NVC and Requests

At this point, I am very much in the habit of converting both my own and others’ statements to NVC. However, my increased focus on efficiency these days has made me realize that I tend to mostly ignore requests. I’m pretty consistent about expressing observations instead of evaluations, sharing my emotions, and tying them to underlying needs, but don’t usually go on to make clear requests, except for empathy. I do explicitly ask for that pretty often.

But lately I’ve had less time to do emotional processing and have extended conversations where Will empathizes with me. And I’ve found that I seem to be adapting by more quickly formulating specific requests. An example that jumps out at me from a few weeks ago was that I was getting upset when I had Lydia at night and Will would wake up just a little and suggest a course of action for me to take with her, such as taking her for a pottytunity. 

When I’m already stressed out and in a mad mood, I’m not the best at accepting well-meaning suggestions. I talked about that some, but I pretty quickly moved to asking whether Will would be willing to do whatever he was suggesting himself right away. Then, we ended up talking about whether that would work.

My recent experience has left me with a new appreciation for clear requests. I do think that leaving them out can be subtly coercive. Because if I’m not being clear about what I’m actually looking for, the message can be that I want the other person to figure out what I want and fix the problem so I feel better.

What Do I Say When Someone Compliments My Baby?

When someone compliments me, I often feel the impulse to downplay it or deny it, but I mostly just say “thank you.” Or, at least, that’s my plan for what to say.

But when someone compliments my baby, I don’t have a plan; I’m confused about what response to give. If someone tells me how cute my daughter is, I feel uncomfortable saying “thank you” because I don’t think I’m all that responsible. I usually end up saying “I think so too,” but something feels off about saying that.

Downplaying or denying it seems obviously wrong, but sometimes I’ve done that too. Someone will tell me how calm she is and I’ll say something about how she isn’t always that way, out of a combined desire to correct inaccuracy (not sure why I particularly care) and get some recognition for the fact that taking care of her can be difficult sometimes when she’s less calm.

My NVC heuristics tell me to either empathize or express my own experience honestly. So maybe I could reflect back something about how peaceful it can feel to look at a baby, or whatever else would apply? Or say something about how it feels good to hear the compliment, because it usually does?

I’d love advice here. 

Hear me talk about NVC, the paleo diet, and more!

Stephanie Murphy, a woman with whom I share many interests (including Nonviolent Communication, liberty, and paleo dieting) interviewed me for a bonus episode of her radio show, Porc Therapy: Pro-Freedom Relationship Talk.

In the show I talk about:

Click here to listen, and check out the rest of her site too!

NVC Question #12

Question:

Explain to me why “intimidated” is not a proper feeling-word.

Answer:

“Intimidated” isn’t an emotion—the word includes an interpretation of the situation. The emotion on its own would probably be fear, maybe anxiety, maybe some other mix. When you say “intimidated”, you’re also bringing up a story about the other person’s behavior, and I’d say there are also implications about intent. “I feel intimidated when you say that” seems much more likely to provoke defensiveness than “I feel scared when you say that”. Does that make sense?

Followup:

Cool, thanks! Someone I am trying to get to know told me he feels intimidated by me and that never sat well with me, thus why I wanted to figure this out.

(Thanks to Dave Jackson for this particular question.)

NVC Question #11

Question:

I’m still kind of confused about the NVC general sense of the term ‘need’.

I’d before been thinking that NVC talks about ‘needs’ rather than ‘values’ or ‘wants’ because by thinking of them as needs, people would respect the desire once noticing and taking account of it, in themselves and/or others. So this was kind of my own way of interpreting the NVC term in a way that didn’t state necessity, such as “I need understanding”.

I put together the facts that NVC talks about needs, you’re an experienced user of NVC, and you mentioned you don’t like “need” based thinking, and wondered what was your own way of treating the NVC terminology of needs. (Perhaps you oppose the use of ‘need’ to mean obligations specifically rather than necessity generally?)

Answer:

I think I understand your question better now.

I guess I was being somewhat imprecise when talking about “need-based thinking”. The needs that NVC lists are all very general. Respect, fun, connection, stuff like that. The most specific ones are stuff like air and water. So sure, you “need” respect, but you don’t “need” it from any one person. You “need” fun, but you don’t “need” to have fun playing this video game right now. Those are strategies.

NVC Question #9

Not quite a question, more of a prompt for discussion: 

I find it very interesting to say “We don’t talk except to meet our needs.” At one level it’s trivially true because you don’t do anything without a reason. At another, it’s not as true. Often the need in question is ‘fill dead air’ or ‘satisfy appropriate social convention’ or other things that suggest there might not be a ‘point’ to saying what we are saying, so it’s kind of half right. Or of course, as he points out, we might be mad and want to express that without actually needing a remedy as such. As a response one might say that this isn’t a productive thing to do and one would benefit if they only had this conversation with a concrete end in mind, which opens up the question of enforcing incentive patterns or other such less tangible goals. It also raises a point that I missed while reading, which is that the word need here seems to be overloaded in the sense that he’s using it to mean something distinct from its ordinary English meaning, although it includes ordinary needs. He doesn’t say so outright, but he implies that what he calls needs includes what I would usually call wants. It’s a vague distinction in English along a gradient, but certainly when he refers to needs he’s talking about something far less strong than most people do when they say they need something. I’ve been told that “need is a strong word” could be considered one of my catch phrases. (Reminds me of George Carlin: ” ‘My needs aren’t being met.’ Drop some of your needs!) 

