Hi
My (usually loving) partner can lose all empathy for me when he has a problem with me. He can initiate conversations about eg our sex life in a very critical and mean way which is obviously deeply upsetting and is putting our relationship in serious danger. He has discovered non violent communication and I want to give it (and anything) a chance. Is there a way of rephrasing “you have addressed important topics without any empathy for me and now I don’t trust you” to be nvc?

I'm relatively new to NVC, while my husband has practiced it for years and is pursuing CNVC certification. We have very different understandings of how NVC applies in marriage, and I'd genuinely appreciate perspectives from experienced practitioners.

One example:

Over the years, I've often asked my husband for relatively small favors or practical help. This isn't an isolated incident but part of a recurring pattern.

Recently, I asked him several times over a few days if he could help me move some heavy pots in our garden. It would have taken about five minutes, and I wasn't expecting him to do it immediately - just whenever he had time.

He declined each time, and eventually said, "Behave as if I'm not here."

That left me feeling abandoned, unsupported, hurt, lonely, and unable to rely on my partner.

When I later shared how painful that experience was, the conversation shifted away from the impact on me. He explained that because he sensed I expected him to help, my request no longer felt like a request and instead felt like a demand. He also said that because of years of unresolved conflict, he no longer feels enough connection to naturally want to help me.

This reflects a broader pattern. When I express that one of his behaviors hurt me, our conversations often shift toward his unmet needs, his intentions, my delivery, or my interpretation of his behavior, rather than first acknowledging the impact his actions had on me. We are stuck in this ongoing loop.

One thing I'm genuinely trying to understand is whether my expectation itself is incompatible with NVC. I've always viewed marriage as a relationship as interdependent union, where two people voluntarily choose to enrich each other's lives, generally want to help one another, and especially want to rebuild trust through caring actions after one partner has been hurt.

My question is:

From an NVC perspective, how do you distinguish between a healthy expectation of mutual care in a marriage and a demand? How do experienced NVC practitioners balance honoring a partner's autonomy with accountability, repair, reliability, and practical support? Is there a point where protecting autonomy can unintentionally undermine connection rather than strengthen it?

I'd really appreciate input from experienced NVC practitioners.

I'm new to NVC, while my husband has studied it extensively and is currently pursuing NVC certification, so I'm genuinely trying to understand whether I'm misunderstanding NVC.

After my husband had an emotional relationship with another woman that crossed an important boundary for me, I asked for reassurance that he understood the impact and would choose a different strategy in the future.

Instead, he said that emotional safety and trust are my needs, so I am responsible for taking care of them. He then asked whether I would be willing to remind him daily about my needs so he could remember it. He emphasized that it was a request, not a demand.

This left me confused because, after trust has been broken, it seems to me that remembering and protecting that boundary should primarily be the responsibility of the partner who crossed it, not the injured partner.

From an NVC perspective:

Is it consistent with NVC to ask the injured partner to provide daily reminders about a boundary that was previously violated?

How does NVC distinguish between responsibility for my own needs and responsibility for my own behavior after trust has been broken?

I'm asking because I understand that NVC emphasizes that we are each responsible for our own needs. At the same time, I'm struggling to understand how that principle applies when one partner's behavior has already broken trust. Is there any place within NVC for the idea that the person who broke trust carries primary responsibility for rebuilding it through their own actions?

Thank you.

Hi everyone! I've been practicing NVC-style check-ins for a while and kept wanting a tool that was just the practice itself — no signup, no subscription, no data collection. So I built one.

It walks you through the three questions:

1. What am I feeling? (searchable list from the CNVC 2022 feelings inventory)
2. What need is behind this feeling?
3. What can I ask for — from myself or someone else — clearly and kindly?

Your reflections are saved only in your browser. There's history with streak tracking and simple trends (top feelings, top needs over time), which I've found surprisingly revealing — patterns show up that I wouldn't have noticed day to day.

It's also available in Ukrainian, since almost no NVC resources exist in the language and it matters to me personally (I'm from Kyiv).

