Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life, Second Edition @Team LiB Read Online Free PDF Page A

verbal, psychological, or physical, whether among family members, tribes, or nations—is a kind of thinking that attributes the cause of conflict to wrongness in one’s adversaries, and a corresponding inability to think of oneself or others in terms of vulnerability—what one might be feeling, fearing, yearning for, missing, etc. We saw this dangerous way of thinking during the Cold War. Our leaders viewed Russians as an “evil empire” bent on destroying the American way of life. Russian leaders referred to the people of the United States as “imperialist oppressors” who were trying to subjugate them. Neither side acknowledged the fear lurking behind such labels.
     

Making Comparisons
    Another form of judgment is the use of comparisons. In his book, How to Make Yourself Miserable , Dan Greenberg demonstrates through humor the insidious power that comparative thinking can exert over us. He suggests that if readers have a sincere desire to make life miserable for themselves, they might learn to compare themselves to other people. For those unfamiliar with this practice, he provides a few exercises. The first one displays full-length pictures of a man and a woman who embody ideal physical beauty by contemporary media standards. Readers are instructed to take their own body measurements, compare them to those superimposed on the pictures of the attractive specimens, and dwell on the differences.
    Comparisons are a form of judgment.
    This exercise produces what it promises: we start to feel miserable as we engage in these comparisons. By the time we’re as depressed as we think possible, we turn the page to discover that the first exercise was a mere warm-up. Since physical beauty is relatively superficial, Greenberg now provides an opportunity to compare ourselves on something that matters: achievement. He resorts to the phone book to give readers a few random individuals to compare them-selves with. The first name he claims to have pulled out of the phone book is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Greenberg lists the languages Mozart spoke and the major pieces he had composed by the time he was a teenager. The exercise then instructs readers to recall their own achievements at their current stage of life, to compare them with what Mozart had accomplished by age twelve, and to dwell on the differences.
    Even readers who never emerge from the self-induced misery of this exercise might see how powerfully this type of thinking blocks compassion, both for oneself and for others.
     

Denial Of Responsibility
    Another kind of life-alienating communication is the denial of responsibility. Life-alienating communication clouds our awareness that we are each responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. The use of the common expression “have to” as in “There are some things you have to do, whether you like it or not” illustrates how personal responsibility for our actions is obscured in such speech. The phrase “makes one feel” as in “You make me feel guilty” is another example of how language facilitates the denial of personal responsibility for our own feelings and thoughts.
    Our language obscures awareness of personal responsibility.
    In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem , which documents the war crimes trial of Nazi officer Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt quotes Eichmann saying that he and his fellow officers had their own name for the responsibility-denying language they used. They called it “Amtssprache,” loosely translated into English as “office talk” or “bureaucratese.” For example, if asked why they took a certain action, the response might be, “I had to.” If asked why they “had to,” the answer would be, “Superiors’ orders.”
    “Company policy.” “It was the law.”
    We deny responsibility for our actions when we attribute their cause to:
Vague, impersonal forces
    “I cleaned my room because I had to.”
Our condition, diagnosis, personal or psychological history
    “I drink