The Power of Focusing, The
Power of NVC II: Healing Alienating
Spring 1985, Sunday night,
and Marshall Rosenberg, in Chicago for a workshop at our home, unexpectedly
drops by for Changes. As usual, we split
into a couple of subgroups for Listening or Focusing, and
An "old timer", S
-- truly oblivious to the needs of others and to his own processing -- offers to listen.
Not-at-all to my surprise, within a few minutes, he reverses roles, and I'm Listening to him.
We follow this to its end --
S says what he comes to say, what he's said every time he's come for years and
with no change, none at all. The Listening
over, there's the pro forma, "How was that for you?" "Fine, and for you?" Etc.
Me, stunned:
"Huh?"
I check, and by golly, I am
mad as hell.
By golly, S is mad, too.
Marshall listens to S, but in
a much different way, and S gets to some honesty -- not to change, but to a
touch of reality, connecting with what's alive in him.
All my classic, careful
empathic Listening, and all Jane's and many others' beautiful Listening --
hours & hours for years -- didn't do what Marshall did in a few
minutes.
During an earlier
Changes, Jane had spent the entire
two hours Listening to S, determined to get through. Nothing. With
Afterwards, I ask
"Have you noticed,"
"Sure,
"And have you noticed, when you reflect feelings, you get more
feelings?"
I frown. "Of course."
Marshall, thereby, gave me as
great a learning as I'd received from Focusing.
This led me to The Power of NVC, and out of
the dead end I'd increasingly experienced with people not just stuck but
entrenched. And
At the start of my first
posting, I distinguished between now-existing forms of Focusing & NVC and
The Power of Focusing, The Power of NVC.
In this readership, I think we may more confidently expect better understanding
of The Power of Focusing, which goes well beyond any Focusing definition or sets
of Focusing steps.
But this Focusing/NVC discussion often seemed
to lose touch with The Power of NVC, tending to substitute an existing NVC
form: reflecting feelings & needs. (I'm certainly open to correction; I may well
have misread, misinterpreted or just simply missed something.)
As my first posting
concentrated on The Power of Focusing, this posting will concentrate on The
Power of NVC, and will also use the notion of processing and the four-part model of basic orderings of our experiencing:
felt-sensing, understanding,
in-the-worlding and homing.
(Briefly, processing is our natural, potential embodying-opening from/with/towards all
four orderings: felt-sensing,
understanding, in-the-worlding and homing.
The orderings aren't separate,
but always found, in some ways, together in all human experiencing.
To use Gene's terms, presented in my earlier
post, the orderings are always interacting first, ev-eving as one whole before any separating, though we may distinguish different
roles each ordering has within that
whole. For defining the orderings, please see my first post.)
Marshall doing NVC-ing goes beyond feelings & needs, just as Gene doing
Focusing goes beyond "the steps" or "reflective listening".
Let me give Marshall's definition of NVC from
a recent (2006) workshop: "NVC is
getting connected with what's alive in another person, and what we can do to
get increased life between us."
Let me quote an NVC direction in Getting Past the Pain Between
Us: Healing and Reconciliation Without
Compromise (Rosenberg 2005, PuddleDancer Press,
available either through amazon.com or his Center's website, CNVC.org.):
"Step One
is for someone to listen empathically to a person who is hurting, angry or
frightened. The listener is present for
the person, listening for 'what is alive in them' without judgments,
moralizing, diagnosing, or offering unsolicited advice." (p. 36)
This highlights The Power of NVC beyond the form of
"feelings & needs": being
"present for the person", empathically receiving "what is alive
in a person", in particular, a person's vulnerabilities, thereby increasing
"life between us".
When Marshall writes about or
teaches NVC, he always includes empathy.
And whenever he teaches empathy, he's clear: how
you empathize is much more important than following any form.
Yes, over the past 20 years,
Marshall has increasingly taught listening for "feelings &
needs". But when
For example, if a person's intention is to achieve a
particular end, to control, to unilaterally direct or in any way to manipulate,
that poisons all forms of empathy.
Marshall has consistently,
clearly taught this over the 25 years I've known him.
Of course being present for the other person, getting
connected with what's alive in them, which as Marshall says comes as a gift, is
NVC's take on Presence, Focusing Attitude, Caring-Feeling Presence, presencing.
And so this
centers on what I call homing or
the with/toward-Being ordering.
