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Ajit Indulkar ajitindulkar — Just love him

Zach Fischer zachfischer — I applaud Rosenberg's intention to bring peace and reconciliation through better communication. Rosenberg offers many potentially helpful insights in this book. His call for a therapist to bring him/herself into psychotherapy was refreshing. It could create less of a power differential and perhaps be more healing in its inclusivity and open acknowledgement of all individuals in the room. He also shows how we can get stuck in patterns that defeat the outcomes we're hoping for, and suggests, via Marianne Williamson in the last chapter, that we're most afraid of our own power, not inadequacy. My chief problem with the book concerns its focus on self-interest, because it seems to instrumentalize compassion for others and other people. Rosenberg's central premise seems to be that communication's primary purpose is to express needs. In any conversation, we are to listen for others' feelings and needs and be prepared to express our own. Being in touch with our feelings and needs will help us be authentic. Our conversational choices include two other responses, according to him, blaming others and blaming ourselves, but these create resistance and further trouble. Instead, no matter what one needs, the solution is the same. His approach resembles the listening, reflecting/paraphrasing, assumption-checking and stating requests or appreciation skills taught elsewhere in psychology. However, it seems we are encouraged to listen to others, because doing so will help them listen to us. This seems to turn compassion into a way to get what we want, and that troubles me. The danger of seeing all communication in terms of meeting needs is that it may extend into viewing other people as means to having our needs met. In Kantian terms, turning others into a means to an end means not treating them with equality or dignity. It risks encouraging us to treat others as instrumental to our happiness. We do need each other. We need to be known and to know one another. We need to be loved and to love, according to Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving. We need to because of what we are--human--social creatures. Yet this self-interested approach requires that others be treated as ends, and not as means to an end. This may also be what Rosenberg meant, that for him one person's needs do not dominate another's, but it is not clear that this is so. He leaves unexplored the line between doing something that's good for us because it is good for us and doing it because it serves us. Since Rosenberg suggests essentially the same strategy in every situation, this thin volume seemed repetitive. His illustrations are taken from many real life examples in prisons, schools, warring parties, families and businesses, and are interesting anecdotes, but the strategy is not more persuasive for the redundancy of explanation or exampes. The included worksheets are much more effective in showing the challenges of using his approach, or differentiating between when we are showing empathy and when we're not, for instance. I think his book would be strengthed by being coupled with No Future Without Forgiveness, where the combination could provide insights on what restorative justice may look like one-on-one in one's own life, or with The Art of Loving, where it may help us to do some of what loving means. Whatever its shortcoming, however, Nonviolent Communication encourages me to be more intentional in my relating, and provides some practical advice on how I could do that. Both are welcome with me. In all, trying what he suggests would be its best proof.

Bangle Sylvia sylbang82d8 — read in 2006