Conflict calls us toward deeper connection and understanding—if we know how
Working through discord, part 4: What the non-violent communication tradition says
No matter what you are faced with, you will be able to handle it if you are willing to be a learner along with your kids, co-investigating and co-creating as you go.1 —Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson
In this piece, I want to give a flavor of the philosophy and practice of non-violent communication (or NVC) as it relates to parenting. Specifically, I’ll explore some facets of how these ideas are presented in Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson’s Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids, which I’ve been turning toward during the past half-year to help me navigate conflicts between my kids with greater intention, curiosity, and grace. I’ll bring in other voices along the way, too.
This is not a comprehensive deep-dive into NVC philosophy and practice. My goal is simply to introduce aspects and implications of the tradition that resonate most strongly for me. In a subsequent essay, I’ll share some of my own experiences with putting these ideas to work in my parenting.
The fundamental, big-picture premise of the non-violent communication tradition, pioneered by the American psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg, is that people’s actions, including their speech, can be interpreted most usefully and most justly as efforts, whether skillful or unskillful, to meet underlying needs. These needs—whether for fun and play, learning, choice, physical nurturance and competence, belonging and connection with others, or relationship with the natural world2—are universal. We all have them, and we all have the capacity to learn to recognize them in ourselves and others.
But we may not understand our own needs clearly, much less those of other people. Moreover, our strategies for meeting our needs may conflict with those of others, and we may not be skilled in navigating the tensions that inevitably result. This makes it all the more difficult to illuminate what’s most important.
“Conflict,” Hart and Hodson write, “occurs when a need is urgently calling, you don’t see how you can meet this need in the situation, and you fear that it can’t get met.”3 The NVC tradition seeks to provide a framework and communication techniques for turning such conflicts into opportunities for learning and deeper understanding and respect.
In the NVC framework, the best way to address conflict between people is to inquire with genuine curiosity into the needs that both self and other bring to the interaction. From this understanding, we can craft a creative response that keeps these needs in mind. In so doing, we honor each other as full persons, instead of treating each other as obstacles to our own ends, and we foster trust, belonging, and cooperation that will empower us in the future.
Sounds great—but how do you actually do this?
The way I think about it, there are two interrelated fields of practice involved here: mindfulness and communication.
First, let’s talk about mindfulness.
Hart and Hodson write,“Taking time to let go of your own agenda and be fully present to what’s going on in your child is a golden gift, and the surest route to connection.”4 But how do we manage ourselves during moments of conflict, as parents, such that we can show up in this way?
If you take no other idea from this essay, let it be this guiding question: “In interactions with your child, ask yourself,” Hart and Hodson counsel: “Am I going for connection? Or something else?”5 Going for connection with care and consistency, Hart and Hodson propose, is the surest and most joyful, life-affirming path to real cooperation within a family.
Though we parents may feel riled up internally in the moment of conflict, we must learn to pause, get back in touch with our deeper intention to understand and connect, and get curious about the unmet needs (including our own) that are calling out for attention. Only then can we, together, imagine a way forward that honors everyone as best we can. When people feel heard and understood, and when they know their loved ones are acting with their needs in mind, it strengthens trust and belonging.
This gift of generosity doesn’t always come easily or automatically, especially when we’re uncomfortable with what’s happening in an interaction. Most of us have not had guidance or explicit practice in understanding our own needs and the needs of others, much less communicating these skillfully and adopting creative strategies for meeting them.