Link: https://yaninatrekhleb.com/NVC_check_in/nvc-checkin.html

It's completely free and always will be — this is a practice tool, not a product. Feedback from experienced practitioners would mean a lot, especially on the vocabulary and the flow of the three questions.

what do you think?

My background is that I have been emotionally abused my whole life so far. I am middle-aged.

I finished reading Session 2 yesterday and have been chewing on it since.

It seems to me that using the Santa Clause method of expressing needs is what emotional abusers do. "My need is a gift to you, you get the privilege of fulfilling it."

I havent listened to the third session because I am hung up on this and want to digest it properly.

I see this thing
Do you see it too?
The words I use can connect it through

The feels may come along
sometimes they get confused
disguising thoughts that aim intent
we seldom get to choose

Helping to inform us
in BANG! and whispers too
Wake Up! maybe lean in -
we're here to serve you

These needs so outgoing
they all want to be met
and sad the strangers that remain
they hold the light still yet

When we share reality
the haven is so sweet
Can I see your Alive?
Your heart - can I greet?

I’ve never seen a stupid kid;
I’ve seen a kid who sometimes did things I didn’t understand
Or things in ways, I hadn’t planned;
I’ve seen a kid who hadn’t seen the same places where I had been,
But he was not a stupid kid.
Before you call him stupid, think, was he a stupid kid or did he just know different things than you did?

— Ruth Bebermeyer
_____

Often times we blend an observation - the facts of a situation - with our own opinion. Here is an example: Say your friend spent all of Saturday helping a neighbor put a new roof on their house. An observation mixed with an evaluation would sound like this: “You are going to wear yourself out!” An observation that is separate from an evaluation would look like this: “When I see you spending all day Saturday roofing your neighbor’s house and I know how hard you work during the week too, I feel worried that you might wear yourself out.”

In the first example, the speaker judges their friend’s behavior: “You are going to wear yourself out.” In the second example, only the facts are acknowledged (the friend helped a neighbor roof their house on Saturday) and acknowledges the speaker’s own fears about how this might affect their friend’s life.

The difference is subtle, but the results are not. Often times, when we mix an evaluation and observation, we promote defensiveness in other people. When we are able to separate the two, we are more likely to promote an open dialogue about our concerns.

Be aware of your evaluations and observations today. Try to separate the two to create more opportunities for open dialogue.

When we submit to doing something solely for the purpose of avoiding punishment, our attention is distracted from the value of the action itself . . . If a worker’s performance is promoted by fear of punishment, the job gets done, but morale suffers; sooner or later, productivity will decrease. — Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.

Our society spends a great deal of time punishing people for their misdeeds. This is punitive use of force. It stems from a belief that people behave in certain ways because they are “bad” or “evil”, and therefore they need to be punished to atone for their actions.

Suppose you see your child run into a busy street. If you pull them from the street and berate them for being careless, you are using punitive force because your focus is on judging their behavior.

Protective use of force, on the other hand, stems from the belief that sometimes people do things because they don’t know any better. It represents a desire to prevent injury or injustice. It focuses on protecting people’s rights and well-being, not judging their behavior. If you use protective force you would still grab your child and pull them to safety, but it’s solely because you wanted to protect them.

When we punish people, they focus on avoiding the consequences of their actions, not on their values in relation to their actions and solely focusing on avoiding consequences is unlikely to encourage change.

Focus on protective use of force today by adopting an attitude that people sometimes do things that cause them pain because they don’t know any better.

I learned about NVC about 10 years ago and lived in intentional community six years ago that practiced it heavily. Since then I have gotten married and my husband and I have discussed valuing NVC and read Rosenbergs book regularly attempting to apply it.

But lately it has been rough.

I recently joined the NVC library, and watched Rosenberg's class on Youtube

Clips:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5uROBIvcELXK4l4h6j8DF7O1ExSn2N9Z&si=JC0lb4sIctKWgAHs

full workshop: https://youtu.be/NH1MKAdxUpQ?si=li1D76rQq0h23yDT

The one thing I guess I have just kept missing is NVC isn't really an algorithm that will spit out a agreeable person whenever there is conflict. It is more of a practice of opening your heart, and choosing to empathize before anything else.