Response:

I am in general interested in better understanding what is meant by NVC needs. I think what distinguishes needs from strategies (which are more like wants) is that with strategies you can ask “why do you want that” and get something more fundamental as an answer, but with needs you can’t. Well, maybe not exactly, since you can certainly answer “why do you need food?” with “so I don’t die”. But I think it’s a decent heuristic. And something is a need instead of a strategy if you are going to keep experiencing a negative emotion until you get it met one way or the other. I agree with you completely that “need is a strong word”, and I’m still okay with using it for NVC-type needs since they’re so general, and they never depend on a specific other person doing anything. So if I need to “be heard” and you don’t feel like listening I can always listen to myself for find someone else to listen to me, filling the need that way. And I think it’s fair to say that if I’m never “heard” about anything I’ll probably keep being unhappy about it.

When I think about what needs people are (subconsciously) trying to meet with dead-air conversations, I’d guess connection, community, acceptance, appreciation, emotional safety, empathy, reassurance, respect, understanding, fun, inspiration etc. probably do play into motivation, but that this type of conversation typically doesn’t end up meeting anyone’s needs. NVC says that we’re much more likely to actually get these needs met if we’re aware of them in the moment. So part of what I got from NVC is that regardless of what other people typically do, it’s in my interest to be aware of what needs I’m trying to meet whenever I do anything, certainly including communicating with other people. So the “we only talk to get our needs met” point I was making is trivially true for people in general, but is perhaps better read as a recommendation—make it more than trivially true for yourself and some of the questions about “how do I say X with NVC” will resolve themselves, since the answer is that saying X won’t actually meet your needs. I get the impression that you understand this point.

NVC Question #8

Question:

It seems to me from reading the book that what he calls “observation” can only include direct observations of physical actions and all frequency statements must be strictly numeric. In fact, any non-exact statements seem to be outside the definition, whether they include estimates of frequency or not. The examples were telling because they were so extreme, in the sense that I would predict most people would assume that the word ‘observation’ applies to them. If this is where it starts, where does it stop? Thus, we have:

“My aunt complains when I talk to her.”

This is not ok, it seems, because “complain” is not sufficiently low-level to be an observation, and because this makes a non-exact statement of frequency: “When I talk to her” is not ok, because it doesn’t include the information on when, in fact, I have talked to her, even if this has occured every single time such an interaction has occurred. Thus, I cannot convey the sentiment “The correlation between my aunt saying ‘hello’ to me and her having a smile on her face is 1” without also saying the frequency of her saying “hello” which of course also must be exact. So if I don’t have that information, it seems this is an observation I have a lot of trouble making!

His suggested alternative:

“My aunt called me three times this week, and each time talked about people who treated her in ways she didn’t like.”

Two notes:

  1. This statement is missing information that was in the first statement, some of which was not judgment, which I assume is a feature and not a bug.
  2. This assumes that your aunt is truthful, which the first statement didn’t. Is this not a judgment? All I can say, at most, is that she claimed to have been treated in a way that she claims to not have liked. I haven’t seen this type of thing addressed: “My aunt called me three times that I know of this week, and each time talked about people who she claims treated her in ways she claims she didn’t like.”

I’m hoping you can help clarify this.

Answer:

I think you’re right about the second one assuming the aunt is truthful. I don’t see it as much of a leap, but I take your point. I bet when coming up with examples no one really noticed that or thought much about it. I would say that the missing information is intended as a feature. I’ll quote this part from the intro:

NVC is a process language that discourages static generalizations; instead, evaluations are to be based on observations specific to time and context. Semanticist Wendell Johnson pointed out that we create many problems for ourselves by using static language to express or capture a reality that is ever changing: “Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.”

The way I see it, there are two different motivations for being very particular about separating observation from evaluation. One is so that other people don’t hear it as criticism or judgement. The second is so that our own judgments don’t prevent us from perceiving new information. They’re related, and I’m going to address each one separately. Finally, I’ll try to touch on this distinction as it fits into the process as a whole.

How other people hear it:

Granted, we don’t know who the person who says “my aunt complains when I talk to her” is talking about, so maybe it’s kind of silly to consider this part of it without making some assumption there. I do think telling your aunt “you complain when I talk to you” is likely going to provoke defensiveness is the way that the transformed statement doesn’t. I think the same applies if you’re talking to someone who’s likely to feel protective of the aunt as well. Even if it might seem pretty objective, I think whenever you make a generalization like that, people who don’t like its implications for whatever reason find it pretty easy to come up with objections and challenges to it—which isn’t the case if you just give facts.

