Living Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

Author:Marshall Rosenberg [Rosenberg, Marshall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2012-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

ANGER TOWARD MOTHERS

PARTICIPANT S: I would like to know if you would be willing to help me with some healing with my mother? I’m going to be visiting her for Thanksgiving.

MARSHALL: Let’s do it. I’ll be your mother, and you play yourself.

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: Well, son, I’ve got my empathy ears on now, and I would like very much to hear anything that’s alive in you that makes it less than totally enjoyable for you to be around me.

PARTICIPANT S: Where do I begin?

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: Oh, good, there’s a lot I can learn.

PARTICIPANT S: I’m so frustrated and angry and discouraged, and I feel despair around how negative you are, how you’re always looking at things to criticize about the world, about me, about life, about the government. I’m angry that you painted this picture that the world is a horrible place and then said it to me and to my sisters.

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: Let me see if I can get that. I hear two important messages in there that I don’t want to miss. First, if I’m hearing you correctly, you’d like some understanding about how painful it is for you to be around me when I’m in so much pain and how it leaves you constantly feeling under some pressure to have some way to deal with my pain.

PARTICIPANT S: Yes.

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: And the second thing I’m hearing that you’d like from me is some understanding of how much pain you carry with you from having been exposed to this for so long, that you’d like not to have so much pain in how you see things.

PARTICIPANT S: That’s partly accurate. I’m angry because it feels like I have to fight inside of myself, to protect my own ability to choose, to perceive things the way I want.

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: So how wonderful it would be if you didn’t have to work so hard to live in a world that is quite different from the one that I painted for you.

PARTICIPANT S: Yeah.

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: Yeah. How much you’d like to live in that other world and how sad it is to see how much of your energy goes into the one that I helped you learn to live in.

PARTICIPANT S: Yeah, and this sounds blaming—and it is—but that’s where I am right now.

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: I can’t hear blame, son. I have my NVC ears on. All I can hear is beauty.

PARTICIPANT S: I’m angry that you’re just in so much pain that that’s all you present, and that you didn’t say, “I’m in a lot of pain, but you don’t have to be.” And I’m angry that I wasn’t given any encouragement to choose a different way of looking at the world, and when I do present a different way, you feel threatened, and you try to devalue and diminish what I perceive.

MARSHALL, AS MOTHER: I want to reflect that, to check with you to see whether it could have at least made things

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