Transforming the Social Order Through Personal Practice? (3)

This post is part of a series that emerged from my commitment to support the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) community in reclaiming the vision of radical social transformation that Marshall Rosenberg envisioned when he began sharing the principles and practices of NVC process. In Part One, I explored deeply why the current focus on the personal and interpersonal, particularly within societies with disproportionate gains from the global economy, is an impediment to manifesting the deepest potential of NVC as a tool for supporting transformation towards a world that works for all. In Part Two, I laid out the three core questions I am grappling with and inviting others to grapple with about how the use of NVC can realign with its radical roots.

Exposing Invisible Impacts Through Systemic Awareness

In this post, I engage with the first of these questions: What can we do to increase systemic awareness when we engage with individuals, groups, and organizations in support of their learning and applying NVC?

In one of my most memorable conversations with Marshall, probably in the spring of 2004 after a workshop in Oakland, he was totally unequivocal that the basic practice template he had developed, which puts observations, feelings, needs, and requests together in a specific choreographed order, was not all there was. He was satisfied with this template, he told me, because it was simple while at the same time containing within it all that was necessary for radical transformation, such that if people applied it consistently, it would be sufficient for shifting their consciousness to align with what he called NVC consciousness. He then surprised me by saying that he was still struggling with doing the same in terms of the applications of NVC in the social change context. He wasn’t satisfied with his progress in this area, finding that the relative lack of simplicity in social structures led to a lot of debate instead of learning in his workshops on such topics.

At the time, I was mesmerized by the idea that practice, by itself, was sufficient to transform consciousness. It gave deeper meaning to the work I was doing, more hope. Today, I no longer believe it is enough. This is because of the difference between our capacity to grasp the immediate and our capacity to see the global or systemic.

It is well known through research that both our comprehension and compassion, as a human species, are related to what is immediately in front of us. If we saw, for example, someone being killed in front of us to produce our cell phone, most of us wouldn’t buy it. And yet untold numbers of women are killed and tortured in the Congo because of rare earth minerals there that are needed for cell phones, but knowing this doesn’t stop the vast majority of us from buying the phones. Why?

Clearly, for any of us, individually, to choose not to buy a cell phone will not change the global picture. No doubt, there are many individuals who are aware of the cost and, nonetheless, buy cell phones out of sheer helplessness. My sense is there is more to it, though. A significant part of what goes into this choice is that the impact is far away, and we neither comprehend nor can access our compassion circuits in the same way. (This is one of many examples in which the distance is geographic, for those of us living far from the Congo; in many others, it is social, with similar effects.)

In this and similar ways, the larger systems we live in are putting more and more pressure on us, making us ever more dependent on strangers for our needs, and masking those relationships through money, making it less likely for us to see the impact of our individual and collective behavior or of the systems we participate in.

Source: NOWCastSA, used with permission

I believe that in our current world, it is less and less likely that we will manage to liberate our consciousness through individual practice alone from the training we receive that embeds us in the existing systems. Without something else that exposes us to the systemic constraints and impacts of our choices, NVC runs a serious risk of continuing to reinforce the myopia that is a necessary condition for the thriving of systems like capitalism and colonialism. Simply connecting to our needs as seen through an exclusively individual lens will not give us a way to examine and consider why some needs are more important to us than they are to people in other cultures, nor how we can expand the circle of those with whom we are in interrelationship about mutual impacts beyond our immediate intimates.

Within this tragic set of circumstances, those of us who want to leverage the impact of NVC practices can experiment in the following ways:

• When we engage with individuals, we can draw the links between their personal experiences and challenges on the one hand and the larger forces outside and within that influence them. Just like consciousness-raising groups in the women’s movements in the 1970s, knowing that our own suffering is shared by others opens our awareness to the possibility, even likelihood, that we are not the source of the problem. In recent “Reckoning with Collapse” calls, I have asked people, who remain invisible to each other on these phone-based conference calls, to press five when they, too, experience what an individual shares about their particular response to global crises, and then I’ve said how many people pressed five. This both creates relief from self-judgments and/or experiences of being alone and, simultaneously, redirects attention from the individual to systemic sources of challenge. This focus in no way takes away from the transformative practice of connecting with needs that is central to NVC. Rather, it shapes how people will engage with their needs and which needs of their own and of others they are more likely to notice and take action to attend to. Over time, this kind of practice has the potential to liberate people from internalized patterns, which often leads to finding the intrinsic motivation to engage with others to transform the systems that limit our individual capacities.
• When we engage with groups, we can tenderly bring awareness to the particular ways that power differences and entrenched social divisions play out in group dynamics. For one-time groups, we may be limited to bringing love and collective mourning to moments and questions that tend to recreate and sometimes even intensify divisions within the group. When we work with groups over time, we can embed these understandings in collective agreements about how to respond when predictable behaviors and responses arise, thereby maintaining more togetherness even while painful challenges likely continue. These pathways have everything to do with NVC principles and practices. Caring for everyone’s needs, a core foundation of NVC, cannot come into practice without an increasing capacity to know our needs and make them known to others; to make requests; to dialogue across differences in our capacity to put on the table our needs, our concerns, our “no,” and the impacts that we experience differentially based on our social locations. As NVC practitioners, we can learn and share knowledge about the intersection of NVC practice and awareness of power differences. We can also support people in seeing the humanity of everyone within a community, regardless of their structural power and/or social location. By connecting to our own and others’ needs, as well as seeing how we are all shaped by the same systems that put us in different locations, we bring tenderness to interactions within the group.
• When working with organizations, we can rapidly increase the capacity to collaborate, to effectively attend to a shared purpose, and to align with shared values through establishing systems and agreements that support collaboration throughout the organization. Even in contexts in which collaboration is not a central value, or where making explicit agreements is not seen as useful, we can demonstrate its effectiveness through practices grounded in NVC. One such example is Convergent Facilitation, which is a process that results in groups making decisions collaborative and efficiently.

The above examples are cursory and by no means exhaustive. I share them as an illustration that more is needed in order to get us to see what is made hidden, to make the connections that are deliberately obscured, and to care beyond the individualization of life that characterizes our current ways. In the next post of this series, I attend to the workshop model that is currently the most widespread method of sharing NVC and how we can transcend this model to be embodying and applying NVC principles and practices when we are actively building communities and organizing and engaging within them.