non-violence in grubby little pieces

I once read a line like “Enlightenment doesn’t come all at once, it comes in grubby little pieces”.

I stumbled across this article about how NVC-like speech with non-NVC motives is not much better and misses all the juiciness of real connection.

I agree, and I find myself continually frustrated by this. I’ll be in a situation where I desperately want to find some other way to communicate, and I reach into my bag and pull out … NVC words, NVC concepts, but not NVC consciousness. I say things like “that’s not a need!” and “say it in NVC!” and “I don’t want to hear your jackals!”.

I realized today how many times I judge myself for not “doing NVC right”. I’ve been living under the thumb of an internal critic that I had no idea the extent of. I’ve worked with a lot of inner jackals, but there is a Big Mama of them that says this: “All your aloneness, all your unmet needs, are because you aren’t good enough, so frickin’ try harder.” A long time ago I decided I was responsible for every bad thing that happened, and I’ve been trying to correct the world ever since. It’s very tiring. And I have this feeling of being tragically special, and being apart from everyone, because after all, I’m supposed to save the world. No wonder I love Buffy. The ultimate tragic figure in my little Universe, a girl who just wants to be normal but whose ultimate destiny is that she is responsible for saving the whole damn world–every week. She can’t get out of it–it’s her whole reason for existence. What that show never addressed was the seething resentment she would feel, that I feel. They got the loneliness, the isolation, but probably anger and resentment aren’t too attractive for our leather-babe heroine to be sporting.

Well it’s just TV, so back to my life. The problem with needing to save the world is that when people don’t get saved, you start to hate them for it. Stop making my job harder! I’m trying to save you, why won’t you do what I say? And that completely ingrained strategy doesn’t budge with NVC-words. It eats them up and spits them out like every other self-help strategy. The gravity well of my inner controller is more powerful than my will to NVC.

So it comes down to this: learning NVC, really learning it is about healing. That’s my theory. Just like 12 steppers say: “Hurt people hurt people”. So the corollary is something like “Whole, healed people naturally speak NVC”.

Is this disagreeing with Marshall’s basic premise? He noticed a difference in language between healthy-healing-cultures and cultures-of-violence. Then he codified it in NVC. With the theory that changing how we talk will change how we are. That we will stop being violent if we stop talking violent.

I do think they go hand in hand, and I’ve gotten a lot of clarity out of understanding the teaching of NVC on a theoretical level. But really giving up the violence-consciousness I grew up learning and practicing and getting really, really good at and decided to trust more than I trusted the people around me? That has been a long, hard, and very unfinished journey. NVC has helped – but mostly when I use it to try to heal myself. When I try to use it with other people, I still find myself using it as a weapon. It helps to know that there is another way out there, but sometimes I despair of ever really trusting it in the moment when I’m hurt and angry and all I know how to do is fight.

But I’m hoping that ease will come when I can heal more of the hard, hurt places in myself and fully rejoin the human race as just a girl–not a savior, not a rock star, and not anybody’s keeper, teacher, or guru.

I’ll leave off with a Dar Williams song that’s been running through my head, Another Mystery.

…
I could cut you off with a shoulder of stone
Smoke all night and leave the party alone
Screw myself with an inscrutable pout
But I just want you to come figure me out

I don’t want to be another mystery oh no
I don’t want to see who’s looking at me oh no
I want to be the one to feel the sun oh oh
So if you want to see the world with me let’s go

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