Welcome to Meet Marshall Rosenberg / Frequently Asked Questions about Marshall and NVC. Marshall Rosenberg's groundbreaking work in helping us connect with ourselves and others in meaningful ways generates many questions. Where did this process come from? How is it different from what I do now? How widespread is its practice?

Hearing about NVC for the first time, people are often surprised at how different it is from the way they learned to communicate. As with all revolutionary ideas, people often ask how Marshall developed his approaches to successfully connect with others, and his reasons for using some unusual techniques to get his message across.

The process of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and how it is presented is the product of decades of study, personal experience, and personal involvement in the lives of others. For that reason, we have included in this area some of the questions that Marshall has fielded over the years, questions that might occur to you as you learn more about Marshall and NVC. Marshall's answers are his own words, responses that have been excerpted from talks, interviews, workshops, speeches, and published works.

If you don't find an answer you're looking for here please fill out our Feedback Form and we'll add the answer to your questions to this list if they may be of value to others.

1. What led you to start the work you are doing?



2. How did you start developing the NVC process?



3. Is there a spiritual basis of Nonviolent Communication?



4. Does violence come from a lack of connection to Divine Energy?



5. What is your definition of violence?



6. When did you discover this connection between language and violence?



7. What do you see as the main issues behind violent conflicts, say, in the Middle East?



8. I'm not violent. How will I benefit from using Nonviolent Communication?



9. What does NVC teach us compared to what I do now when I communicate?



10. What are some frequent mistakes you and others make when trying to use the process of NVC?



11. Why do you use giraffe and jackal puppets in your presentations? What do they represent?



12. How does your work apply to children and parenting?



13. What do you mean when you say that most schools are structured to be violent?



14. Have you worked in any inner-city projects or ghettos?



15. How did your organization get to be in so many places?



16. What are the biggest challenges for your worldwide operations?



17. How many people are working in support of spreading NVC?



18. How does one become a certified trainer with your organization?



19. How do the many projects CNVC has underway get started?


Regional Projects
Africa:
Eastern Europe
Moldavia
Poland
Latin America
South Asia

Cultural Projects
Creative Education Project
Parenting Project
NVC in U.S. Schools Project
Social Change Project

Q: What led you to start the work you are doing with NVC?

MBR: It’s pretty clear to me that I got started in the work that I’m doing in 1943 in Detroit, Michigan. My family moved into Detroit just in time for the race riots of 1943. They were the second worst race riots in United States history. About 33 people were killed in three days. That was my first exposure to that kind of violence. I realized that this is a world in which you can be hurt simply for your skin color. Then there was a good deal of violence directed at me for being Jewish.

It was frightening and depressing never feeling safe, wondering how to get home from school without being beaten or humiliated. My family would say to me “Just be glad we’re here. If we were living in Germany now we’d be put into an oven.” That didn’t make me feel very secure about this world.

During this time I discovered that there were two kinds of smiles. One kind of smile was on the face of people watching as I was being beaten by a group. As much as the beating was frightening, I remember looking up and seeing the observers enjoying it, enjoying watching me being hurt and humiliated because I was a Jew. When I came home, I saw a different kind of smile. My Grandmother was paralyzed. An uncle would come over every evening to help my mother take care of my Grandmother. While he was cleaning up my Grandmother, which to me would be a horrible job, I saw him smiling the whole time he did it, with a beautiful smile!

So there are these two kinds of smiles in the world. There are the people like my Uncle who get joy out of serving in some way, and the other kind of smile of those people who enjoy people’s suffering. That started this question in my mind: How could that be? Why do some people enjoy contributing to other people’s well-being and others want people to suffer? Slowly I discovered that my uncle was expressing our true nature. I’m convinced that there’s nothing that human beings like more than to contribute to one another’s well-being. And the other kind of smile, the kind that teaches us to enjoy other people’s pain, we get that from education, education that’s left over from domination systems in which a few people dominate many. That history has trained us to think in ways that support those systems and their violence.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

 

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MBR: I was very dissatisfied with clinical psychology because it is pathology based and I didn’t like its language. It didn’t give me a view of the beauty of human beings. So, after I got my degree I decided to go more in the direction of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

I decided to look at this side and ask myself the scary question, “What are we and what are we meant to be?” I found that there was very little written about this in psychology. So I took a crash course in comparative religion because I saw they talked more about this question. And this word “love” kept coming up in each of them.

