Nonviolent communication could be described as a language of life. It was founded by Marshall B. Rosenburg, Ph.D. (1934-2015) during the 1960s, living into our time today, and is a way of spiritualized speech. The embodiment of this speech relinks ourselves back to our deep needs and longings, without getting there through criticism, judgments, guilt, blame, name-calling, and coercion.
Enneagram derives from the Greek root ennéa, meaning "nine", and gramma which means "written" or "drawn". It denotes nine overarching strategies with corresponding characteristics that describe people through a collection of their traits.
I happened to stumble upon Julie Lawrence's wonderful website that housed a blog post named: "false" needs? enneagram and nvc. In this report was a connection of nonviolent communication to an enneagram—a personality typing construction that connects basic fears, desires, weaknesses, and longings to a typification.
What makes an enneagram so telling is that it reveals beliefs or values that may conflict with what we may need on a deeper level.
NVC and Enneagram adapted from Julie Lawrence
| Personality | False Needs | Avoids | Really needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Order | Mess, disarray | Acceptance, serenity |
| 2 | Contribution, connection, love, appreciation | Support | Humility |
| 3 | Appreciation, recognition, approval, connection, being seen | Honesty | Authenticity |
| 4 | Connection, being heard/understood | Unpredictability, discomfort | Courage, curiosity |
| 6 | Space, knowledge, learning, autonomy, to understand | Uncertainty, the unknown | Faith, peace, communion |
| 7 | Fun, freedom, autonomy, variety | Boredom, stillness | Connection, patience, gratitude |
| 8 | Autonomy, agency, honesty, control | Vulnerability, faith | Temperance, trust |
| 9 | Peace, harmony, belonging | Conflict, anger | Discernment, grace, understanding, safety |
Julie Lawrence then goes on to write about a strategy to identify 'false needs':
So how do we know when what seems to be “meeting a need” is actually a faulty strategy? One hint might be, when it creates more pain than happiness.
False needs are like staccato, which is Italian for detached, meaning that they are needs that are divorced from what we are truly seeking out. Not only are they temporary and give you short pulses of release, but they also increase an underlying air of tension in a relationship.
So now, going forth, how exactly could one use this understanding to serve life-sustaining purposes? Well... that is quite a difficult question to ask, as courage and conflict are inextricably linked and integral to shifting from neglecting our needs to meeting them.
Conflict is sacred inasmuch as it allows for us to become in touch with our shared needs. Often times, we have an deep sense of anger or fear within our hearts when our needs are being met: whether that the fear of not being worthy enough or resentment and mistrust because of another's actions. Joanna Macy once said,
Crisis is one of the factors that can cause people to pull together.
A lot of people nowadays are fearful of their own anger, taking it to be an emotion that separates and distances rather than that one that connects. So we repress it, only to face the dire consequence of neglecting both ourselves and the other we are attempting to connect with.
There is an interesting quip on anger that I heard from a talk by David R. Loy:
Anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
...
Just make sure to give the poison to the other guy.
He then challenges: Maybe we do shouldn't give it to either one, right?
His challenge is quite profound because it questions our commonplace understanding of anger entirely. Through NVC emotions are signals towards our needs. In the context of this quote, anger may actually be the antidote to conflict. NVC flips the script, so to speak, mirroring that of Joanna Macy: our anger is our passion for justice and our fear makes way for us to act courageously.
It is of great significance the way we express anger. When we believe that anger or conflict elicits loss and gain, then we become threatened by it. We when believe that anger or conflict only results in blame, guilt, and shame, then we become afraid of it.
We may think that conflict makes us fall apart from our shared needs; that in order to fulfill needs there must be a sacrifice. In the context of NVC this is not true. Because if we are actually speaking nonviolently, then we are not trying to make someone do something for us (that's a form of emotional slavery.)
Oren Jay Sofer wrote a magnificent article that I really resonated about how to heal in and through conflict and how to understand and diverge from our habitual patterns of blame:https://www.orenjaysofer.com/stop-arguing