Non-Violent Communication is Violent
Sarah: Hey, Pete, you really screwed up and acted like a jerk and now I’m mad and hurt. I don’t want to see you anymore.
Pete: Whoa whoa whoa, so much blame and judgment ! Can you try telling me in a way that doesn’t feel so violent?
If any of my dear readers have had the displeasure of arguing with someone trained in Non-Violent Communication, then they are likely familiar with the blood boiling sensation of interacting with someone who truly, deeply, wholly believes that their style of communication and expression is the light, the way, and the truth.
Started by a Jew (this will be important later) who was largely inspired by a Presbyterian minister (this will be important later), NVC is taught all over the world and asserts that world peace can be achieved through its practice. I first became familiar with it because there was this cringy new-age place down the street from me in Brooklyn called maha rose. I’d watch people pour out from NVC classes with wide eyes I can only describe as “culty.” They gave me the heebie jeebies.
If you don’t know, NVC is based on the premise that humans “no longer need to use the language of blame, judgment or domination.”
The unfortunate truth, of course, is that some people warrant blame and some behavior warrants judgment.
If you are the person that deserves blame or you have committed the behavior that warrants judgment, you can easily and seamlessly weaponize NVC to disarm your victim even further by impressing upon them that they are so stupid and miseducated they can’t even correctly express their own pain.
In my experience, NVC is just a survival guide for gaslighters who are about to be caught gaslighting. At their wit’s end, backed into a corner, they throw the book at you and say your pain and how you express it is unacceptable and unworthy of their charitability.
Much like any organized religion, in the hands of well-meaning practitioners who don’t take it too seriously, NVC is a useful tool for self-awareness and more measured communication and understanding. Also like any religion, in the hands of immature people apt to emotional dysregulation (which of course is most of us), it is incredibly harmful.
I have a few main points I want to cover, namely that NVC is inherently meaningless because all communication is non-violent, delusional because it denies that anger and blame are real and acceptable emotional responses, and finally, I think it’s just a gaslighting playbook for colonizers and secular missionaries.
As much as I felt like this post was a hot take when I began writing it, during my research I found out that academics are working on similar projects already such as meenadchi at UCLA. You can buy her book Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication here.
Communication is the Opposite of Violence
“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
Watch only a few episodes of Law & Order: SVU and you will understand that the way in which humans respond to and remember traumatic experiences is mercurial and infinitely variable. One person might cry, one person might laugh, one person might act as if nothing happened, one person might scream and be angry, and one person might forget everything.
It’s laughable that any of these reactions is the “correct” way to communicate hurt or pain. Even actual violence (revenge) is acceptable in my eyes, but in that case, that’s not really “communicating,” except in a figurative sense. Communication is the opposite of violence.
Whatever your moral views of violence or revenge,1 I believe that in most cases, all “hands-off” communication is non-violent. If I’m screaming in your face, blaming you left and right, that’s not violence, that’s an angry and hurt person who has a lot of emotion that is overwhelming them.
For these reasons, the mere phrase “non-violent communication” is cringy. While I’m not denying that communication styles can be abusive and that people can be cowed into submission, controlled, and made to act against their interests using words only, I still want to draw a line and say that these instances (and even threats of physical violence) are not acts of violence. If you’re just talking, you’re still safe.
There are two dubious premises you would have to accept in order to support NVC:
(1) communication should always be easy and free of anger
(2) if you can achieve anger-free communication, anger will no longer exist.
In my understanding, when meditators (or whoever) actually happen to gain any control over their emotions and thoughts, this control usually comes in the form of relinquishing control to their emotions and thoughts rather than actively dictating them. This is passive control.
It is only with the acceptance that we cannot control our brains that we are able to observe our thoughts and emotions and imbue them a higher level of intentionality. But in this case, all we have really done is coax our brains into being more in control of themselves; we have taught them to regulate so that our egos can have a more relaxing and less reactive ride on the waves of consciousness.
The alternative, which I think NVC is a version of, is active control. This is where you’re desperately trying to force inner and outer peace by directing your thoughts and emotions in the way you want them to go—it’s a very Western way of achieving peace. That is, via war and colonizing your own feelings.
bell hooks, who just recently passed away god rest her soul, expressed in a television interview that the question she got most often was how to have important conversations about race or love without things getting heated and people getting angry. (I can imagine a frustrated NVC practitioner asking this question).
hooks’ beautiful response was one of bafflement. She was confused as to why in the world you would want it to be easy and smooth? She asserted that one would never expect to have a life-long, loving partnership with someone and not have arguments, difficulty communicating, resentment, and anger. These emotions are inside love, they are necessary, and in that sense, they are most often non-violent. Difficult topics that evoke pain and hurt are not supposed to be easy and soft.
Anger is real, and to deny the importance of anger, blame, and even domination (which NVC sees as its three targets) in the human psyche is to deny being a human at all. This sort of thinking actually hinders meaningful communication and results in people who believe they can fully control themselves and the people around them.
Secretly Colonial
Finally, it seems to me that NVC is just secular missionary work. In researching more about NVC and its founders, I felt more and more that the language around it felt very religious. Proponents of NVC don’t seem like people who just took a course and learned a new way to converse, they seem like people who converted to a religion and, like missionaries, believe you need to convert so that peace can prevail on Earth. It felt mighty familiar, and I realized why when disagreeing with NVC-ers, their general stance made me feel like I was using an apostate form of communication.
In practice, we know NVC is not the light and the way when it comes to easy breezy communication because NVC-ers live lives full of troubled relationships and frustration like anyone else—just ask founder Marshall Rosenberg’s first, second, or third wife.