I used to hear the word love as many people use it in a religious sense like, “You should love everybody.” I used to get really annoyed at the word love. “Oh yeah, I’m supposed to love Hitler?” I didn’t know the words “New Age Bullshit” but I used what was my equivalent then. I tried to understand better what love means because I could see it had so much meaning for so many millions of people in all of these religions. What is it, and how do you do this “love”?

So Nonviolent Communication really came out of my attempt to understand this concept of love and how to manifest it, how to do it. I came to the conclusion that it was not just something you feel, but it is something you manifest, something you do, something you have. And what is this manifestation? It is giving of ourselves in a certain way.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

 

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MBR: I think it is important that people see that spirituality is at the base of Nonviolent Communication, and that they learn the mechanics of the process with that in mind. It’s really a spiritual practice that I am trying to show as a way of life. Even though we don’t mention this, people get seduced by the practice. Even if they practice this as a mechanical technique, they start to experience things between themselves and other people they weren’t able to experience before.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: The Heart of Social Change.

 

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MBR: I would say it this way: I think we have been given the gift of choice, and we can create the world of our choosing. We’ve been given the whole of this great and abundant world for creating a world of joy and nurturing. To me, violence in the world comes about when we get alienated or disconnected from this Energy. How do we get connected when we are educated to be disconnected? And of course, when we’re not connected to this Energy, it makes it easier to do violence to others.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: The Heart of Social Change.

 

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MBR: Most people refer to violence as physically trying to hurt another. In NVC we also consider violence to be any use of power over people, trying to coerce people into doing things. That would include any use of punishment and reward, any use of guilt, shame, duty, or obligation. Violence in this larger sense is any use of force to coerce people to do things. Violence is also any system that discriminates against people and prevents equal access to resources and justice to all people.

John Holt wrote a book about education, How Children Fail. I got to know John during his lifetime and we worked together at times. He said, “If we taught children how to speak, they’d never learn.” We don’t use punishment and reward to teach children to speak. Why do they learn to speak? Because it enriches their life, it opens up possibilities. Why would we ever want to teach anybody anything except for that reason? And if it does enrich life, you do not need punishments and rewards.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Life-Enriching Education.

 

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MBR: While I was still in graduate school I saw the limitations of a field that was based in psychopathology, especially when the field was so mixed up with value judgments. Two qualities seemed to be present when people were acting like real human beings. People were honest without criticizing or insulting. Their honesty came from the heart. And there was a certain quality of understanding. Not a mental understanding, but an understanding that involved presence, fully being with another person through empathy. Those two things were very important: honesty and empathy. But how do we manifest this? That’s where I learned about the importance of language.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: We Can Work It Out.

 

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MBR: If you really look at the conflicts themselves, the kinds of issues that lead nations to war where hundreds of thousands of people get killed are issues that most teenagers or even grade school children could solve. They’re not that complicated. What’s complicated is that people are thinking of each other in enemy images. They don’t see the humanness in one another. If you get beyond the posturing and defensiveness, if you can just get people to see the humanness in one another--even for a moment--it’s amazing what miracles happen.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Getting Past the Pain Between Us.

