Yeah, I strongly recommend going to a workshop, someone I practice together with has told me about NVC New York: https://www.nycnvc.org/
She went there and she seemed pretty good at it.
If you tell them that you are low on money then they might be willing to either offer you a discount or to let you do the workshop for free, I don’t remember which one it was.
In terms of practice, I tend to take it easy because there are so many things to master.
One of the easier things to get better at is to stop making things worse, by applying punitive measures in cases where it’s counter-productive.
One of the way harder (for me) things is to actually go through the entire observation-feelings-needs-request chain in a conflict, because I find it that during a conflict, I need empathy so my capacity for empathy towards others is limited, so the first step is to give yourself empathy. Don’t expect initial good results doing this, the book doesn’t warn you how hard it is, you could practice just the first step (observations), and also practice things in your own mind, without sharing them—Marshall Rosenberg says that the most important part of the process is not the words that you use, even if you do all of it silently it would still work well, but if you do it out loud and do it wrong then people might be pissed off at you, it has happened to me sometimes. I’ve also had good results, and it’s unreliable. So this takes a lot of practice.
Another great thing to practice is empathic listening.
I find it that coming up with the magical keywords for the correct emotions and needs is not as powerful as we might believe; instead, the powerful part comes when you are fully listening and you are connecting with the other person’s feelings and needs.
Rereading parts of the book is also worth it. Also watching their workshop videos on Youtube is both inspirational and instrumental.
Good luck! Workshops are expected to be totally worth it!
Good job dealing with such a tough case. I have chronic pain and everyone I’ve seen was either totally useless or only mildly helpful. That includes several doctors, three different therapists, and even a few alternative medicine practitioners.
Although I’m already familiar with reinterpreting pain as something positive, and I’ve even experienced it myself, on reading this post I stopped to do it and I was able to see it from another angle, which was beneficial for me. Thanks for the examples, too.
Now this is my understanding of how this works:
After the raw sensation from the body occurs, we often react to it mentally, like the cousin with the burnt hand—we actually add something after the sensation, and next time, we perceive them both together, as if they were one whole thing, we can’t separate what we added, and we don’t know that we added it.
What we add is often harmful, for example when there is pain and then we are afraid of it. Therefore, it is beneficial to unlearn that we added. We could at least temporarily add a positive interpretation, or hear the body better with less of our reaction. As a result, you’d be able to experience the sensation without being hindered by it, and you’d be able to experience it better, instead of being dissociated from it.
This isn’t reliable, though—it takes some practice and there might be ways of doing it better—I won’t get into that, I’ll just say to not push it, to prefer to continue it again another time rather than try to prolong a session that is not going great anymore.
I believe that a lot of the healing comes from letting the sensation be felt (I use this passive language to say that the feeling best happens on its own, you don’t purposefully decide to feel that sensation, if you do then you’re cultivating this inclination to seek out that sensation, that inclination would also take up some of the space of your mind; it’s easier to relax to the max and wait for it to come to you). I see it as a stuck computer program, that’s frozen at step #23, and if you let it continue then it will halt on its own at step #55.
That, repeated many times, especially more for people who have had chronic pain for longer. Temporary relief is not as temporary as it seems, even if there is seemingly no trace of it later, it is a sign of permanent relief for reasons I won’t go into, in this already long comment. Good luck.
P.S. Reading the other top posts on Lesswrong tagged as chronic pain, I am finding several resources for dealing with it, including some books and also an app, with big claims of effectiveness. Well, now I have to look into these.