Nonviolent Communication - Our Brains, Stereotypes, and Strategies
Fragment from an 18th Century Memento Mori, Poland
Wayland Myers April 30, 2024
Fifteen years ago, learning that I'd written a book on Nonviolent Communication, my wife's Community Nursing professor asked if I would come to the community clinic and share some of what I knew about NVC with a small group of men. They were beginning the process of reintegrating themselves into civilian life after having completed multi-year prison sentences and a six-month stint in halfway houses. The evening was part of a support program made available to them and I was keen to share some of the wisdom and humanity I’ve derived from this unique framework for helping people create compassionate connections with others and themselves.I readily agreed.
When preparing for talks like this one, I think about the particular audience I'll be speaking with and try to imagine which parts of NVC they might find interesting and relevant. When I thought about what to share with these men, I drew a blank. I also unhappily discovered that when thinking about the evening with them, I felt anxiety about how the evening might go far more than I usually do. What was going on?
It wasn’t until recently, when in preparation for writing a new book on NVC of which these articles are a part, that I explored the most recent findings concerning how our brains work and discovered that the strength of my anxious feelings wasn’t my fault. Particular brain structures and neurological processes that bestowed the most survival and reproduction advantages to our ancestors had kicked in. Without my conscious involvement, my brain had, in an instant, automatically performed a safety assessment using whatever information concerning people who’d been in prisons I absorbed up to that point in my life. The problem was,having never met someone who had done a multi year prison sentence, the only information my brain had to work with was whatever I’d seen in movies, TV, documentaries, and the media. Oh boy! The more primal parts of our brains go to work even before we become consciously aware of things, and they aren’t sophisticated enough to discern the difference between reasonably reliable information and total fictions. As a result, mine had created a stereotype of “these types of men” that it felt was accurate enough to sound the prophylactic alarms (generating feelings of anxiety). This was not the mental and emotional energy I wanted the men to encounter when I met them. My dream was for them to have the happy surprise of meeting someone who was open-minded, respectful, and had no pre-existing prejudices. But back then, I just criticized myself for not being a very good practitioner of what I was trying to teach.
“To view another through the lens of the stereotypes, activated emotions, or moralistic appraisals is like putting on glasses whose prescription is designed to help you find the evidence that confirms your prejudicial views”
In the practice of NVC stereotypes, preconceptions, and any other ways that we formulate or work from assumptions about the “type” of person another is are barriers. They make it much more difficult to practice the “in-to-me-see” part of NVC, which is its heart, and where its power to calm conflict and facilitate mutually beneficial relationships comes from.
To view another through the lens of the stereotypes, activated emotions, or moralistic appraisals is like putting on glasses whose prescription is designed to help you find the evidence that confirms your prejudicial views and the emotions offered up by your primal brain to try and keep you safe. Good luck creating mutually enriching connections wearing those glasses.
Yet, given how automated the creation of this prejudice is, what can we do? I don’t know how to stop my brain from doing what it is designed to do, but I have discovered that I can stay alert to the possibility that it may happen. When it does, I remind myself that the stereotype and whatever emotions accompany it are simply the products of well intended but unsophisticated parts of my brain. Sustaining this perspective enables me to relate to those most likely incorrect phantasms my mind has produced in a detached, observing, kind of way. “There’s nothing to necessarily believe here.”, I say, “You can move on.” Doing this greatly helps me to proceed along the path I’d prefer to follow, which is to learn from the person in front of me who they actually are.
In my next instalment, I will return to the story of my night at the community clinic with the six men who were ex-prisoners. I will share how I handled a difficult moment then, and how I would handle that moment now with the deeper, more mature understanding of NVC I have 15 years later.
Wayland Myers, Ph.D. is a psychologist who writes books and articles on Nonviolent Communication and other applications of compassion. He was introduced to the Nonviolent Communication process in 1986 by its creator Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, and has since used it extensively in his personal and professional lives with profound and deeply valued results.
