Unrelated, but thank you for finally solidifying why I don’t like NVC. When I’ve complained about it before, people seemed to assume I was having something like your reaction, which just annoyed me further :)
It turns out I find it deeply infantalizing, because it suggests that value judgments and “fuck you” would somehow detract from my ability to hold a reasonable conversation. I grew up in a culture where “fuck you” is actually a fairly important and common part of communication, and removing it results in the sort of language you’d use towards 10 year olds.
An analogy would be trying to build a table, but banning hammers and nails. If you’re dealing with 10 year olds, this might be sensible. If you do it to adults, you’re restricting their ability to get things done. It’s not that I think the NVC Advocate thinks I’m a bad person, it’s that they’re removing a useful tool. And even if they don’t try to push it on me, it still means my co-worker in building this table is going to move super slow because they’re not using the right tools.
I grew up in a culture where “fuck you” is actually a fairly important and common part of communication, and removing it results in the sort of language you’d use towards 10 year olds.
This culture sounds interesting.
(I’ve wondered how much more productive things could be if “Shut up” was a part of language that everyone used and it wasn’t rude.)
I don’t think taking two words for this is much more productive then the NVC-ish “I’m bored, can we please switch the subject?”
Simply communication based on the need seems to be a lot more productive then the standard solution of thinking about whether something is polite/rude.
Unrelated, but thank you for finally solidifying why I don’t like NVC. When I’ve complained about it before, people seemed to assume I was having something like your reaction, which just annoyed me further :)
It turns out I find it deeply infantalizing, because it suggests that value judgments and “fuck you” would somehow detract from my ability to hold a reasonable conversation. I grew up in a culture where “fuck you” is actually a fairly important and common part of communication, and removing it results in the sort of language you’d use towards 10 year olds.
An analogy would be trying to build a table, but banning hammers and nails. If you’re dealing with 10 year olds, this might be sensible. If you do it to adults, you’re restricting their ability to get things done. It’s not that I think the NVC Advocate thinks I’m a bad person, it’s that they’re removing a useful tool. And even if they don’t try to push it on me, it still means my co-worker in building this table is going to move super slow because they’re not using the right tools.
This culture sounds interesting.
(I’ve wondered how much more productive things could be if “Shut up” was a part of language that everyone used and it wasn’t rude.)
I don’t think taking two words for this is much more productive then the NVC-ish “I’m bored, can we please switch the subject?”
Simply communication based on the need seems to be a lot more productive then the standard solution of thinking about whether something is polite/rude.
Thanks for the NVC example.