Oren Jay Sofer, whose work bridges the NVC and mindfulness traditions, observes that, too often, we learn strategies that actively undercut our ability to meet our needs and respect the needs of others. We avoid conflict. We compete for the primacy of our own needs over the needs of other. We let go of our own needs passively. Or we act passive-aggressively when a need isn’t met. As Sofer puts it,
We learn these lessons early in life. When our needs as children didn’t align with the expectations of adults around us, what was the outcome? Usually someone got what they wanted, and someone didn’t. Every time this happened, regardless of the outcome, we implicitly learned three things: (1) difference usually means someone wins and someone loses, (2) those with more power get their needs met more often, and (3) conflict is inherently dangerous because we can lose that which is important to us.6
As Hart and Hodson put it, your actions as a parent during moments of conflict “affect your child’s emotional safety.”7 A parent who is unprepared to respond may be thrown into reactions like raising their voice, blaming, or enforcing convenient winners and losers. These actions seek to control the situation and make it go away, rather than learn from and respond to it. They make the home more fraught with tension and distrust, not less, because they teach control and submission, rather than understanding and connection.8
Meditation teacher Tara Brach calls this pull into reaction, variously, the reactive trance, or the trance of separation and self-centeredness.9 We become caught up in the discomfort in our bodies and our judgments about them. We reject what is, and we deem other forces and other people as being at fault and separate from us, instead of attending to the larger situation, the larger whole, of which we are a part. Unless we can cultivate within ourselves “a space of non-judging care,” Brach explains, “we’ll contract away from the rawness of truth. We won’t have the space for it, the tenderness for it.”10
Undoing these internal patterns requires practice. To this end, Hart and Hodson offer lots of exercises and tactical advice for things like clarifying your own intentions and sense of purpose as a parent,11 reflecting on how your own actions align (or not) with those intentions and purposes, navigating strong feelings when they arise, and returning to connection as one’s bedrock concern.
The idea is not merely to have tools for coming back to ourselves when we lose our way, though this is essential. (After all, we can and will lose ourselves sometimes.) The deeper idea is that these practices can gradually shape the way we perceive family situations as being grounded fundamentally in human need and connection, and this gives us greater capacity to respond to conflicts with the care and grace that we intend.
Before moving on from mindfulness, let’s pause for a moment to talk about anger.
When kids are bickering with each other (or with us), anger is often among the energies that propels the conflict forward and makes it louder and more intractable. When anger arises, it comes steeped in stories about our own virtue and the failure of others who inflict injustice upon us. And when a parent bickers back, yells, or tries to squash the conflict without understanding what’s behind it, judgment-laden anger often fuels those reactions, too.
As parents, we will experience anger. But will we be informed by that anger toward wiser action? Or will we be thrown into knee-jerk, self-protective reaction? This is a matter of practice.
Anger is important. It provides vital information, a necessary signal, that a deeper need is not being met. It points toward pain and our own vulnerability at the hands of others—and as parents, we are often most vulnerable in relation to our growing, changing children. As Lama Rod Owens writes in Love and Rage, “my need in the moment when I am experiencing anger is to be taken care of, and when I don’t know how to do that in the moment, I get swept up in reacting to anger.”12
If recovering cooperation with our loved ones—that is, putting connection first and repairing and renewing our relationship—is our goal, then we must learn to harness the information that anger can illuminate without acting in anger’s own terms. As Lama Owens writes, “When I am pissed, I can feel the energy of being pissed, but I am not trapped in a compulsory relationship with that energy.”13 We must learn to engage with anger as an invitation to recognize an unmet need, and learn to channel anger’s energy into the courage we need to name and express that need skillfully and wisely.
Hart and Hodson offer good tactical advice for navigating and investigating the energy of anger, toward wiser and more-compassionate action in relation with one’s children. They offer particularly helpful guidance in how to make simpler, more-helpful observations about the situation we hope to understand, disentangled from the self-protective pre-judgments that would throw us into reaction. If you want to dig even deeper into the practice of learning mindfully from anger without being trapped by it, Lama Rod Owens provides profound insights.
Finally, let’s talk about the C in NVC: communication. Communication is our field of action for investigating and expressing needs with one another and negotiating new ways to meet them.
