There are myriad ways that you can disengage your listening and bring the focus back to yourself. One of the most common is to express that you have the same feeling as the speaker, e.g., "I feel that way too!" Sometimes this is connecting and sometimes it distracts you from what the other was saying. For example, your partner expresses their disappointment around missing intimacy with you and you say, "I miss it too, you know." This "me too" response can trigger a sense of competition or blame. You both might start gearing up for an argument about who has been wrong or who is suffering...

Do you ever wish you could get a little more breathing room with your partner? From your perspective, they move in so close that you wish you had a snorkel so you could get a little air.

Your partner on the other hand is feeling hurt wanting more intimacy and is receiving your request for space as a form of rejection or lack of caring. You notice this conflict repeating itself in little and big ways. You want to be able to ask for space and know that your partner trusts your caring. Your partner on the other hand, is longing for you to come closer without having to ask.

It...

Article by Taylor A. Wolf

As NVC continues to develop from the beautiful seeds that Marshall Rosenberg planted, it has moved in a number of directions. The work of Miki Kashtan has taken the nonviolent consciousness of NVC directly into processes with systems and groups. Some practitioners meld Nonviolent Communication with approaches like focusing for deep self-connection and self-discovery. And the branch that Susan Skye and Sarah Peyton have spent years nurturing right here in Oregon, the integration of Nonviolent Communication with relational neuroscience, with a...

I have shared before that my mother was fractured by trauma. Her reflections of me shifted every time she blinked. I had the luck in college to receive four consecutive letters from her, each about the same subject: what she thought about me and friendship. In the first, she wrote, “Sarah, you have no friends.” In the second, she wrote, “You have so many friends.” In the third, “You are a person who only has one friend at a time.” And in the fourth, “I don’t understand how you can have so many close friends at once.”

Strange though it may seem, this particular series of letters was...