56 pages • 1 hour read
Marshall B. RosenbergNonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Marshall B. RosenbergNonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Life-Enriching Communication
Life-enriching communication or actions enrich our lives by fulfilling our needs, or by communicating clearly which unmet needs we have. Life-enriching actions can be undertaken by ourselves or by others. We can perform life-enriching actions for others by attending to their needs once we have discerned them through NVC.
Life-Alienating Communication
Life-alienating communication moves us away from a focus on met or unmet needs and toward a focus on blaming and judging ourselves or others. This fosters anger and violence, rather than empathy; empathy is the cornerstone of productive, nonviolent communication. People tend to get defensive and unwilling to meet our needs if we communicate in a life-alienating manner; this can happen even if we are thinking this way but don’t verbalize it.
Needs
Needs are what people require to feel fulfilled, happy, and respected. Some needs include trust, love, reassurance, peace, rest, and acceptance. Rosenberg suggests using positive action language to communicate with the people around us when our needs are not being met.
Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
Nonviolent communication is a way of communicating with others and ourselves compassionately. NVC seeks to create authentic, empathetic connections with others in order to allow our needs and the needs of others to be met. Through channeling compassion, NVC negates the need for judgment, blame, anger, or violence that crop up in our relationships with others and with ourselves.
Positive Action Language
Sometimes, our needs are not met because we fail to clearly articulate them; instead, we can fall back on making general statements about our dissatisfaction, expecting others to infer what it is we need. Rosenberg recommends using positive action language to clearly and directly ask others what we need in a given moment in order to enrich our lives.
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