COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION
(Originally created for Quest for Eternal Sunshine)
I’m excited to share a wonderful and timely new resource—Compassionate Communication—generously created by my dear friend, Patricia Wolff. I have known Patricia for over three decades, and we’re grateful that our special connection has been deepening with each passing year.
Like my father, Patricia has dedicated her life to self-discovery, healing, and personal growth. I love how she embraces life’s challenges as “portals of transformation, ”digging in with curiosity, rather than running away in dread.
Patricia has studied and taught compassionate communication for many years, and has much wisdom to share about the healing power of focused attention on the way we speak and listen to others as well as to ourselves. This gateway of self-discovery is completely in line with my father’s focus on shining the light of our awareness onto our ancient patterns so that we can become conscious of them. Only then can we choose to let them go and open ourselves up to new, far more pleasant, experience.
“Compassionate communication techniques help us embrace relationship challenges as opportunities for increased intimacy and deep healing,” Patricia says. “When we recognize our habitual responses to ourselves, others, and our world, we become aware of our all-too-familiar stories and triggers, and have the opportunity to gently challenge them instead of endlessly repeating them.”
— Myra Goodman, author of “Quest for Eternal Sunshine”
Compassionate Communication:
The Language of Open Hearts
Created in partnership with Myra Goodman & Dr. Patricia Wolff—chiropractic physician, homeopath, marriage and family therapist, and meditation teacher
Compassionate communication techniques, drawn from Buddhist and Nonviolent Communication practices (NVC), help us embrace relationship challenges as opportunities for increased intimacy and healing. Inherent in compassionate communication is the commitment to remain open minded and open hearted, which requires the cultivation of curiosity, self-awareness, empathy and courage. This approach to communication fosters kindness (towards ourselves and others), reduces conflict, and increases awareness of the universality of our human needs and desires, as well as our interconnectedness.
Endeavoring to communicate peacefully helps us to recognize habitual responses to ourselves, others, and our world. As we become aware of our all-too-familiar stories and triggers, we have the opportunity to gently challenge them instead of endlessly repeating them. We are invited to face and understand the difficult aspects of ourselves that we habitually try to avoid or ignore. Instead of shutting down or acting out when conflicts arise, we can learn to dance with the polarities of our lives—loving someone one minute, feeling rage the next. Every conflict or strong emotional state is an opportunity to heal our ancient wounds.
Techniques to Help Foster Compassionate Communication:
1) Open your heart and set your intention
Set your intention for communicating from an openhearted place of kindness, understanding, and empathy toward both yourself and person you will be speaking with. Resolve to do no harm.
Here are some examples of helpful intentions:
“I will stay deeply connected with myself and with you.”
“My aim is to create mutual understanding.”
“I promise to listen attentively, with an open heart and open mind.”
“I will remain curious and appreciative.”
We often direct as much (or more) unkind language toward ourselves as we do toward others. When we are judgmental and demanding with our partners, friends or co-workers, we almost always behave this way to ourselves.
Every human is motivated by the same needs for love, acceptance and acknowledgment. It takes bravery to see the vulnerability in others and ourselves, and to embrace the intimacy that comes with honest inquiry.
Patricia highly recommends doing her short (8 min) Awakening the Heart guided meditation to help you find a place of deep calm and openhearted generosity.
2) Learn to recognize when you’ve been triggered and take a pause to settle yourself
Learn to recognize the telltale signs of when you have been triggered. Here are some clues:
You start to repeat your familiar, often victim based stories.
Your body tightens up: your jaw is clenched, you stopped breathing, there is a pit in your stomach, or your heart rate is elevated.
You have intense surges of emotions, such as fear, worry, fury, irritability, or a sense of dread.
You blame others for your reactions of upset, confusion or discomfort.
If you watch yourself closely, you will usually catch yourself being triggered over and over again. When you’re feeling triggered, pause and notice your feelings. Resist leaping into habitual human strategies of blaming, demanding, feeling victimized, distracting yourself, or giving up.
When you’ve been triggered, it is helpful to take time to settle into your body and the present moment before starting or continuing a sensitive conversation. Breathe deeply, meditate for a few minutes, stretch, walk, gaze at something in nature—anything that helps you calm down and feel more relaxed.
Try this simple and effective relaxing breathing exercise for at least three rounds:
Inhale as you slowly count to four
Hold your breath for the count of four
Exhale for the count of eight
Hold breath your breath for the count of four
Allow yourself to feel your discomfort and stay with it. Cultivate patience despite the desire to plunge ahead quickly in your desire for a quick resolution. Avoid getting pulled into stories or analyses. This gives you the space to respond differently, rather than from automatic patterns of reactivity.
With practice, it is easier to stay present with sensations in your body, instead of resisting or trying to get rid of them. We breathe and stay open our to actual experience and sensations. Buddhism teaches that everything changes. When we remember that all emotions that arise will eventually dissolve, we can find spaciousness between stimulus and response. Emotions, no matter how intense, always come and go. The self we identify with is not as solid as we think it is.
Instead of believing the familiar litany of the stories our minds continually spin, we can feel them in a somatic way and let the emotions pass through us as waves pass through the ocean
3) Become curious about what’s really happening
There are times when the gentle spaciousness of a pause is all that is needed for a difficult emotion to complete its cycle. Other times, we discover that our initial emotion or response is just the tip of the iceberg, which can serve as an opening for deep healing. How do we walk through these challenging portals of transformation? We become courageous (the word “courage” comes from the ancient Latin “to speak one’s heart”) curious, and compassionate.
