diane horn interviews marshall rosenberg

CNVC is grateful to Diane Horn and KEXP for permission to share the following interview. The KEXP website is www.kexp.org.

Diane Horn: This is Diane Horn, your host on the "Sustainability Segment" of "Mind Over Matters". Our guest this morning is Marshall Rosenberg, international mediator and founder of the Center for Nonviolent Communication^sm—a global organization whose vision is a world where everyone’s needs are met peacefully. Marshall is here this morning to tell us how we can use the principles of Nonviolent Communication^sm in responding to the September 11th tragedy. Welcome Marshall.

Marshall B. Rosenberg: Well, hello Diane.

DH: As a general background for our listeners, how do you define “Nonviolent Communication?”

MBR: It’s communication that connects us with people in a way that makes it enjoyable to contribute to one another’s well-being, and communication that does not facilitate people wanting to hurt each other.

DH: And what is the purpose of Nonviolent Communication?

MBR: It’s to connect people in this way that does enable them to give to one another, to contribute to one another’s well-being willingly, and to resolve whatever conflicts come up without any reference to violence.

DH: What happened at the New York World Trade Center on September 11th would seem to be the very opposite of Nonviolent Communication. When confronted with such a violent act, how can someone who is committed to Nonviolent Communication go about responding to the act?

MBR: Well, of course the first thing that needs to be done is to help heal the agony and suffering of those who have been affected by it. Our training shows how to connect empathically with people who have suffered, and that needs, obviously, to be the first step. Then, our training shows how to connect in a way that allows reconciliation to occur between the forces that were involved in the acts of violence; so, what we have done and our application of this in different countries is to get leaders from both sides together and engage in a process that leads to reconciliation.

DH: What type of thinking process might we use in deciding how to respond?

MBR: The first thing I would strongly recommend is that we not think in terms of enemy images—meaning that to think of whoever did the acts as some kind of monsters or that there is something wrong with them. This kind of thinking, we believe, is at the core of the violence to begin with; that when people think in that way towards certain people, they think of them as enemies; they think of them as wrong; as selfish; as dangerous. When those kinds of judgments are applied without people understanding the needs that people are trying to meet by engaging in the actions. So, to begin with we start by showing alternatives to these dehumanizing ways of analyzing the people who are behaving in ways we don’t like.

DH: With nonviolence as a value, is the use of force appropriate?

MBR: There are times when you need to use force. But here, it’s critical that we not mix up two different kinds of force. There is the punitive use of force—whose purpose is to inflict suffering on people. There is the protective use of force whose purpose is to protect against the damage. We do need, at times—with children, for example—to use force to keep them from running into the street and doing something which could be harmful to them. We can use that force without punishing them, without trying to make them suffer. When it is groups of adults setting bombs or doing things of this sort; yes, we need to use force to prevent this continuing—to protect ourselves from it continuing. Hopefully we can find how to use such force without having to hurt people. We at times do this when somebody might be behaving in the community—such as sexually molesting people—we can use force to grab them and put them somewhere that keeps them from continuing this. But we want to put them somewhere where we can negotiate with them to find other ways of meeting their needs that are not dangerous to others. We can do that without punishing such a person. That would be the protective use of force.

[to top of page]

DH: How can we respond to our fellow citizens who call for revenge?

MBR: Well again, we need to start with them by empathizing with the pain that leads them to want to get revenge. Revenge comes out of a deep fear, deep suffering, and mixed with ignorance in the form of thinking that the way to solve such things is to punish or to hurt somebody. That kind of ignorance we have been educated to perpetuate for several centuries, and only in recent years/decades have we started to see that the thinking that leads to revenge and punishment is really a primitive form of thinking. So, the first thing we need to do with such people is to empathize with their pain. And then we need to open to them ways of getting their further needs met, and to get them to see that punishment will not meet that need, and that the only way that will really give them the security and safety they need is through some form of reconciliation; some form of restorative justice.

DH: How can we respond to those who harass Muslims who live in our country?

