The ability to offer empathy to people in stressful situations can defuse potential violence.
A teacher in the inner city of St. Louis related an incident where she had conscientiously stayed after school to help a student, even though teachers were warned, for their own safety, to leave the building after classes were dismissed. A stranger entered her classroom, where the following exchange took place:
The teacher handed the stranger her purse, relieved not to be raped. She later described how, each time she empathized with the young man, she could sense him becoming less adamant in his intention to follow through with the rape.
A metropolitan police officer attending a follow-up training in NVC once greeted me with this account:
I’m sure glad you had us practicing empathy with angry people that last time. Just a few days after our session, I went to arrest someone in a public housing project. When I brought him out, my car was surrounded by about sixty people screaming things at me like, ‘Let him go! He didn’t do anything! You police are a bunch of racist pigs!’ Although I was skeptical that empathy would help, I didn’t have many other options. So I reflected back the feelings that were coming at me; I said things like, ‘So you don’t trust my reasons for arresting this man? You think it has to do with race?’ After several minutes of my continuing to reflect their feelings, the group became less hostile. In the end they opened a path so I could get to my car.
Finally, I’d like to illustrate how a young woman used empathy to bypass violence during her night shift at a drug detoxification center in Toronto. The young woman recounted this story during the second NVC workshop she attended. At eleven o’clock one night, a few weeks after her first NVC training, a man who’d obviously been taking drugs walked in off the street and demanded a room. The young woman started to explain to him that all the rooms had been filled for the night. She was about to hand the man the address of another detox center when he hurled her to the ground. “The next thing I knew, he was sitting across my chest holding a knife to my throat and shouting, ‘You bitch, don’t lie to me! You do too have a room!’”
She then proceeded to apply her training by listening for his feelings and needs.
“You remembered to do that under those conditions?” I asked, impressed.
“What choice did I have? Desperation sometimes makes good communicators of us all! You know, Marshall,” she added, “that joke you told in the workshop really helped me. In fact, I think it saved my life.”
“What joke?”
“Remember when you said never to put your ‘but’ in the face of an angry person? I was all ready to start arguing with him; I was about to say, ‘But I don’t have a room!’ when I remembered your joke. It had really stayed with me because only the week before, I was arguing with my mother and she’d said to me, ‘I could kill you when you answer “but” to everything I say!’ Imagine, if my own mother was angry enough to kill me for using that word, what would this man have done? If I’d said, ‘But I don’t have a room!’ when he was screaming at me, I have no doubt he would have slit my throat.
“So instead, I took a deep breath and said, ‘It sounds like you’re really angry and you want to be given a room.’ He yelled back, ‘I may be an addict, but by God, I deserve respect. I’m tired of nobody giving me respect. My parents don’t give me respect. I’m gonna get respect!’ I just focused on his feelings and needs and said, ‘Are you fed up, not getting the respect that you want?’”
“How long did this go on?” I asked.
“Oh, about another thirty-five minutes,” she replied.
“That must have been terrifying.”
“No, not after the first couple of interchanges, because then something else we’d learned here became apparent. When I concentrated on listening for his feelings and needs, I stopped seeing him as a monster. I could see, just as you’d said, how people who seem like monsters are simply human beings whose language and behavior sometimes keep us from seeing their humanness. The more I was able to focus my attention on his feelings and needs, the more I saw him as a person full of despair whose needs weren’t being met. I became confident that if I held my attention there, I wouldn’t be hurt. After he’d received the empathy he needed, he got off me, put the knife away, and I helped him find a room at another center.”
Delighted that she’d learned to respond empathically in such an extreme situation, I asked curiously, “What are you doing back here? It sounds like you’ve mastered NVC and should be out teaching others what you’ve learned.”
“Now I need you to help me with a hard one,” she said.
“I’m almost afraid to ask. What could be harder than that?”
“Now I need you to help me with my mother. Despite all the insight I got into that ‘but’ phenomenon, you know what happened? At supper the next evening when I told my mother what had happened, she said, ‘You’re going to cause your father and me to have a heart attack if you keep that job. You simply have to find different work!’ So guess what I said to her? ‘But, mother, it’s my life!’”
I couldn’t have asked for a more compelling example of how difficult it can be to respond empathically to one’s own family members!