We inquire:
What am I feeling? Just by identifying a feeling, our nervous system starts to calm down.
When have I felt this before? Often we can see the habitual nature of our feeling or story—how we keep landing there again and again despite changes in our outer circumstances.
What need is of mine is being illuminated? For example, if you felt sad when your friend canceled your chat, your sadness may have illuminated your need for more intimacy.
What might the other person be feeling? What need of theirs is being illuminated?
Inquiry can lead us to an exploration of our ancient wounding—our needs for safety, security, acceptance, and love. Much of what triggers us traces back to when we were very young and automatically developed strategies to protect our tender hearts. Many of these strategies are way past their expiration date, and are often extremely ineffective and self-defeating.
As we explore these needs as the wiser adults that we now are, we can offer support, love and reassurance to the parts of ourselves that are stuck in the past. We can ask ourselves the following questions:
What are my needs?
Is it true that my needs are not being met?
Is there an action to be taken?
Are there requests to be made, points to be clarified, or emotions to process?
4) Try to be an objective observer
An important step in healthy communication is making the effort to objectively report what is actually going on versus your subjective interpretation. It is helpful to imagine what you would view through then lens of a video camera—an impartial observation of facts, without any blame or accusations.
For example, if you are initiating a conversation with your child about a messy room, you may use words that sound judgmental and accusatory, such as: “Your room is a pigsty. Why do have to be such a slob?” Instead, try just describing what a camera would see, such as: “When I walked into your room, I saw candy wrappers on the floor, half eaten breakfast on your bed and dirty clothes on the floor.”
Similarly, after a difficult encounter with a partner, you might say something like, “You were inconsiderate and unloving!” Instead, try to objectively describe what actually happened: “When I walked into the kitchen after work this evening, the dishes were still in the sink. Last night you promised me you would do them this morning.”
5) Express your feelings without blame
It is helpful to practice using language that accurately describes how we feel, rather than words likely to bring up that is less likely to cause defensiveness or conflict. Very often, the words we habitually use unintentionally accusatory and/or victim language—words that implicitly contain judgments, evaluations, blame and/or demands. They reflect our perception that someone is doing to us. Whenever we add a “by you” (i.e. “I feel attacked by you,” “I feel belittled by you,” or “I feel ignored by you”) our language is likely to trigger the person we are speaking with.
Instead, find words that simply describe how we feel without implying that someone did something to us—such as “I feel sad,” “I feel unsettled,” or “I feel angry.”
6) Become aware of spoken and/or unspoken needs
When we use the steps above to become curious about what important needs and values our feelings are revealing, we are engaging in a process of self-discovery. We must hold ourselves in the compassionate light of understanding and compassion, and then shine that same light toward our friend, partner, child, or whoever we are in conversation with.
When we listen deeply with the intention of bearing witness to someone’s pain without defending ourselves, judging, or trying to fix it, we can more readily identify the need we’re trying to meet. As Marshall Rosenberg, founder of NVC says, “We become like a U.N. translator, simultaneously translating from one language into another. We learn how to hear the feelings behind the message that the person is expressing and their unmet needs.”
7) Be clear and specific in your requests
Requests are not demands or ultimatums. Rather, they are specific articulated desires that invite honest conversation. For example, instead of accusing your partner: “You never pay attention to me!” Try saying, “When I talk to you, would you be willing to put down your phone and look at me? Instead telling your child, “Clean up your room!” try being specific, “Please put your toys back in the toy bin when you are done playing.”
It’s important to strategize in partnership, realizing the universality of our human needs as we searching for win-win solutions, understanding that when someone says “no” to one thing , it is often because they are saying “yes” to something else. For example, if your friend says “no” to taking you to the airport at 4:00AM, they may be saying “yes” to their need to sleep and be well rested before an important event.
In Summary:
So much of our suffering is created by conditioned tendencies to grab for what we think will make us happy, and turn away from that which we don’t want. This roller coaster of emotions reflects our lack of understanding that wellbeing starts as an inside job. Knowing ourselves more deeply will change our lives, and therefore the lives of our beloveds.
Buddhism and NVC both offer paradigm-shaking teachings—invitations to turn and face difficult aspects of ourselves and others, to truly know ourselves, to pause and reflect before leaping into habitual responses, and the reminder to be curious and compassionate. But perhaps most profound is the illumination of own incessant, self-judgmental internal dialogue and the realization that we can only be as kind to others as we are to ourselves.
We will keep getting triggered again and again, like a bad dream, until we can penetrate and understand our familiar scenarios. What we resist persists. We can choose to courageously open to whatever is happening, acknowledging the ancient, familiar, often intergenerational quality to the pain. We remember our deepest intentions—kindness, intimacy, connection, authenticity, and understanding. We use nonjudgmental language that is kind and recognizes our unmet needs. We listen attentively. We trust our resilience as we open to the healing of our ancient wounds.
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) was developed in the 1960s by Marshall Rosenberg, and is a rich and detailed resource for healing and personal growth. For more information:
Resources, both free and for purchase