MBR: Well here again, the same problem—the same process needs to be gone through. We need, first of all, to use whatever force is necessary to protect the people from having this happen to them. But then with those who are doing it, we need to empathize with them to show an understanding of the fear, the rage and other emotions that are behind their tormenting the people, and then after, we have to show them other ways of getting their needs met for safety other than through these kinds of punitive tactics.

DH: What are your thoughts as to how the U.S. on the national level can best proceed?

MBR: The U.S. on the national level I would like to see follow the same process I’ve just outlined. Using whatever force is necessary to protect us, but without inflicting damage or punitive efforts towards others. And then to use the force to lead to negotiations of a kind that will lead to reconciliation. This will be very painful for the United States government because it will require looking at what it has done that has not been contributing to other people’s safety and respect for their needs in other countries. Until we become much more sensitive to the suffering that others have been going through for many decades as a result of United States policies, we are going to continue with this cycle of violence, so we need to use protective use of force; we need to empathize with the people who have behaved in this way to see what needs of theirs have not been met, and then we need to work out some way of getting our needs met and their needs met in order for us to have peace in the future.

DH: On a more specific level for the people who have committed this act, how do we go about interfacing with them using Nonviolent Communication?

MBR: Well this is always one of our biggest problems in the work that I do. When I mediate between different groups—getting access to the people is the biggest issue. Once we can get the representatives into a room together, then we can usually get them connected in a way that we can find alternatives to violence for resolving the issues. So the first step is to make the connections—getting the access to the leadership on both sides and their willingness to sit in different kinds of meetings than usually happen when governmental leaders get together. Very often these kind of meetings are simply prepared statements being made and there is not much connection at the heart level, so what I’m saying is we need to get access to the leaders on both sides, but also to get them to agree to radically different kinds of negotiations, much more of a mediation than the kind of arguing that usually goes on in their sessions.

DH: If you were present in a meeting between the terrorist groups and representatives of the U.S. government, how would you start? What would you say to each one of those groups?

MBR: I would ask whoever wants to begin to say what needs of theirs have not been met in what has been happening. And probably neither side would be very able to answer that question because in our work we find that very few people have literacy at the “need” level. They don’t know how to articulate their human needs very clearly. Instead, they have been taught to communicate in terms of enemy images; that is, judgments of the wrongness of the other side. So, if this were to happen and let’s say one of the two sides were to make a judgment of the other such as “you have been oppressing us, and not showing respect for our basic spiritual beliefs,” I would then help that side by translating that into a need—a statement of a need that contained no reference to wrongness on the part of the other side.

So I might reflect back “So if I’m understanding you, you’re saying that you have a need for respect for your spiritual beliefs.” Then, if the side says “yes,” then I would ask the other side simply to repeat it back so I could see that they clearly understood the other side’s needs that weren’t getting met. It’s often not that easy, because the other side has enemy images that keep them even from hearing the need when it is expressed. But then my job as the mediator would be to help the second side to hear clearly that need. Then I would help the second side articulate their needs and then help the first side be sure that they understood those needs. Then, when both sides have gone through this process of articulating their needs and hearing the needs of the others, then we would look for strategies to meet everybody’s needs. In other words, such a focus is on each side’s needs, understanding of the other side’s needs, and searching for exploration of ways to get everybody’s needs met. There is no analysis and judgments of a moralistic nature that I would encourage.

DH: If I wanted to write my government, how might a sample letter read that directs the government to seek justice without pursuing military action that will kill innocent citizens? What language would you suggest?

MBR: I would suggest that we look for means of restorative justice in this situation and that means knowing the difference between retributive justice, which is based on the assumption that people have behaved in an evil way and need to be punished for their acts—they deserve to suffer for their acts. That is the kind of thinking that has been prevalent over much of our planet for several thousand years. So, instead of that, I would use a language of restorative justice which would sound like this: That we need to restore peace, and the way to restore this peace is to get all parties together to explore what needs of theirs have not been met, and to search for ways of meeting everyone’s needs. That needs to be the focus: The getting together for the purpose of mutual understanding of needs and exploration of ways of getting everyone’s needs met.