To omit discussing this quality in NVC is as serious
as to omit discussing, in Focusing, the quality of presencing.
Presencing has
a long history in everything person-centered & Rogerian. One of Rogers's most precious writings was
his "Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality
Change" (1957), from which comes "congruence", "empathic
understanding" and "unconditional positive regard" --
cornerstones in all that's humanistically, humanely
healing. Much in Gene & Marshall,
much in Focusing & NVC flows from here.
(If you haven't read this
short paper in ten years or more, treat yourself. It's easily & cheaply available, along
with other key
Everything on presencing I said
in my earlier post holds for NVC, though we recognize that Focusing is vastly
clearer, more explicit & precise about the "internal" physical embodying-opening of felt-sensing -- the implicit ordering.
NVC when well done - or in
other words, The Power of NVC- certainly includes felt-sensing. But compared
with NVC's explicit understanding, its
now-existing forms, Focusing has the strong advantage.
Where NVC talks about
"feelings" or "emotions", Focusers know that we need to get
to the "murky zone", the place of revolutionary pausing &
noticing, the embodying-opening of felt-sensing & the implicit ordering.
And we Focusers must also
recognize where NVC, in its explicit teachings of empathy -- highly relevant to
presencing
-- has advantages & clarities over the now-existing forms of Focusing
(though not The Power of Focusing). In
particular, I wish to highlight The
Power of needing & "increasing the life between us".
The Power of needing.
The rest of this post concentrates
on The Power of needing. Again, I want to distinguish needing's "now-existing forms"
& The Power of needing. Over the last 25 years, Marshall's
understandings & teachings have evolved more here than in any other section
of his four-part model -- the "because I" of his "When
you...", "I feel...", " because I...", "and so I
want..."
A short history of Marshall's
growth may help us understand The Power of needing.
When I first learned NVC,
Marshall made many enormously
valuable distinctions, helping me experience that my feelings came not only
from another's actions, but also from my interpretations of that other person,
my past, my hopes & wants, and the values I held.
These were often not natural or in-born, but came
loaded with indoctrination. Quoting from
This, of course, begs the
question, Is there anything other than & prior to or
beyond "indoctrination"? Are
we just blank slates shaped by our environment?
Or chaotic ids & self-centered egos requiring
culturally-imposed super-egos for any abilities to work together?
Marshall was always clear,
even in the Preface of his first version of NVC, "A Manual for
'Responsible' Thinking and Communicating" (Community Psychological
Consultants, 1972):
"Buddhists are fond of
the parable of the raft. A raft,
sufficient to the need, is constructed at the bank of a river. It is used for the crossing, but then it is
left behind. He is a fool who continues
his journey to the mountain top with the raft well fastened to his back.
"I offer this manual as a raft to aid you in overcoming a sea of words and
communication habits that might keep you from enjoying the humanity in yourself
and others. I would not want anyone to confuse this raft
itself with the joys of meeting. To
whatever joy with others it leads you, I rejoice."
[DY: A beautiful distinction between "the now-existing
forms" & "The Power of", eh?]
Inherent, inborn in us all is
"enjoying the humanity" in ourselves & others, "the joys of
meeting", "joy with others".
In that first manual, Marshall quotes Martin
Buber to introduce his "Introduction": "All real living is in the
meeting."
But tragically, indoctrination,
coming out of various forms of oppression, hate, authoritarianism, domination &
control -- what Marshall has, for 25 years, called jackal-talk -- blinds us to
& alienates us from who we really
are, who we can be.
Indeed, many of Marshall's distinctions were
developed to free ourselves & others, to free our we, so to speak, from these traps of outer-imposed alienations.
We Focusers are quite good at
helping people who, by virtue of their life's tragedies & their cultural/family
training, were alienated from their bodies, in particular from their felt-sensing. We have only to look at someone, to listen
carefully not just to their words, but also to their voice tone & rate-of-speech
to know whether their bodies are felt-sensing,
are truly embodying-opening, or
whether they are trapped in stopped-processing.
As I mentioned in my first
post, in the late 1970's, longtime Focusing teacher and psychotherapist, Jim Iberg developed easy-to-learn ways to spot whether a person
is, as I would say, in stopped-processing,
as opposed to two states of felt-sensing:
- within
that revolutionary pause (Jim calls this parturient or in labor, which is often
called checking in with the felt sense)
And,
-
speaking from the felt sense (nascent or giving birth) --
something all experienced Focusing guides recognize.