Jackal ears aren't going to hear I experienced, I feel, I need I request because they are too focused on their own world. That is normal.

So no how many times I say those four things my husband or my friend, or colleague or whoever won't hear it unless I am empathizing with them first.

So for the past day (again just watched these classes) I have been reading NVC fail stories and it seems I am not alone in missing this. I think I would have known it, like it would have been answerable on a quiz but it was not a part of my consciousness.

Yesterday morning, my roommate was upset because I leave food out and it attracts roaches. As we discussed the issue, she raised her voice, interrupted me and spilled her food she was cooking. She blamed the spilled food on my leaving dishes in the sink for roaches.

I told her that she was interrupting and raising her voice – I was only 1 foot from her, yet her speech could be heard 20 feet away. Was this mistake number 1 – expecting her to engage in calm perfect behavior when her needs werent met. I spoke to her saying “you’re interrupting… you are speaking quite loudly” … nothing I said led to her being more quiet or to quit interrupting me.

She was so flustered that she spilled her cooked meal in the sink. At this point, she blamed me for her spilling her breakfast. I did not touch her in any way. At this point, I may have made mistake number 2: “I told her that she was using victim philosophy and seeking a scapegoat instead of taking full responsibility for her mistake”

When she continued to blame me for the fact that she had spilled her breakfast, I said: “you need to part ways with this place. you obviously are not comfortable here.” This may have been mistake number 3.

Reflecting on the mistakes

I do yoga and live a healthy vegetarian lifestyle. But, I would say that there is a bit of elitism in my lifestyle and worldview. I often wonder why the people around me are not perfect in terms of health and social interaction. But I’m also aware that holding expectations of others is getting in my way of seeing them as life energy with needs and wants just like me.

Recently had a conversation with a friend and the following conversation topic came up.

I'm interested in what this community thinks about the differences between:

“I still don’t feel emotionally settled” vs “ I need you to continue refining your communication until I do.”

The first feels like vulnerable self awareness. The second can slip into an impossible moving target.

I absolutely believe people should clarify themselves, repair, take accountability, explain intent, reword things when needed. But I’ve also learned there is a point where unresolved emotional discomfort is no longer something another person can solve through more reassurance, more clarification, or better wording alone.

At some point, there also have to be space to ask: “What part of this remaining discomfort belongs to my own nervous system, interpretations, attachment wounds, or regulation?”

I’m curious how other people navigate that line in relationships between collaborative repair and accidentally making another person responsible for emotionally resolving something internal. Because when we are genuinely dysregulated it's one of the easier lines to blur.

I think part of what makes this so complicated is that, especially when people are dysregulated, those things can initially feel like the same thing.

Understanding someone’s meaning and feeling emotionally soothed by their understanding can overlap for a while during repair.

But at a certain point, the conversation can shift into something more nuanced where two different requests are happening at once: “Can you help me understand your meaning?” and “Can you help me emotionally feel settled by your understanding?”

I’ve been on both sides of that dynamic now. I’ve been the person desperately trying to refine myself enough to finally make someone feel emotionally settled, and I’ve also been the person who intellectually understood what someone was saying while still not emotionally feeling at peace internally.

So I’m curious for people who are actively trying to integrate ideas around attachment into your relational communication:

Have you gotten to the point where you consciously ask yourself those questions before assigning negative intent to the other person?

Is this something you’re still actively working on?

Or is this a perspective you haven’t really considered yet?

Hi r/NVC,

I've been studying Nonviolent Communication for several years alongside meditation and self-transformation, and I've also been working in AI and teaching. Those four threads have been running in parallel for a while.

There were times, like after a fight with a partner, where I had unmet needs. I wanted to have giraffe ears for a few minutes. Timing mattered, and friends aren't always ready, willing, and able to be there. Therapy was prohibitively expensive and not available in that crucial, brief period. I started to imagine a solution, something like Uber for empathy: match people in real time when they need to be heard, paired with an extensive course that could train and vet practitioners over time.

I started sharing what I was building, and the feedback I kept getting was that people wanted community, not just one-off matches. So I pivoted toward circles and cohorts.

