about it like that prevents you from seeing how you could actually act differently”. This led to a very constructive and useful conversation where we resolved the thing that had been bugging me.
Previously I had felt like if I was upset with someone, my alternatives were to either lash out at them, or keep it in but keep feeling angry. And because I did want to be kind, this often led to a lot of bottled-up annoyance towards other people. NVC taught to me to look for how my needs create my emotions, and how to express that in a way that doesn’t come off as aggressive.
Highlighting that this example had details that pointed me towards the fact that I view saying that sentence as good, right and useful, but telling someone else to talk like that, or that such talk is the only valid talk seems supremely hostile and wrong. It’s the difference between “this is a tool in my box that is sometimes the right tool” and making regulations requiring the tool’s use.
Yes, this. NVC should be treated with a similar sort of parameters to Crocker’s Rules, which you can declare for yourself at any time, you can invite people to a conversation where it’s known that everyone will be using them, but you cannot hold it against anyone if you invite them to declare Crocker’s Rules and they refuse.
Sure. I’d think that in general, anyone claiming that others were only allowed to talk in some particular way would already bear a pretty heavy burden of proof they needed to meet, regardless of whether it was an NVC pattern or any other pattern.
If only it were so easy. The road to hell etc.
A fictional snatch of dialogue:
“I’m only trying to help!”
“That is the problem. You are only trying to help. You are not actually helping.”