Principles of Nonviolent Communication - #2

All actions are attempts to meet needs: Our desire to meet needs, whether conscious or unconscious, underlies every action we take. We only resort to violence or other actions that do not meet our own or others’ needs when we do not recognize more effective strategies for meeting needs. ~Miki Kashton, NVC Trainer, Blog: baynvc.blogspot.com

Now that I live in a city with great public transportation, I'm frequently riding the bus. I encounter a tremendous variety of human beings this way, not all of whom are easy to be around. Once I watched a woman plop down next to a man with a toddler and begin to ask to touch the child. She had old clothes and no front teeth. Her hair was half tied back and half wild. She leaned over the little girl, clearly delighted, and praised her. The man immediately pulled the child around to the other side of him and when the bus stopped moving, he changed seats. The woman continued to entreat him to let her hold the little girl. 


I would guess that she had a need for touch, affection, family, and most of all, a longing to nurture. Although she wasn't physically violent, she did invade the man's space and she couldn't take his nonverbal "no" for an answer.  I felt badly for her, because the strategy she chose to try and get her need to nurture met didn't work. Her pleading only served to alarm the man even more.


All strategies that people choose, even the strategies that alarm us, are tragic attempts to meet a fundamental need. When a person robs a store, or scrawls graffiti onto a parked bus, he is trying to meet something necessary to his physical or emotional well being. If we understood this concept deeply, our entire punishment and incarceration structure would change. Instead of seeing the person as the"other": as a perilous, dangerous, chaotic marauder, we would see ourselves, see our own human longings in the other person. We would relate to that person and our compassion would see that we shared the same needs.
Instead of punishment, I believe we would want to give the person effective strategies so they could meet their need. Just as I wanted to help the lonely woman on the bus.