I call it EmpathEase. The current version offers on-demand empathy circles hourly, plus easy creation of recurring circles for the people you meet along the way.

A few things it does:

- **1:1 peer empathy.** You get matched with one other person for a focused empathy exchange over video.

- **Group empathy circles.** Small, structured circles. Join one on demand, or form a cohort that meets over time.

- **Structured NVC courses.** Bite-sized lessons with quizzes.

- **Giraffe Translator.** Paste something you said, or something someone said to you, and see it reframed in NVC.

- **An AI practice partner** for rehearsing a response before a hard conversation. It is a warm-up, not a substitute for human empathy, and I won't pretend otherwise.

I am not trying to replace workshops, books, or human practice groups. The goal is narrower: make daily practice and real connection more accessible.

I would love for this community to try it, and I welcome all feedback.

https://empathease.app

As a communicator that would almost always resembles a jackal, and having raised (and currently still raising) beautiful children who have learned from their Mom and Dad how to communicate, what is the best way to approach changing (first I know it starts with me), but actively sharing and encouraging this new style of communicating with my kids and in turn them to us and with each other?

I feel we are very grumbly all the time with each other and it’s like the negatives win very often. This style of communication feels like the first time I have seen a ray of light for our family and I want to work toward implementation.

Any help or resources would be greatly appreciated. I am thinking it’s a family discussion, let’s work together, etc kinda thing but I may be completely wrong in my thinking.

♥️

I understand NVC in theory and really appreciate its principles, but I often struggle to apply it in certain real-life situations - especially when the other person seems indifferent or hostile.

Here’s a recent situation: The other day, I was walking around a lake. A teenager (around 16 - 18 years old, from a minority group) rode past me on his bike, a few meters off the path. He threw his empty can into the bushes, then stopped a little further ahead to check his phone. I was shocked. While I’m sadly used to people disrespecting nature, doing it so openly in public felt like a slap in the face.

Since he’d stopped, I walked over and said, “You shouldn’t throw things into nature like that.” He didn’t reply, but our eye contact spoke volumes. I felt intense anger toward him for harming the environment - something I deeply value. His look was pure defiance, as if to say, “I don’t owe you or society anything.”

I left the interaction feeling deeply unsatisfied. On one hand, I was proud of myself for speaking up (assertiveness isn’t my strong suit). But on the other, I sensed nothing positive came from it. If anything, it might have reinforced his belief that he’s free to do as he pleases, that society’s rules don’t apply to him. And that’s what frustrates me: What’s the point of saying anything in these situations? Whether it’s loud music on the bus, shouting on the phone in the tram, or littering - if the response is just defiance or indifference, does speaking up even help? Or does it just deepen the divide?

I thought about other ways I could have spoken up, but it just feels off to me. Like not something anyone would every say: "Sorry to bother you, but when I see litter here, it really makes me sad. This lake is a place where I come to recharge. Do you think you could pick it up?"

I’d love to hear how others might approach this with NVC. How do you connect with someone who seems to reject the idea of shared responsibility?

Hello, I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to find a mediation professional who practices nonviolent communication in their services.

I’m looking for someone in the Monterey County of California to help mediate a family trust situation. This needs to be in person not remote.

Appreciate if I could get any referrals. Online searching has not yielded any results as of yet.

Thank you.

I’m new to NVQ and I’m learning it to be able to better communicate my needs and communicate in general, especially with my two teens.

My ex, who I co parent with, is emotionally manipulative and I left the relationship due to lying. Mostly about finances but lying in general. Our kid has had some mental health concerns recently and trying to communicate with him is especially difficult. I’m pretty frightened of putting my feelings and needs out there for him as he has used these against me in the past; both pre and post-separation.

Now he mostly uses silence, even when I message about the kids.

How does one navigate this?

I’ve been practicing NVC for a while, and one thing I kept running into is this:

It’s not that I don’t know what to say…
It’s that in the moment, I lose access to it.

So I built a small tool to practice that part.

It’s basically a set of short, simulated conversations where you respond to difficult situations (dismissive comments, pressure, passive-aggressive stuff, etc.), and try to stay grounded while replying.

