Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life, Second Edition @Team LiB by by Marshall B. Rosenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

evaluation might be: “My aunt called me three times this week, and each time talked about people who treated her in ways she didn’t like.”
    The Mask
    Always a mask
Held in the slim hand whitely
Always she had a mask before her face —
    Truly the wrist
Holding it lightly
Fitted the task:
Sometimes however
Was there a shiver,
Fingertip quiver,
Ever so slightly —
Holding the mask?
    For years and years and years I wondered
But dared not ask
And then —
I blundered,
looked behind the mask,
To find
Nothing —
She had no face.
    She had become
Merely a hand
Holding a mask
With grace.
    —Author unknown
     

Chapter 4: Identifying and Expressing Feelings
    The first component of NVC is to observe without evaluating; the second component is to express how we are feeling. Psychoanalyst Rollo May suggests that “the mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones as in the different passages of music in a symphony.” For many of us, however, our feelings are, as May would describe it, “limited like notes in a bugle call.”

The Heavy Cost Of Unexpressed Feelings
    Our repertoire of words for calling people names is often larger-than our vocabulary of words that allow us to clearly describe our emotional states. I went through twenty-one years of American schools and can’t recall anyone in all that time ever asking me how I felt. Feelings were simply not considered important. What was valued was “the right way to think”—as defined by those who held positions of rank and authority. We are trained to be “other directed” rather than to be in contact with ourselves. We learn to be “up in our head” wondering, “What is it that others think is right for me to say and do?”
    An interaction I had with a teacher when I was about nine years old demonstrates how alienation from our feelings can begin. Once I hid myself after school in a classroom because some boys were waiting outside to beat me up. A teacher spotted me and asked me to leave the school. When I explained I was afraid to go, she declared, “Big boys don’t get frightened.” A few years later I received further reinforcement through my participation in athletics. It was typical for coaches to value athletes willing to “give their all” and continue playing no matter how much physical pain they were in. I learned the lesson so well I once continued playing baseball for a month with an untreated broken wrist.
    At an NVC workshop, a college student spoke about a roommate who played the stereo so loudly it kept him awake. When asked to express what he felt when this happened, the student replied, “I feel that it isn’t right to play music so loud at night.” I pointed out that when he followed the word feel with the word that, he was expressing an opinion but not revealing his feelings. Asked to try again to express his feelings, he responded, “I feel, when people do something like that, it’s a personality disturbance.” I explained that this was still an opinion rather than a feeling. He paused thoughtfully, and then announced with vehemence, “I have no feelings about it whatsoever!”
    This student obviously had strong feelings. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to become aware of his feelings, let alone express them. This difficulty in identifying and expressing feelings is common, and in my experience, especially so among lawyers, engineers, police officers, corporate managers, and career military personnel—people whose professional codes discourage them from manifesting emotions. For families, the toll is severe when members are unable to communicate emotions. Country and western singer Reba McIntire wrote a song after her father’s death, and titled it “The Greatest Man I Never Knew.” In so doing, she undoubtedly expressed the sentiments of many people who were never able to establish the emotional connection they