An abuser has an emotional need for respect. He experiences it as deeply hurtful when his partner has conversations with other men. When she talks to other men anyway, he feels betrayed. He says “When you talk to other men, I feel hurt because I need mutual respect.”
Using NVC principles, how do you say that what he is doing is wrong?
NVC generally wouldn’t say that having a need is wrong by itself. Rather its defense against unreasonable demands is to emphasize that when responding to a request from someone else, you should first check how those fit with your own needs, and only accept requests that are actually aligned with your needs. (NVC does not say that anyone would have an obligation to fulfill other people’s needs.) So one could respond to that by saying that they e.g. have a need for the freedom to talk with anyone they like, so they aren’t willing to fulfill this man’s request.
NVC explicitly tries to get away from the frame of needs being reasonable or unreasonable, and I think that this can actually be a strong defense against manipulation. If you accept the frame of reasonable/unreasonable needs, then you open yourself to the possibility of being convinced that your needs might be unreasonable and the abuser’s need to abuse you might be somehow reasonable. Whereas if you stick to “everyone’s needs are valid but nobody is obligated to fulfill other people’s needs” then you can eliminate that whole angle of attack. (Speaking from experience—I’ve at least once been caught in an abusive situation where the other person was very good at convincing me that their needs were more reasonable and important than mine, and I could only get out by rejecting that whole frame. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that knowing about NVC allowed me to get out, but I do think that it helped.)
I mean, to some extent any improved communication technique is going to be a tool that increases the options available to an abuser, especially when their interlocutor isn’t very sophisticated.
Yeah, that’s my view too.
But it does seem to me that very thoughtful practitioners of it should at least be aware of the naming issue, and that it would reflect badly on such practitioners if they’d never thought of it (sorry) and on the practice in general if none of the “top brass” (so to speak) were aware of it either. Hence my wanting to probe on it.
NVC generally wouldn’t say that having a need is wrong by itself. Rather its defense against unreasonable demands is to emphasize that when responding to a request from someone else, you should first check how those fit with your own needs, and only accept requests that are actually aligned with your needs. (NVC does not say that anyone would have an obligation to fulfill other people’s needs.) So one could respond to that by saying that they e.g. have a need for the freedom to talk with anyone they like, so they aren’t willing to fulfill this man’s request.
NVC explicitly tries to get away from the frame of needs being reasonable or unreasonable, and I think that this can actually be a strong defense against manipulation. If you accept the frame of reasonable/unreasonable needs, then you open yourself to the possibility of being convinced that your needs might be unreasonable and the abuser’s need to abuse you might be somehow reasonable. Whereas if you stick to “everyone’s needs are valid but nobody is obligated to fulfill other people’s needs” then you can eliminate that whole angle of attack. (Speaking from experience—I’ve at least once been caught in an abusive situation where the other person was very good at convincing me that their needs were more reasonable and important than mine, and I could only get out by rejecting that whole frame. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that knowing about NVC allowed me to get out, but I do think that it helped.)
Yeah, that’s my view too.
It’s a fair point! Appreciate you raising it.