 

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MBR: Nonviolent Communication is a process that enables us to give to other people, and to give to other people for reasons that we enjoy. That is, we’re not being forced into it. Nonviolent Communication identifies where we need to keep our attention focused to get our own needs met and to give to one another in a humane way. We give willingly because of the joy that we feel as human beings enriching life. It helps us to just stay human even in the face of conflict. NVC makes it easy for people to both give and receive willingly, and that makes life more wonderful for everyone.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

 

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MBR: Nonviolent Communication identifies where we need to keep our attention focused in order to give to one another in a humane way. We give willingly because of the joy that we feel as human beings enriching life. This is in stark contrast to what most people grow up with. Other forms of communication, which often direct our attention to how bad people are, can make violence seem very attractive. This is very apparent in the conflict resolution work we do. For example, I was once in a city in a little village in Africa working with two tribes that were at war, and there had been about a hundred murders between these two tribes in the previous year. I asked the chiefs of both tribes that I was with, “Can you tell me what your needs are that aren’t getting met, and what you’re wanting from each other?” This is the heart of Nonviolent Communication, to identify human needs and what can be done to meet those needs. So, I asked this question to the chiefs and one chief looks over at the other and says, “You people are murderers.” You see, I ask, “What are your needs?” and he makes a diagnosis.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

 

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MBR: I find myself in that situation very often, especially with the people that I want to connect with the most--namely myself, my family, my friends, and my associates. An example is the difficulty in giving and receiving criticism. In either case the mistake that we make in offering or receiving criticism is thinking in terms of what we or other people are. My experience is that people respond very negatively to anybody telling them what they are.

Another example of a mistake I make is in offering help. I offer chicken soup without checking to see if the person wants chicken soup. What I mean is that we give help that we think the person wants without first getting their permission to do it. I think very often when somebody is in pain, we’re in such pain to help them that we can’t rest until we’ve done something that will help them. For example, one of my daughters was once looking in the mirror and she says, “I’m as ugly as a pig.” And I said, “You’re the most wonderful, beautiful creature that ever lived on the face of the earth.” And she says, “Daddy!” and she storms out of the room. I had offered her some help that she didn’t want at that moment. I offered it out of my desire to make her feel better. In our publications and workshops we show some skills that enable you to check out with people in pain, to help them easily tell you what it is they want so that you’re protected against this awkward situation of offering something that might please you to help the other person, but isn’t what they need.

One more mistake we make--especially when we’re new to NVC--is to think that Nonviolent Communication is the goal. I’ve altered a Buddhist parable that relates to this issue. Imagine a beautiful, whole, and sacred place. And imagine that you could really know God when you are in that place. But let’s say that there is a river between you and that place and you’d like to get to that place but you’ve got to get over this river to do it. So you get a raft, and this raft is a real handy tool to get you over the river. Once you’re across the river you can walk the rest of the several miles to this beautiful place. But the Buddhist parable ends by saying that, “One is a fool who continues on to the sacred place carrying the raft on their back.”

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

 

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MBR: I chose these animals to represent two parts of our communication model because I have fun using them. They’re good teaching devices in many of the locations I visit. As symbols they help people visualize what I’m getting at. I use the image of the giraffe as Nonviolent Communication, because Nonviolent Communication requires coming from the heart, evaluating in terms of your needs and your feelings, and since giraffes have the largest heart of any land animal I find it helps people remember the idea. It’s also because of a Giraffe’s perspective: It sees the big picture and is looking down the long road, not just for instant gratification. They live their life with gentility and strength, they stick their necks out in the service of compassion, and their saliva digests thorns! And the other side of it, the language that alienates and leads to violence, I call jackal language. I picked the poor Jackalas the symbol for language that contributes to violence. I chose him for no reason other than that I like the word jackal. I don’t know why. I just like it.

For more on this topic please consider our publication: Getting Past the Pain Between Us.

 

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MBR: I suggest that we get rid of the concepts of children and parents. Just seeing somebody that way can make them less than human. I do parent workshops, and I’ve taken half the parents and put them in one room, half in another and I give them a role-play to work on. They’re supposed to predict what the other person would say if a person has borrowed something of yours and didn’t return it to the place you would have liked. I tell half of the parents the other person is their next-door neighbor and I tell the other half it’s one of their children. We have their response up on the board and don’t tell the other side that there’s a difference. Then we ask which group showed the most love and respect to the other person? And everybody agrees every time that the neighbor gets more love and respect. In a domination culture we learn all kinds of things about children that allow us to dehumanize them.