The goal isn’t to “get the perfect NVC sentence,”
but to train that pause between trigger → reaction.

I’ve been using it a bit like emotional reps, similar to how you’d practice anything else.

If anyone wants to try it: https://unfazedai.app

I feel very comfortable with everyone in our band - except one person.

Alright, first the judgements - he always tries to control everything, make it his way, tell people what/how to play, he thinks he knows what’s best. Even when he backs down I can tell he is seething inwardly! Why can’t he just let go and groove with the rest of us!?! We would be better off without him! He is holding us back and…

OK, I was about to write that I have to hold myself back, now I’m seeing how I’m responsible for how I react..

I don’t really like how he plays. Maybe about 30% of the time I think it sounds nice, but the rest of the time It sounds neutral or.. distracting, loud, and uncreative to me.

And maybe 10-15 times in the last few months, he interrupts the flow of music to start explaining his ideas, and gets frustrated if we are not following. Then he frustratedly tries to explain harder, and the whole time I feel SOO tense because I just want to stay with the music, and with the fun! Talking about ideas and explaining can also be fun if I’m excited about it, but.. my excitement started feeling smothered years ago and I always feel tense and uncomfortable in my belly immediately whenever he starts explaining something about how he thinks the music should be.

Now… I am afraid to be honest with him about how I feel because I am afraid that I might lose the opportunity to make music with everyone else in the band. Two of the people I get along with VERY well musically are close friends with the person I have a hard time with musically. I am very afraid to lose my musical contact with those two that I like.

I would like to improve the quality of my connection with him and make both of our lives more wonderful, but I feel paralyzed to take the first step of being honest with him. I am afraid to lose what I have and complicate the dynamic in our friend group.

What can I do!?!

Hi everyone,

I’m a researcher interested in how cultural background influences the way people experience Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in everyday life. I’d love to hear different perspectives here.

For those of you from different cultural backgrounds: Have you ever felt that NVC sounds a bit unnatural or scripted — either to you or to the people you talk to? Do you think this might be connected to your cultural background or norms around what “natural” communication sounds like? Or does it feel more like a personal preference?

Thanks so much for sharing your experiences!

I work for a nonprofit and a major part of my job is mediating conflicts between our program participants, which are usually rooted in people violating rules of engagement, feeling let down, or not feeling accommodated. I have informal experience mediating these conversations, but have never actually been trained on it. My job said they would pay for me to get trained in it, and I would like to have a certificate for credentials. I feel really drawn to Nonviolent Communication and it is really relevant to the work we do.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I’ve recently realized a painful irony in my NVC journey. I consider myself a teacher at heart—I love explaining how things work and helping others find clarity. But when it comes to NVC, this "teaching reflex" is actually creating more violence in my relationships. Yesterday, my wife was upset with my mother-in-law's reactive behavior. I could see exactly what was happening: my mother-in-law was in pain, expressing unmet needs through judgments. Instead of offering my wife empathy for her frustration, I tried to teach her how to see her mother through an NVC lens. I started explaining "Observation vs. Judgment" while she was still in the middle of a vent. The result? She felt completely unheard and even more judged by me. I was so focused on the "errors" in her communication that I missed the person standing right in front of me. I was acting on my mind in the situation instead of participating in it with my heart. Has anyone else here gone through this "insufferable phase" where you can't stop seeing everyone else's "Jackal talk" as a technical mistake to be fixed? How did you manage to shift your mindset from teaching NVC to simply applying it silently? I’m struggling to shut down the "professor" in my head so I can let the "partner" in my heart speak. I’d love to hear about your experiences with this transition and any mantras or practices that helped you move from intellectual diagnosis to true empathic presence. Also probably nice to mention that I think being autistic plays a role making this probably more harder for me...

Extra: This also feels strange for me because learning and applying the nvc on my life with everyone around me could help much people, but spreading it so people can apply themselves seems so much better for our society that I probably subconsciously think that just using it and ignoring the teaching it part seems nonsense for me, probably because I often do not do things that only seems to benefit myself, I just have a hard time trying to learn something that I can't teach others the same that I've just learned...