On Kindness to One's Self and Others: Reflections from Non-Violent Communication, Hiya and Pakikipagkapwa
Sharing some of what I learned about Non-Violent Communication from the work of Marshall Rosenberg, and a workshop with Amina Mambuay, with some thoughts on Filipino culture and psyche
“What others say and do may be the trigger, but are never the cause of our feelings.”
- Marshall Rosenberg
How do you feel when you read the above quote?
For me, I went through a wave of different emotions when I first read it, and I still feel different emotions when I read it today — even if I’ve read, typed, said it out loud several times now.
It’s like “Wait, what? Say that again…that didn’t sound quite right”. An initial jerk of resistance.
Non-Violent Communication (NVC) is founded on language and communication skills that strengthen our ability to remain human, even under trying conditions.
It stemmed from Marshall Rosenberg’s curiosity around the questions:
What happens to disconnect us from our compassionate nature, leading us to behave violently and exploitatively?
And conversely, what allows some people to stay connected to their compassionate nature under even the most trying circumstances?
He saw the crucial role of language, and has since identified an approach to communicating—both ways, in speaking and in listening— that leads us to connect with ourselves and each other in a way that allows our natural compassion to flourish, when violence has subsided from the heart.1
As the first day of the Non-Violent Communication (NVC) workshop I joined last August came to a close, I “mourned” that knowledge is power, and with great power comes great responsibility, and that the burden was on me to apply what I learned in my interactions with others.
I thought it was unfair to be the one putting in the work of communicating non-violently, in adjusting and changing myself, when I felt others were responsible for creating those trying conditions, or when it seemed like others needed more work too. At some point though, between the dates of our workshops, what initially felt like a burden later felt like a privilege.
In the coming paragraphs, I’ll be sharing some of the concepts I’ve learned, and the insight and practice (and fails) I’ve had in giving myself more empathy, receiving more empathically, and also expressing myself honestly.
The NVC Way
According to NVC principles, every action we take is an attempt to fulfill a need — and everyone’s needs matter.
NVC also says that we share some universal needs as human beings — like connection, physical wellbeing, peace, autonomy, play and meaning — and we are more able to meaningfully connect with others at the level of our needs. However, we often communicate our needs as strategies, i.e. the specific actions and outcomes that we want to happen — and this is often where conflict often arises. We may have similar end goals as another person, group or country, for example, and yet, we may have very different perspectives on how to get there.
Just recently, I went on a short trip to Davao with my parents, and growing up, family vacations can often feel like very stressful events. My brain already made predictions about increased conflicts that may arise from the constant exposure and the confined space in shared rooms.2 My dad and I had a dumb tiff about packing our bags for the return trip home. Looking back on it now, I had a need for ease, and he probably had a need for contribution, and we had different strategies to approach to the bag-packing situation to address those needs.
The truth is, there was a way to meet different needs with a single strategy, if we just hear each other out (which my dad and I did eventually, but not without some conflict).
NVC Framework
Rudimentarily broken down, the NVC framework can be summed up through the image below:
For us to practice it effectively, we want to prepare ourselves for how we want to be as we go into the space by:
Being clear with the intention of our communication
— so that we are express our needs in the highest order of clarity and compassion as possible
Being present and paying full attention in the conversation
— so that we can truly empathize with the feelings and needs of others
Being open to the outcome of our honest expression
— so that observations, feelings and needs are expressed, whether or not our requests are granted
In the conversation itself, what we want to do is:
Give empathy to one’s self
— by naming and acknowledging our feelings and needs
Express ourselves honestly (and compassionately)
— by stating our observation, feeling, need, request
Receive empathically from others
— by suspending any judgment or knee-jerk reactions, and taking time to simply listen and recognize the feelings and needs of others
In order to practice honest and compassionate expression, NVC encourages the use of 4 elements below in order when we express ourselves:
Observation
By stating observation, we rely on what is observed and visible, and not what is assumed, inferred or evaluated.
We suspend judgment; we ask questions to clarify and understand the other.
Feeling
All feelings are valid. There are no “right” or “wrong” feelings; there just is what there is.
Feelings help provide information and insight to our met or unmet needs.
Just because we say “I feel ____”, it doesn’t mean we’re necessarily stating a feeling; it is helpful to differentiate our feelings from pseudo feelings or feelings we feel when we perceive ourselves as victims of others or our situation.
Need
According to NVC, we have universal needs (and although we do have some universal needs, I believe the applicability and weight of those needs will vary in different culture contexts, i.e. Filipinos might define fun and closeness differently from Western folks, and we may also place a higher value on spirituality and family, generally speaking)
See the below guide and see which needs resonate for you:
Request
A request is flexible, while a demand is fixed. When NVC speaks of openness to the outcome, it requires us not to be attached to whether our request is met exactly in the same way we asked, or whether it is attempted to be met at all.