For more on this topic please consider our publications: Raising Children Compassionately and Parenting from Your Heart.

 

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According to Michael Katz and other researchers, schools were designed to prepare people for a life within a domination system in which a few people benefit from the efforts of many. The same problems have existed since the beginning of public education in the United States. About every twenty years new reformers come along with new ideas for fixing it. The reformers, against great resistance, get their educational ideas into the schools. By educational standards they’re very successful. Children learn more. They enjoy learning more. And within five years the reform programs are gone. Why does this happen? Because the schools were never set up to educate. They were set up to maintain an economic system which requires people to work for extrinsic rewards and not to look at the value of what they’re doing.

In Michael Katz’s book, Class, Bureaucracy and the Schools, he states that one of the political functions of schools is to train people to work for extrinsic rewards. The economic system needs to prepare workers to do things that may not really enrich life, may even pollute the environment, for example. It needs compliant workers to maintain the system. Schools do this by having young people believe that the goal is to get grades, to work for external rewards.

For more on this topic please consider our publications: Life-Enriching Education and Teaching Children Compassionately.

 

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MBR: Lots of them. I’ve been asked to apply NVC often in such areas in the United States. For about thirteen years I was doing most of my work in race relations in cities. It was during school desegregation and there was a lot of racial violence. Frequently I have met with both police and street gangs in their war against each other. They have a very painful history together, and yes, our training has been very helpful in getting both sides to see the humanness of the other side and to concretely resolve their differences without violence.

I was down in the inner city of St. Louis, where I worked and lived at the time, and I was talking to the minister of a black church in the heart of the ghetto. The warlord of a street gang heard there was this white man talking to people on his turf and he wanted to be in on it. So he just walked in to this meeting in the minister’s office and he sat there staring at me while I spoke to the people about this process of communication that I was willing to offer them to help in the race relations. After a while he said, “We don’t need no great white father coming down to teach us how to communicate. We know how to communicate. You want to help us, give us your money so we can buy guns and get rid of fools like you!”

I had heard things like that before and I wasn’t in a particularly good mood that day, so instead of practicing what I teach, I got into a competitive harangue with him. It wasn’t going well and I saw what I was doing so I stopped and I came back to life and I applied our training. I tried to hear just what he, the human being, was feeling and needing. I shifted and I said, “So you’d like some respect for how the people communicate and you’d like also some awareness of how other people have oppressed people that they originally say they’re going to help.” Instead of competing with him I just tried to understand his feelings and needs and this shifted things. He just sat there and stared the rest of the meeting.

When the meeting was over it was dark outside and I started walking to my car. It’s always a little risky being a white person in that neighborhood. Then I heard, “Rosenberg!” and I thought to myself, Uh-oh, I got smart too late. “Give me a ride,” and he told me where he wanted to go. He got in the car and said, “What were you doing to me in there?” And he went right to that moment where I shifted to try to understand him rather than compete with him. “That’s the process I was talking about.” And he said something that changed both our lives for the next thirteen years. He said, “Can you teach me how to teach that to the Zulus?” That was the name of his gang. “We’re not going to beat you white people with guns. We’re going to have to learn stuff like that.” And I said, “I’ll trade you. I’ll teach you how to teach this to the Zulus if you go to Washington with me on Thursday where I’ve been invited to work with the school system, to show them why the blacks are burning down the schools.” And he laughed and he said, “Hey man, I got no education.” I said, “Look, if you can pick this up the way you did just now, you’ve got a damn good education. You may not have had much schooling, but you had a good education.” And he went with me to Washington and did an incredible job of helping the teachers understand why the kids were burning down the schools. And for the next thirteen years we did a lot of work together all over the south, preparing the schools for desegregation. The U.S. Government asked us to go into pretty hot areas and do some conflict resolution work between blacks and whites. That former warlord’s name is Al Chappelle, and he became the head of Public Housing in the city of St. Louis. Another member of the same gang almost became Mayor of St. Louis a few years back.