When this felt-sensing embodying-opening is
flowing, we readily experience what
And
I learned this early in Changes from many of
our "old timers", like S in my introductory story. And I continue to see this in my clients,
particularly those severely abused & neglected as young children.
One way
of re-connecting them with the larger truth of who they are, individually &
with-others, is through The Power
of needing.
By the mid/late 1980's, in
advance trainings,
(For this and a much more
fulsome & realistic description of Maslow's beautiful understandings, see his Toward
a Psychology of Being, 2nd ed., Maslow 1968.)
Marshall was reaching towards
something that all humankind shared, something that, even through
the twists & stranglings of life-defeating indoctrinations,
still, beyond them found expression in co-creating how we were felt-sensing.
His needs were, indeed, a processing we all shared, and they were
basic to who we are and why we are so bondedly, passionately
with-others. Needing,
as I call it, was the engine driving Marshall's "joy of meeting" &
Buber's "All real life is found in the meeting."
In its current explicit form,
needing is presented as a list of
needs, which can be found somewhere in almost all of
As taught, these needs are
never the specific strategies of what we can do specifically to satisfy our
needs. This lets us negotiate ways of
meeting, together, even very different needs.
Over & over,
As I would say it, needing, as an aspect of homing, always has a greater potential not for conflicting,
but for bonding -- a thought which, sadly in psychology & in our
social/political discourse, is revolutionary.
But a list of needs is still
only "a now-existing form" of needing,
not "The Power of needing."
This adds two key points to
our Focusing.
First, "The Power of needing” helps us both give empathy and heal
alienation between us as well as within ourselves & others. When
we attune to needing, we're truly attuning
to "what's alive in us" in a place that's never only cultural
programming or merely situational, although both programming and the situational
are always with this, too.
Attuning to needing, in ourselves & others, also helps us guide felt-sensing beyond these alienations.
Anyone who has worked
through, personally, or done therapy with NVC has seen, here, "The Power
of needing" in ways nothing short of astonishing. (See
Now we're more ready to
define needing in a way that may help
us, better than lists, attune to & live The Power of needing.
Needing
is aspect of homing ( the with/toward-Being ordering). As such, needing
is shared by all humans - though its explicit understandings & in-the-worldings, and also its implicit felt-sensings, will always also include
some individualities & differences, which are best often honored &
included.
Needing shows itself when,
as others accurately attune to
someone's needings
in a deep way & free of demands, empathy & presencing emerge.
All this creates a meeting, an encounter, a two-made-one, a we - which comes as a gifting and which is experienced as a true & real homing.
[ From this flows more true, more real, more healing & embodying-opening felt-sensings,
understandings, & in-the-worldings. ]
Furthermore, when we're alienated from ours
& other's needings,
this leads to stopped-processings
in all four orderings -- felt-sensings,
understandings, in-the-worldings & homings.
It's important not to reduce needing to a series of evolutionarily
in-bred survival-of-the-fittest strategies which promotes shoving our genes
onto the next generation.
[See, for example, the fascinating book, The Evolution of Cooperation (Robert Anxelrod, Basic Books, 1984), which through "The Prisoner's Dilemma Game", purports
to show how cooperation, in the long run, has a clear survival advantage.
I don't dispute the
advantage; I do dispute reducing cooperation to a survival strategy. William of Occam's razor was just that -- a
razor to be used appropriately, not a nuke for reducing everything.]
This reduction misses the transcending feel within experiencing
The Power of needing & The Power
of homing. This reduction
misinterprets the "function" (itself a reduction) of the with/toward-Being ordering. These qualities
are readily experienced as very much beyond
any reductionisms, just as felt-sensing
is so experienced.
And this reduction leads us to understandings
where "needs" are separate "things", competing for
attention inside the container of our body - - - - as opposed to needs being always-present, interaffecting & interaffected-by
aspects of one whole processing, where
in some ways body & environment are one, where we can participate in
world-evolving toward peace.
My next posting, continuing
my discussion of The Power of NVC, concentrates on the above-mentioned quality
of "increasing the life between us" -- a quality I call we or, using Gene's A Process Model concepts, we-ing.
With love, peace & hope,
Dave