The dark haired, middle aged woman stood on the "enraged" placard, choosing her place in the line of laminated cards ranging along the anger continuum from "annoyed" up to "enraged" and "livid."

"I’m so angry at him – he’s a sick man, and I don’t want him to poison my son!"  Amanda said, crossing her arms to stop herself from shaking.

Different voices in the room called out guesses about her experience, resonant with coherence and empathy:

"Would you like the man who is your son’s father to be modeling a better way to live?"

"Are you exhausted and wanting some support?"

"Do you long for partnership and support from the person you are co-parenting with?"

"Are you wishing for emotional health and well-being in your family?"

"Do you feel hopeless, and really want to look into the future with a sense that things will be better?"

After a few more exchanges between Amanda and the group, the group facilitator asked Amanda, "Where are you now on the anger scale?"

Amanda stepped away from the line of cards laid out on the floor.  "I’m actually not angry any more.  Now I just have a sense of mourning for my ex-husband’s alcoholism, for my son, for the years I’ve spent in pain about this.  And I have a sense of acceptance.  I see that he’s trying as hard as he can.  And I see that part of my anger has been anger at myself, for having a child with him."

What happened in that exchange?  How did a woman who had been carrying anger for over five years put down her burden in a matter of minutes?  How can this be possible when so many of us wander around with unresolved anger and pain for years on end, without resolution?  What can help us transform the pain of our history into a sense of calm self-understanding and compassion?  

In this excerpt from a Nonviolent Communication workshop, every speaker referenced Amanda’s universal human needs, spoken of as her values and dreams.  They also named possible feelings that might underlie the strong emotion indicated by Amanda’s placement of herself on the anger scale.  This accurate recognition of feelings behind the anger helped Amanda’s limbic area calm (as evidenced by her movement off the anger scale, and her report of a sense of acceptance), and allowed her prefrontal cortex and her hippocampus to work together to see herself and her ex-husband with compassion and ‘mindsight’.  Amanda was heard and acknowledged.  She experienced something transformative in her sense of a shared reality with others, something that we can call empathy, although neuroscientists are not yet in full agreement about how to define it.

The field of Interpersonal Neurobiology gives us some hints about the mysterious and transformative experience of receiving empathy.  For example, the research of Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues at UCLA points to the importance of naming experience in self-regulation—calming the amygdala and activating the prefrontal cortex.  Stephen Porges, Allan Schore, and Daniel Siegel have contributions to make to this puzzle, as well, with their writings about the effects of a neuroception of safety, right hemisphere circuits of attachment, and resonance circuits in creating new neural pathways and enabling ‘mindsight’ for self and others. In the words of NVC Certified Trainer Robert Gonzales, 

We all have a deep yearning that goes beyond words. It is a quality of yearning that is not for something outside of us, but for a resonance of something deep that's alive in all of us….  There is this place that lives in each of us where we yearn for something beautiful…. This yearning exists in a domain of our consciousness [different] than most of us are used to accessing. This is the (inner) territory where the qualities of the heart reside. The qualities of the heart manifest as universal human needs.

Amanda, by having her feelings and universal needs spoken to by a room full of people, and by experiencing resonance, shifted in her view of herself and the situation.  In Siegel’s terms, she was being held with mindsight…..  In that place of resonance, she was able to step out of her fight or flight reaction and move into a coherent understanding of self—the ability to see her own, her husband’s, and her son’s autobiography in context. 

Is Nonviolent Communication something radically different from what we already know and do?  Yes and no.  "NVC is founded on language and communication skills that strengthen our ability to remain human, even under trying conditions.  It contains nothing new; all that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries.  The intent is to remind us about what we already know—about how we humans were meant to relate to one another…. The form is simple, yet powerfully transformative"  (Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, Rosenberg, p. 3).  The difference from our usual patterns lies in bringing the power of mindfulness to the space between us, largely, but not exclusively, reflected in our use of language with one another.

There is more happening than the words describing the universal needs themselves. The empathetic relationship includes someone trying to be present, no matter what they say (intention, attention, and attunement) and the experience of a direct hit (resonance) when a feeling or a need is named with precision.  The attempt to be present interrupts whatever cycle was happening, and then together the two people can attend to what the need might be until they hit on the right one.  Given the way resonance circuits are suspected to provide both people in a relationship with similar information, getting the direct hit may not be too difficult once they are calmly connected. Before interpersonal neurobiology and the discovery of mirror neurons, such an approach would certainly have been considered unscientific. 

NVC classes and practice groups encourage people to bring this resonating awareness of needs into our daily lives, providing an ongoing verbal foundation for conversation, and a continual nonverbal extension of empathy for others and for oneself as a practice of self-compassion. Sharing the self-calming out loud can also be an interesting preventative measure to communication problems.  I was in the kitchen with my 28-year-old son not long ago, and told him I had made a call to an old friend of ours.  There were a few beats of silence, and then he said,  "That’s just stupid."  I was quiet for a moment, and then, without even realizing what I was doing, I said, "I feel so embarrassed hearing you say that—I guess I was wanting to share my excitement."  My son looked up at me in shock, and said, "Oh, no, I wasn’t saying what you did was stupid. I can’t get this lid open. It’s made really badly."  The relief rushed through me, as well as a curiosity about how many times in my life I have interpreted other people’s words as a reproof, and tried to learn from them, when in fact the lesson was merely that they weren’t talking to me.

Just as with any mindfulness approach, the more we embrace a daily practice, the more we strengthen the new neural pathways that permit us to first calm ourselves, and then use our mirror neurons and resonance circuits, in their fullest expression of mindsight, to connect with and offer the experience of being seen to others.  As we bring the focus of our conscious awareness to how we use language with one another, we become aware of the power of resonance to calm and connect on a minute-by-minute basis as we move through the world.

Sarah Peyton is an independent facilitator and a candidate for certification from CNVC. Her workshops and teleseminars integrate the latest brain research with NVC, focusing on the transformative power of words and empathy. Her work focuses on how we hear and understand one another, effective ways to connect hearts, and what the cutting edge of neuroscience has to tell us about what happens in relationship. Her presentations are fun and inspiring, and she makes the abstract information about what happens in the brain accessible for all. website / email

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