For more on this topic please consider our publications: The Heart of Social Change and Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

 

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MBR: World-class giraffes: Women and men around the world who are unstoppable in their efforts to share NVC with others.

Here’s the characteristic of a world-class giraffe. They don’t think for one moment that one person alone can do nothing, or give up because they’ve seen so much. They don’t ask an unanswerable question like “What can one person do?” They dream beautiful dreams, and then they choose what they want to do to make the dreams come true. An example is Rita, someone I met almost 20 years ago in Chicago. In the years since Rita met me, she’s gotten NVC training into 150 agencies in Cleveland. These are not high-budget agencies, used to having in-service training. These are agencies on the front lines, the people dealing with the poor, the oppressed, that have very little or no budget. So this world-class giraffe heard me speak 20 years ago in Chicago, and look what’s going on!

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MBR: The biggest challenge really right now is administrative. We have so many people in so many countries very eager for NVC training, and often they want us to train national teams to use in healing efforts left from their wars and attempts at reconciliation. So at the moment my biggest problem is administrative: how to get enough training to all the places in the world that want it.

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As of early 2004, we’ve got 143 Certified Trainers spread around the world, with an average of one new certified trainer per month. Additionally, 110 people have identified themselves as NVC Local Supporters.

For more information visit the Trainers and Supporters List at CNVC.

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Q: How does one become a certified trainer with your organization?

The best way to get information on becoming an NVC trainer is to visit the Trainer Certification Page at CNVC. It’s the link to the trainer’s page for the Center for Nonviolent Communication.

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Q: How do the many projects CNVC has underway get started?

Regional Projects

Africa

In (2002) Dunia Hategekimana recognized there was a need to coordinate all the activities promoting Nonviolent Communication that were happening in Africa since I started visiting the continent in 1993. In consultation with CNVC, he set up the Africa Project to train teams of African trainers in the highly skilled application of NVC and to look for ways of getting financial and material resources to back up their work in their respective countries/communities.

Now they are working in partnership with people and organizations in Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Egypt, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.

For more information visit the Africa Project at CNVC.

Eastern Europe

Eva Rambala made it her mission to train teams of citizens in Eastern European countries to make Nonviolent Communications training available within their countries. She now has connections in Romania, Poland, and Croatia. She is working in these countries to achieve projects like those that have been created in Yugoslavia, where a team with several trainers has made NVC training available to over 30,000 school children. She is looking for at least 5 or 6 more people in different Eastern European countries who would enjoy helping to organize these local teams.

For more information visit the Eastern Europe Project at CNVC.

Moldavia

I introduced NVC to Moldavia in July, 2000 when I offered three workshops at a conference called “Surviving Trauma with Dignity,” held in Baku. One conference participant, Liliana Raileanu, was inspired by the workshops and decided to help bring NVC to others in her country. Together with Valentina Olarescu, Liliana subsequently organized the first two-day NVC workshop in Moldavia: a training class, led by Eva Rambala, for psychologists, social workers, and NGO members.

For more information visit the Molldavia Project at CNVC.

Poland

I visited Poland twice, appearing on National Television and Radio, and had articles about my work in the press. Andrzej Krajewski helped organize my public workshops there, which attracted over 500 people. The Poland Project was also helped by the publication of the Polish language translation of my book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (link to book page?), in February, 2003.

There are now three active practice groups in Warsaw and they are offering training in Poland at least every 3 months thanks to the support of Eva Rambala, Towe Widstrand, and Marianne Gothlin.

For more information visit the Poland Project at CNVC.

Latin America

In 1999 I led the first Nonviolent Communication workshops in Colombia. Since then, NVC has been promoted in Latin American by Jorge R. Rubio, the NVC Latin American Project Director.