It turns out that Rosenberg was a borderline acolyte of a radically liberal Presbyterian pastor who preached very similar ideas to NVC. That explains the markedly Christian tone to the whole thing. Furthermore, it turns out Rosenberg got his start working on racial integration in southern schools, which explains the neo-liberal tone to the whole thing.
Born in Detroit in 1935, Rosenberg was a product of his time. As a young Jew during World War II, he was presumably raised by parents, family, and friends who had a lot to say about evil and bigotry in the world. I dare say the Jews are the most globally and historically popular scapegoats. Furthermore, he experienced racism and antisemitism at every turn in Detroit. This was a time in the US when Jews were not white-passing like they are today—anti-semitism was out and proud. When he was 5 years old Madison Square Gardens was still hosting Nazi conventions!
When I imagine life for a young Marshall, it seems to me he saw angry bigots left and right and really wanted to teach them how to communicate more calmly and without being so loud and mean. He also wanted to teach the recipients of this abuse to communicate themselves better as well. It’s may have been an honorable endeavor but it was a waste of time. Teaching bigots how to communicate more softly addresses only the symptoms, not the disease, and teaching victims how to communicate better is no one’s business. In Rosneberg’s world, he actually thinks there is a huge difference between “I feel that Jews are sub-human” and “Jews are subhuman.”
He writes:
“Peace requires something far more difficult than revenge or merely turning the other cheek; it requires empathizing with the fears and unmet needs that provide the impetus for people to attack each other. Being aware of these feelings and needs, people lose their desire to attack back because they can see the human ignorance leading to these attacks; instead, their goal becomes providing the empathic connection and education that will enable them to transcend their violence and engage in cooperativ relationships.”
The emphasis added is mine. He operates in a (neo-liberal) world where black, brown, or otherwise oppressed people who have been the victim of anger, violence, or domination don’t understand that ignorance leads to angry bigotry. He thinks they need to be told this and that furthermore, if they truly understood it, then they would stop being angry about the oppression. He thinks it’s his job to inform them.
NVC is, in this way, infantilizing and patronizing. It operates in a world that does not have any room for discussion of our society’s power structures including structural racism, gender normativity, capitalism, and militarism, nor the psychological toll these structures take on the populations who are subject to them. Indeed, if he did, he would have been able to see that sometimes blame and anger are reasonable responses. After all, it is not the colonized person’s job to become aware of their aggressor’s feelings, it is not their job to communicate better in order to be heard. That, again, is why NVC is cringe and perhaps made sense in the 1970s but deserves to be put to rest now.
A quick, relevant sidenote about the colonized Jewish mind:
Jews hold an amorphous, muddled, and often tumultuous place in current social justice conversations. On the one hand, everyone understands that real white supremacists hate Jews more than anyone. On the other hand, most non-orthodox Jews are now white-passing and therefore often identify as white. The fact that Israel is carrying out an apartheid level2 war along racial lines doesn’t make things any clearer. This, in turn, means they even take on political and social views that I can only describe as white supremacist. That is why Trump confusingly had tons of support from the Jews and the KKK. Can you think of another reason for this paradox?
The way I see it, Britain colonized Jewish minds by establishing for them a country: Israel. And the Jews, however happy about this decision for religious reasons, made a deal with the devil and had to swallow the fact that their biggest allies—France and Britain—are Christian nations with long history’s of anti-semitism that really just wanted a non-Muslim military ally in the Middle East. The colonialists did what they do best, they made a new country by force all while spouting fantastical rationalizations and reasoning for why it was the right and moral thing to do.
With this move, the Jewish mind was fully colonized. Nearly all the Jewish people and people with Jewish heritage in my immediate and extended family have forgotten they are Jewish or that the real whites™ want them dead. It reminds me of how little attention liberal critics gave the fact that, in the movie Get Out, the white family were Democrats who voted for Obama. Many Jews have forgotten that Nazis didn’t come out of nowhere to kill millions of Jews, they were expressing a latent sentiment amongst most white, Christian populations—one that that still exists. The result of this delusion is that many Jews use their pigmented privilege to identify as white people and enjoy all of the privileges that come with it without realizing that this juxtaposition of identities turns their brains into a sort of cognitively dissonant mush.
And so this is the world that Marshall Rosenberg’s brain was molded in.
In Closing
Rosenberg saw his non-melanated kin in the White population being bigoted and wanted to teach them how to communicate more lovingly and toward peace. He also saw his historically oppressed kin in the Black population being angry and hurt and wanted to teach them how to make up with their oppressors just like the Jews did.
But it just wasn’t his place to do so and his whole way of communicating needs to be put to bed or caught up with the times.
It seems to me that, much like any religion, non-violent communication really only works when everyone converts to it, otherwise it’s just a story you adhere to because reality feels too complicated and out of your control.
If I, however, accept the story for a moment that Jews really are the chosen people, then in this era we have been chosen to bridge the gap between whiteness and “the other.” We can do this by tactfully bringing to light the ills of our society, oppressive power structures, and novel roads to peace.
Larry David does this well, and he does it using only judgment, blame, and anger.
As usual, I end every post with a picture of my breakfast and a picture of my son.
While I’m tempted to say that violence is definitely an incorrect way to express one’s pain, I’m not even sure that’s true. It’s interesting because time feels like the defining factor here. If someone physically and sexually assaults me and I kill them to defend myself, most people would say it’s morally acceptable. But if I freeze up and let it all happen and then once I get out of my traumatized stupor in a few weeks I go back and kill the guy, what changes? Is it still morally acceptable? It feels like it’s not. How come? And what about three years later? Then I’m the bad guy? Just a side thought.
Don’t @ me about Israel shit, please. Start a blog if you have something to say.