Because we are called to reveal our deepest feelings and needs, we may sometimes find it challenging to express ourselves in NVC. Self-expression becomes easier, however, after we empathize with others, because we will then have touched their humanness and realized the common qualities we share. The more we connect with the feelings and needs behind their words, the less frightening it is to open up to other people. The situations where we are the most reluctant to express vulnerability are often those where we want to maintain a “tough image” for fear of losing authority or control.
Once I showed my vulnerability to some members of a street gang in Cleveland by acknowledging the hurt I was feeling and my desire to be treated with more respect. “Oh, look,” one of them remarked, “he’s feeling hurt; isn’t that too bad!” at which point all his friends chimed in laughing. Here again, I could interpret them as taking advantage of my vulnerability (Option 2: Blame others), or I could empathize with the feelings and needs behind their behavior (Option 4: Sense others’ feelings and needs).
If, however, I have an image that I’m being humiliated and taken advantage of, I may feel too wounded, angry, or scared to be able to empathize. At such a moment, I would need to withdraw physically in order to offer myself some empathy or to request it from a reliable source. After discovering the needs that had been so powerfully triggered in me and receiving adequate empathy for them, I would then be ready to return and empathize with the other party. In situations of pain, I recommend first getting the empathy necessary to go beyond the thoughts occupying our heads and recognize our deeper needs.
As I listened closely to the gang member’s remark, “Oh look, he’s feeling hurt; isn’t that too bad?” and the laughter that followed, I sensed that he and his friends were annoyed and not wanting to be subjected to guilt trips and manipulation. They may have been reacting to people in their pasts who used phrases like that hurts me to imply disapproval. Since I didn’t verify it with them out loud, I have no way of knowing if my guess was in fact accurate. Just focusing my attention there, however, kept me from either taking it personally or getting angry. Instead of judging them for ridiculing me or treating me disrespectfully, I concentrated on hearing the pain and the needs behind such behavior.
“Hey,” one of them burst out, “this is a bunch of crap you’re offering us! Suppose there are members of another gang here and they have guns and you don’t. And you say just stand there and talk to them? Crap!”
Then everybody was laughing again, and again I directed my attention to their feelings and needs: “So it sounds like you’re really fed up with learning something that has no relevance in those situations?”
“Yeah, and if you lived in this neighborhood, you’d know this is a bunch of crap.”
“So you need to trust that someone teaching you something has some knowledge of your neighborhood?”
“Damn right. Some of these dudes would blast you away before you got two words out of your mouth!”
“And you need to trust that someone trying to teach you something understands the dangers around here?” I continued to listen in this manner, sometimes verbalizing what I heard and sometimes not. This continued for forty-five minutes, and then I sensed a shift: they felt that I was truly understanding them. A counselor in the program noticed the shift, and asked them out loud, “What do you think of this man?” The gentleman who had been giving me the roughest time replied, “He’s the best speaker we’ve ever had.”
Astonished, the counselor turned to me and whispered, “But you haven’t said anything!” In fact, I had said a lot by demonstrating that there was nothing they could throw at me that couldn’t be translated into universal human feelings and needs.