10/28/26, 5:57 AM, chair in family room

I think it’s safe to say that learning the conflict resolution system Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg led to nothing short of a paradigm shift for Cari and me. And I’m wondering if anyone else out there experienced something similar, with non-violent communication or with something else. I genuinely wish to connect with people, and to discover what others have similarly found.

Non-Violent Communication, let’s call it NVC, teaches that all humans have the same basic set of universal needs, and we can resolve conflict, or just understand each other and ourselves, both by relating on such a basis.

NVC teaches that our feelings come out of needs being either met or unmet, and it invites one to look inward, and to reflect, and to develop a vocabulary that’s more connected to what’s really going on inside, that’s leading to how we behave.

It’s called non-violent because it aims at fostering voluntary cooperation, as opposed to the habits we all develop to get our way, which habits, if we haven’t consciously made the effort to examine them, can oftentimes be coercive, forcing, passive-aggressive, and all kinds of manipulative. Wikipedia calls NVC a communication process intended to increase empathy, which I think of as just being integrated with what actually is: being able to map the minds of others, because we’ve learned to map our own internal worlds.

Before our introduction to NVC, Cari and I were relating with each other and with our young children via a rather fundamentalist and patriarchal version of Christianity. We were trying to live how we ought to live according to the rules and laws of an all-knowing God, who had condescended to communicate his principles of “how we should then live”, via His Bible, which we were to learn to understand via pastors and elders.

I think there are many ways in which Cari’s and my thinking is still quite Christian, and the historian Tom Holland would say we in the West can’t escape the revolutionary impact which Christianity had on our ethics and morality.

But I’ve come to see, I think, after about 7 years of casually practicing NVC and casually teaching it to our kids, that principles of ethics and moral living, that one’s idea of what constitutes the good life, are best arrived at when one is adding to his/her studying an intentional practice of honest self-reflection, of acquainting oneself with oneself, of examining oneself. This notion of an examined life obviously has deep roots in Western philosophy, but NVC introduced us to ways of thinking about The Good Life via traditions we hadn’t interacted with much before.

The first book we read on NVC wasn’t actually Marshall Rosenberg’s, but Oren Jay Sofer’s “Say What You Mean” which is subtitled “a mindful approach to [NVC]” as he adds to Rosenberg’s methodology his experience from years of practicing and teaching mindfulness, a perspective deeply shaped by his extensive training in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.

All this mindfulness, and self-reflection might sound inward and self-focused to more Christian ears (it did to mine at first, at least), but this mindfulness is brought to bear in such a way that you come to understand that the way you experience life is much more similar than dissimilar to how every one of our fellow humans experiences life. Sofer teaches about coming to conversations with clear intentions (he teaches to set an intention of listening with curiosity and care), having examined our motivations, we can make observations about our own internal state, and invite the other to bring to light their own. And so on and so forth it goes, and with only a modicum of intention to understand, it can throw the hardest situations into an upward spiral of a positive feedback loop of understanding, compasison, care, etc.

So please share if you’ve had any intersection with NVC, or with something like it, and what was your experience?