[to top of page]

DH: In your opinion, in what lessons can we draw from the September 11th tragedy?

MBR: I think we can draw from this tragedy that there has been a large number of people on our planet whose needs have not been met—some very basic needs; needs for basic sustenance, needs for respect for their religious belief; need for respect for their nationalities; their national interests, and that out of this desperation on their part to get some attention that their needs have not been met, that they have been resorting to tactics which are very frightening and very destructive of peace. So, we need to wake up and learn what needs are not getting met on the planet, and what actions of ours are actually interfering with the needs of these people getting met. So we need to deepen our learning at this level. We need to deepen our learning as to what has kept us from seeing these needs and taking action before this. And I think that this gets into how has our attempt to satisfy our own needs economically—how has it been short-sighted and contributing to other people having limited means of expressing themselves except through violence.

Do you see the September 11th tragedy as opening up opportunities?

MBR: I think it certainly has shaken enough people so that most people now are desperately searching for something to do. Unfortunately, most have been trained to think in a way that leads to violence. That’s why the polls show that the majority of the people do want a violent reaction to this violence. However, I am also seeing that it is waking up the other segment of the population to put a good deal of energy into seeking for alternatives to violence as a way of coping with the situation.

DH: On a practical level, how can we help transform the thinking and language that does lead to violence?

MBR: Well, at a practical level, our organization—looking at long-term preventive bases—has been creating schools in which the children are taught a radically different language than the language that we see contributes to violence. And my term for the kind of schools we have been creating is "Life-Serving Schools". In such schools, they are taught to evaluate with reference to needs, feelings and to hear empathically one another’s needs. The schools are not set up in a competitive way, but in a way in which all students support each other’s learning activities. Punishment and reward are not used to maintain order in the school, but rules and regulations are established by the students to protect everyone’s rights, but to protect them without having to use any kind of punishment in the process. So this is one direction we can, on a preventive level, start to educate subsequent generations in radically different ways of thinking, communicating, forming communities, resolving conflicts.

In the more immediate context, we can each do what we can to look at whether our own thinking and communication supports the use of punishment and reward; and if it does, then we can do some personal transformation so that we come to a consciousness in which we can see the humanness of each person regardless of how they are behaving; in which we can seek ways of resolving our difference with people that do not involve coercive tactics such as punishment, reward, shame, guilt, and so forth.

DH: What is your sense of how this will all turn out? Where will our response to the September 11th tragedy lead?

MBR: Well, it depends again on whether we choose to use violence; in which case I think historically that we know where it will lead to—increasing acts of violence. If we can use this to show a radically different approach to this—one in which we now seek to get the meetings with key people that will enable reconciliation and restorative justice to take place; then I think this will be a very major stepping stone toward a world of peace.

DH: In your speaking with people as they are responding to this tragedy, what is your sense of the direction that most people are going?

MBR: Well, in my work—I work in about 30 countries—but the people that bring me in are the people who are actively seeking new alternatives to the punishment that has been going on for centuries. So in my work, I’m daily with that segment of the population that is hungrily searching to solve this without violence.

DH: And if our listeners would like to find out more about your Nonviolent Communication techniques, what can they do?

MBR: They can go to our website, which is www.cnvc.org; and they can read my book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

DH: So I’d like to hear a little bit more about, for example, if you get together with—well you talked about this earlier—if you get together with the representatives from the terrorist groups and the U.S. government; how do you think they are likely to respond? You said that you feel that they are probably not very articulate in terms of formulating their needs, but would you be optimistic that they would ultimately be able to articulate those and that it could actually lead somewhere? Or are people so entrenched in their thoughts of violence that it seems not hopeful? What is your take on that?

MBR: My experience has been, and I have done mediations between groups of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda where members of both sides have had members of their family killed; I have mediated between other tribes in Africa; between warring parties in Israel and Palestine and Serbia and Croatia. In all of these mediations; no matter how much pain has been going on in the past, once we can get both sides connected to each other’s needs, it’s incredibly hopeful about how the past, no matter how painful it has been, can be transformed into an energy in which people now seek to find ways of meeting each other’s needs without violence having to be used.