How it affects the person saying it:

Some of my thoughts on this issue come from another book I really liked about communication, Crucial Conversations. Our brain responds to facts and stories in different ways. Maybe the distinction would be that facts don’t create emotions, and stories do. And stories tend to be “sticky” in a way that facts don’t. As in, once we’ve told ourselves a story it tends to become self-fulfilling prophecies and by default we act in a way that provides confirming evidence. I think it’s similar to what Eliezer’s getting out when he talks about the blood type theory of personality and how as soon as we make a mental category we start harvesting similarities. The effect of saying the words to yourself “my aunt complains when I talk to her” leads your mind in the direction of thinking of other times she has complained and fitting her into a mental image of a complainer. Saying it the other way doesn’t have this effect so much, since you’ve contained the statement, after a fashion. Aggressively trying to harvest confirming evidence in the second case doesn’t do much harm, since it’s pretty specific.

To make another reference to the sequences, Eliezer also talks about we are “running on corrupted hardware“, and I’d say that’s the reason statements like “my aunt complains when I talk to her” are problematic. I would believe some people (like you, maybe) have safeguards in place in your mind to mitigate or eliminate the side-effects of statements like this. I’ve seen stranger things. But phrasing it as an observation way both provides a safeguard and tends to (subconsciously) communicate to people that you’re not letting your brain run wild harvesting evidence, so I think that’s a big part of why it makes them feel less defensive when you just present facts. Even if you don’t mean your generalization as a judgment, generally people end up turning their generalizations into judgements whether they mean to or not.

That being said, I think there are potential problems with focusing on a single instance (or two) when what’s bothering you is an overall pattern. Your emotions might seem out of proportion to the other person, and (like you said), you’re throwing out information that does in fact bear on the situation at hand. However, I think there are NVC-approved ways to incorporate the additional information about the pattern you’ve noticed.

But I think to figure out how to tackle this, we need a bit more information about the situation. Part of the point of NVC is that we don’t talk at all except to try to meet our needs. So, what’s the point of having the conversation about the aunt in the first place? Once we know that, it’ll suggest ways to talk about it.

Let’s assume that you’re actually talking to the aunt, and you’re annoyed about her complaining all the time. You could say something like, “Last week, both times I talked you you talked about people who treated you in ways that you said you didn’t like. I’m feeling frustrated because it’s important to me that the time I spend talking to you is enjoyable for both of us, and I have difficulty enjoying conversation with that sort of focus.” Something along those lines. At some other point if you think she’s not getting that it’s a pattern, maybe something like, “When you say that I’m ‘making a big deal out of just a few times’ I get concerned, because I’m seeing a pattern here and I really want you to understand what I’m getting at. Can you tell me how you see the pattern I’m describing?”.

Once again, I think the point about why you’re even talking about your aunt in the first place is relevant. Because I think it’s not so much that statements like “my aunt complains when I talk to her” are so awful, but more that they fall into the category of things that are likely provoke defensiveness in certain contexts. Also, by no means is the book saying that such statements are useless. If nothing else, one of its main claims is that if ONE person in the conversation is using NVC, it’s all good. So if you said this to someone who was very good at translating generalizations then it wouldn’t much matter how you said it and it would just be information. And maybe the people you choose to associate with are pretty good at this sort of translation, so in practice it’s not such a big deal for you.

Something else I just thought of about talking about patterns: NVC would tell you to speak up about it the first time it happens if it bothers you, so if you’re really doing the NVC then you won’t have too many patterns to talk about. NVC is not about talking about the past.

NVC Question #7

Question:

I’m wondering how one would actually make one the requests outlined in the book as un-NVC: “I’d like you to respect my privacy.” Yes, in one particular instance this could mean knocking on the door, but how would I make the more general need known? There are many times when it is not reasonable to expect an exact expression of what action is required to be possible.

Answer:

Often we do want to make more general requests and we don’t know how to outline the exact actions. And in my experience it’s likely that when we’re in that boat, the other person usual is too and wouldn’t know quite what to do either. Maybe in the case of privacy you could try:

“When you came in without knocking I felt frustrated because I’m needing some peace and space for myself. I would like you knock on the door when you come in, and I’m also concerned because I’m thinking that the issue is bigger than that. Would you be willing to hear me out about what I want until it seems like we’re both on the same page about this?”

or maybe

“I’d like to talk to you about privacy, and what it would take for me to feel resolved about this issue and then have you tell me what you understood from what I said.”

Followup Question:

On the privacy issue, that second one confuses me even though I know what you’re trying to say. I’d expect a head to be scratched. The first one sounds more promising; it seems like a good beginning, but the question is where to go from there. The central problem remains.

Answer to Followup Question:

Agreed.  I think figuring out what to do when something’s important to us and we don’t really know the actions that would lead to us getting it is a bit of a conundrum that NVC doesn’t have a magic solution for.