Non-violent Communication in Communities

Open sentences were one of the first techniques. People worked in pairs, asking each other to fill in the sentence: “When I think about my world, what I’m scared of happening is —.” Or: “As I look at my world, what breaks my heart is —.” It was a very simple technique, but just speaking these sentences aloud to one another was very powerful for peo

Most people, though, learned to hide for their own safety or to fight back to protect themselves or to become small and pathetic so that people would take pity on them. If you have any of these responses to conflict—defensiveness, rage, withdrawal, weepiness, whatever—it is certain that you developed them for a good reason.

If we keep meeting anger with anger, the world’s divisions will only escalate. Persuasion is a communication-based process. If we’re all just shouting so loudly that we can’t hear the other person, we can’t communicate.