Hart and Hodson offer a framework for orienting our parenting inquiries and speech during moments of conflict, with the goal of elucidating and meeting underlying needs. Specifically, they encourage parents to anchor their talk in:
A clear observation about the situation, without pre-judgments or evaluations smuggled in;
A statement or guess about the feelings involved;
A statement or guess about the underlying need that those feelings point toward; and
A request for a do-able action that might better meet that need.14
Imagine that, during the course of play between two siblings, one child begins to constrain the other’s body, and an argument and pushing results.
Entering into that situation with an intention to understand and connect, a parent might inquire:
[OBSERVATION] “I see that your sibling was holding you, and you were pushing away.”
[FEELINGS] “Were you feeling frustrated and uncomfortable . . .”
[NEEDS] “. . . because you needed to have control over your own body?”
[REQUEST] “Would you like for your sibling to ask permission before wrestling with you?”
The first child might agree with this interpretation and request, or the child might offer new ones. Either way, the parent helps the children see themselves and each other more clearly by drawing the conversation back, as needed, to observations, feelings, needs, and requests.
The parent can investigate the other child’s needs in the situation, too:
[OBSERVATION] “It seemed like you were really engaged in playing when your sibling started pushing you away.”
[FEELINGS] “Were feeling excited . . .”
[NEEDS] “. . . about connecting and needing to get some energy out?”
[REQUEST] “Can you think of some fun things that you could do instead? Are there other games you could suggest, or fun things you could do on your own?”
The parent might also share about their own experience of the conflict and make a request, in order to help the children understand how their actions relate to the other people around them. This is a good chance to affirm norms and boundaries.
[OBSERVATION] “When I saw and heard you pushing and arguing with each other . . .”
[FEELINGS] “. . . I felt sad . . .”
[NEED] “. . . because I need us to be safe with our bodies and treat each other kindly.”
[REQUEST] “If one of you doesn’t want to play in a particular way, can you please speak up and say something like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that?’ What else might you say?”
[REQUEST] “When you play with someone, how can you tell when your playmate likes what’s happening? How can you tell when someone doesn’t like what’s happening?
All of this probably sounds rather stilted—and it is, at first. But it needn’t stay that way. The idea is that, with practice, we internalize these major communicative beats—observations, feelings, needs, requests—in our own style, because we know that they invite us and our children into a more-meaningful and respectful understanding of one another. We learn to see and imagine each other more fully and justly.
Moreover, we teach our children how to do these things over time by doing and modeling them ourselves. We are the curriculum.
Next time, I’ll share what I’ve been learning as I’ve engaged anew with these NVC ideas and practices.
Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson, Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids, Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2006, pg. 120.
For a fuller list of human needs, as well as a list of feelings that may accompany fulfillment and non-fulfillment of these needs, see Hart and Hodson, pg. 101–102.
Hart and Hodson, op. cit., pg. 125.
Ibid., pg. 110.
Ibid., pg. 82.
Oren Jay Sofer, Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach To Nonviolent Communication, Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2018, pg. 62.
Hart and Hodson, op. cit., pg. 74.
On this point, see also Jen Lumanlan’s Parenting Beyond Power (Sasquatch Books, 2023), which also draws on the needs-based NVC and respectful-parenting tradition. Lumanlan asks us to consider how honest and collaborative inquiry into human needs within families—“beyond power,” as it were—can build our moral and practical resources for pushing back against exploitative societal forces such as patriarchy, which short-circuit our capacity for truthful encounter with lived human needs.
For example, listen to Tara Brach’s recent talks “Four Spiritual Inquiries: Finding Heart Wisdom in Painful Times” (October 18, 2023) and “Awakening from the Trance of Self-Centeredness” (September 27, 2023).
Tara Brach, “Four Spiritual Inquiries: Finding Heart Wisdom in Painful Times,” talk given on October 18, 2023, https://www.tarabrach.com/four-spiritual-inquiries/.
My previous essay, “A Gift From My Younger Self,” was an exercise in precisely this.
Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path Of Liberation Through Anger, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020, pg. 29.
Ibid., pg. 26.
Hart and Hodson, op. cit., pg. 98–99.