The mission of the NVC Latin American Project in Colombia is to promote reconciliation and peaceful coexistence in a war-torn country by teaching NVC, and by training core teams of NVC practitioners around the country.

Since 1999 the team has trained over 2000 Colombians, including:

• Policeman as a part of a President Project “Creating a Culture for Peace” in alliance with the National Police.
• “Community Mothers,” a program of the Colombian Institute for the Welfare of the Family, or (ICBF).
• Government officials including those from the ICBF, Minercol (National Mining Company), the Defensoria del Pueblo (National Ombudsman Office), the Mayor’s Office of Bogota, and from the National System of Family Welfare.
• Women and men of many walks of life: students and teachers, community leaders, journalists, and families.

We want to use our experience in Colombia to support the growing NVC communities in Bolivia and Argentina and bring NVC to the other Latin American communities in North, Central, and South America, and in particular to support the interest generated by my visits to Brazil, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

For more information visit the Latin America Project at CNVC.

South Asia

Project Asia was born out of the energy that emerged in the “IIT 2000–Sri Lanka” in Hunas Falls, Kandy, in May 2000. Led by Father Chris Rajendram, the objective is to spread the process throughout Asia beginning with the South Asian region (SARC countries). Father Chris wants NVC to become the principal instrument of peace and harmony among the people of Asia. His goal is to share the process, thereby empowering people to use it effectively to realize socio-political change, and peace, and reconciliation. The main thrust of these objectives is to apply NVC in two main areas: Peace and Reconciliation, and Social Change and Development.

For more information visit the South Asia Project at CNVC.

 

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Cultural Projects

Creative Education Project

One of our trainers in Germany, Klaus Karstaedt, dreamed of new media for spreading NVC, such as new learning materials like games or video-DVDs. He envisioned ways to use art and entertainment to get people interested, or interactive means such as internet learning platforms and support groups to keep them interested. He started this project to help create materials that we can provide to participants to keep the ball rolling after an introductory training.

For more information visit the Creative Education Project at CNVC.

Parenting Project

Inbal Kashtan is focusing attention on the connection between CNVC’s mission and the role of parents in our society (the social change aspect of parenting). She is making a concerted effort to bring NVC to parents in ever-widening circles (through workshops, networking, and publications). During 2003, she worked with others on an NVC family camp, articles, a booklet for parents, parenting workshops, bringing NVC to parenting organizations, and an e-group with close to 300 members.

For more information visit the Parenting Project at CNVC.

NVC in U.S. Schools Project

Sura Hart, co-author of the book, The Compassionate Classroom: Relationship Based Teaching and Learning (with Victoria Kindle Hodson), is coordinating the NVC in U.S. Schools Project. The objective of the project is to create life-enriching learning communities that foster mutual respect, cooperation, compassionate interactions, effective communication, and engaged learning. Nonviolent Communication Training in Schools offers administrators, teachers, staff, parents, and students inspiration, encouragement, and practical tools for reaching these objectives in the classroom and throughout the school community.

Social Change Project

Miki Kashtan coordinates the social change project. Its goal is to contribute to the transformation of social systems so we can create a world in which people are able to balance their well-being with that of others--and of the planet--spontaneously and gracefully, through need-based dialogues.

Miki is focusing on organizing NVC and Social Change events; establishing collaborative relationships with other individuals and organizations working for social change who share similar visions and values with CNVC (The Synergy Project); creating curriculum for teaching NVC and Social Change; and contributing to CNVC’s efforts to become a life-serving organization.

In April 2003, she organized and hosted a Synergy Gathering as part of the Synergy Project. The gathering brought together 12 key leaders and visionaries to work towards greater effectiveness, and understanding about social transformation. Out of the work of this 3-day gathering emerged a clearer vision of areas in which CNVC would like to contribute to creating or transforming systems.

For more information visit the Social Change Project at CNVC

 

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To Interview Marshall

If you would like to interview Marshall for your publication or program please use our Feedback form to contact us and we will put you in touch with our Public Relations firm. More information can be found on our For the Press page.