To express the request successfully, it needs to be:
articulated out loud (vs. expected but unexpressed — I hate it when people assume we know what they want or need)
clearly expressing the desire (what we want), and not just our pain (what we don’t want)
naming a realistic action (i.e. is doable)
voluntary — the other person needs to have choice or agency in fulfilling the request, and not strong-armed or manipulated into it
To be more flexible and open, it can help to ask ourselves:
What is the underlying need behind the request? And is there another way to meet that need? — by asking this, we focus more on the need, and fixate less on the actual strategy.
There’s a lot more content that can be said here, but perhaps I’ll write that in another post. For now, I’ll share some of my own musings on what I’ve learned.
Some key reflections
Empathy for self
I think if there’s one important and surprising thing that I’m taking away from NVC, it’s this.
It may feel like practicing NVC is something we do for others — like we have to be patient and to adjust for others. And what I’ve actually learned is how much self-empathy also plays a role in NVC — allowing one’s self to really experience our emotions, find better ways to honestly communicate our feelings, and ask for what we realize we need (based on what those feelings surface).
Moreover, sometimes (often), our communication with ourselves is more violent than our communication to others. (Not unlike the voice I hear in my own head about how long it’s taken me to publish this post.)
Hiya and Pakikipagkapwa
In Filipino culture, it feels like there’s more fear, guilt, shame or hiya attached to certain feelings, which lead to a relinquishing of one’s own needs, and a resignation to the desires or needs of others, especially to one’s parents — more so than in Western, less family-centric cultures. I don’t think I personally experience this at the same level as other Filipinos, but I recognize that culturally, this is different for us vs. Western cultures — and that “family” can refer to the one we have at home, and can also refer to the “family” we have at work. Ang dami nating hiya at utang na loob sa mga kapamilya natin sa bahay at sa trabaho.
Like other values or virtues, there can be an excess or deficiency of hiya.
Courage can be seen as an admirable value or virtue when pursuing our dreams or fighting for justice, but too much of it can result in disregard for safety and consequently, result in reckless language and behavior that may cause harm to self and others.
In a similar way, hiya can serve us by helping us connect with, respect and be sensitive to the needs of others, whereas being walang hiya, or a deficiency of hiya, might be used to describe behavior that doesn’t align with pakikipagkapwa. However, an excess of hiya can lead to a lot of unexpressed needs — because we anticipate (rightly or wrongly) our perception of needs and perspectives of others (without necessarily validating those perceptions).
Our unexpressed needs can lead to resentment, and as Rosenberg states in his book: “Depression is the reward we get for being ‘good’.” — a contentious statement, but definitely something worth thinking about, especially when we think about hiya and the value of clearly expressing our needs vs. assuming other people should know our needs and then resenting them when they don’t. The Filipino pakikiramdam or expressions like “makuha ka sa tingin” can sometimes highlight the indirect way we communicate or approach our needs.
And for us to clearly communicate our needs, I believe it also requires us to have empathy for ourselves first — to recognize our own needs matter too, while we try to cater to the needs of others. It doesn’t serve us or the other person when we try to meet their needs while disregarding our own, because this emotional slavery (self-imposed or otherwise) may fester resentment, contempt, and ultimately, disconnection.
Embodying Learning
Between this NVC workshop and another coaching certification program I’ve been going through (as well as recurring themes from coaching conversations with clients), I’m constantly reminded about the importance of all the inner work we all need to do — the compassion, acceptance and embrace we give ourselves, in all our beautiful, messy humanness — in order to show up better for both people we work with, and people we “life” with. That’s probably the most challenging lesson to embody.
The journey towards embodying some of the principles of NVC lies not so much in our cognitive understanding of these concepts, frameworks or processes, as much as it is recognizing within our body and being that we have the capacity to extend more kindness to ourselves and others, if we choose to pause, reflect and act with intention.
It’s easy to know and understand all this cognitively, and it’s quite another thing to put it into practice consistently, especially when our brains are wired to make default predictions and reactions based on lived experience or social learning. It can take a lot of repetition and practice to unlearn old patterns and create new ones. And it can be especially challenging when you feel forced into a corner.
But as Esther Perel was quoted on Ted Lasso (by Rebecca’s mom):
It takes two people to create a pattern, and only one person to break it.
When I remind myself of this quote, self-empathy, and the resources I have with NVC, it becomes clearer to me that this increased knowledge and capacity is a privileged resource — and an intentional choice to practice it. It is a power to break patterns.
I’ve come to believe more this year, that the language of “should” — of a sense of duty / obligation / responsibility, of fear, guilt and shame — is not as effective a motivator for me as the language of “choose” and “want”, which come more from a place of love, care and joy.
And so, as I end this post, some questions I’d like to pose to you are:
What need/s is/are most important for you to express?
In expressing this need, what is it that you hope others might do to help you fulfill that need?
What options and outlook would become available to you if you made choices from a place of love, care and joy rather than fear, guilt and shame?
Rosenberg, M. B. (2015) Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. 3rd Edition. Puddledancer Press, USA.
Said something in my previous article on emotions on the predictions our brain makes that cause certain emotions.