[to top of page]

DH: And of course the Middle East is one of the issues behind all that’s occurred, and the problems there. Could you comment on the situation there, and the use of nonviolent techniques to try to aid in bringing about peace in the Middle East per se.

MBR: Well it’s the same situation there, I have been working in the Middle East for about 12 years, I have brought a group of Palestinians and Israelis to a neutral country in 1990; getting them working together and they have been working together since then supporting movements towards peace in the Middle East. In all of these situations, you see that they have developed enemy images of the other side. They see themselves as virtuous, the other side as villains—as evil, and they have been educated to believe that punishment is therefore deserved and the only way to resolve the situation. So in each case, we do what I have been describing: We bring them together. They do not know usually a language of the kind of connectedness that leads to peace, so in our mediation efforts we loan them this by helping them translate their messages from these judgments that lead to violence into vulnerable statements of their own needs, and we help each side hear each other’s needs. And in the Middle East, as in other places, when we have done that, the people end quite willing to cooperate with each other’s needs.

DH: Have you made an effort to directly contact the U.S. government to offer your services in pursuing the ideas that you have?

MBR: I have certainly sent a message to the President; we have members of our network that have used every means we know to let the government know of our availability as an organization and my personal efforts as a mediator to function in that capacity.

DH: And what kind of response have you gotten? Or have you gotten a response?

MBR: No, we have not gotten a response yet. In other countries, we have a person who has gotten my book to [Shimon] Peres in Israel, and the word I get back is that he has found it personally helpful; he would like to see government members in Israel trained to communicate in this way, but he’s been very busy and he hasn’t contacted me personally. We’re involved in some degree right now in Colombia. The President knows of our work; but unfortunately, where we would like to have our impact right now with the United States and with the Afghanistanians—Afghanistani people; we don’t have the connections their yet that we would like.

DH: So how do you see making this happen?

MBR: By all of the people who want it, to lending their contacts, their access that they have and their creativity and expressing it clearly that they want these kinds of negotiations to occur. And there are many such meetings that are organized in different communities, and of course once one is member of a group, and the whole group is presenting such requests, it often has more power than individuals.

DH: So is there a massive campaign going on among people in your group, because it seems as though it’s something very important.

MBR: Our group, where we have members in about 25 countries, we have been submitting papers to the government; we have been submitting papers to the media trying to outline the steps that we see necessary; we have been trying to contact other organizations working toward peace to see how we can mutually work together in this area.

DH: What kind of media response have you generally gotten so far?

MBR: Enormous. We have many radio programs, newspaper articles being requested and have already done many of them. So we have the media interested. Where we would like to get the media more interested has been for years we have been trying to get different kinds of programs onto the media which would show young people radically different ways of defining heroic efforts than the good guys hurting the bad guys; and so we have been trying to find interest in creating television programs for children which would give them totally different heroic images than the ones they now have. We would like to have a whole different slant of the news presented over the media. We think that it’s a very limited slant that the people are educated to—that we’re not really seeing the suffering that’s going on in the world through eyes that are empathic eyes. I think we’re seeing it through slanted eyes.

DH: Well, we’re almost out of time, but what’s the message you’d like to leave our listeners with?

MBR: The message is that whoever has done these acts of violence towards the United States has the same needs that we have. If we were to see what led them to do it, we would see that they were trying to meet needs in the only way that they could conceive of meeting them; that they had felt frustrated meeting them in other ways and now were relying on desperate ways to meet their needs. So these are not people different than us at the basic level. They have the same needs—we’re created out of the same energy. Acts of violence towards these people will only perpetuate violence on the planet. Doing nothing is not the answer. The alternative is to create connection with these people through negotiations of a different kind than we usually do. Through negotiations in which we connect at the need level—see each other’s needs and mutually explore ways of meeting those needs that will lead to peace.

DH: Well thanks so much for being here.

MBR: You’re quite welcome. Thanks for this opportunity to speak to your listeners.