by Miki Kashtan

When we are in conflict with someone, or are adversely affected by someone’s actions, even without personal interaction, or see others being adversely affected, our habit is often to pull back, close our hearts, create judgments about the other person, and all around make them less than human.

For me, for example, where I get completely lost, is whenever I interpret anyone’s behavior to mean that they don’t care. My entire life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been profoundly affected by anything that registers in me as unkindness or lack of care. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to recognize the nature of the effect. It’s a shock to my system. Despite all I know about what human beings are sadly capable of inflicting on each other, I am still, somehow, shocked whenever I see any instance of it. My soul still refuses to believe, as it always has, that cruelty and unkindness truly happen.

It is not uncommon for me to receive several such shocks in the course a normal day. Almost anything can affect it. Sometimes it’s just seeing a tattoo, and thinking about the pain a person put their body through in order to have the tattoo. I could feel this shock when seeing someone throw something out through the window of a car into public space. Or when hearing someone say “I don’t care about how she feels!” I shudder when hearing someone make a joke at the expense of someone else or a group. I cringe in some movies when an audience laughs at a person designed to be made fun of because of their weight, and just thinking about what life is like for that person that would lead them to accept an acting role in which they know they will be made fun of, and why others find it funny. I feel this shock when I see, in many of the places I work with, how bosses talk about or interact with their employees. At times I feel this shock more than anywhere when I see how many parents respond to their children.

With this degree of sensitivity, I keep away from the news. I don’t trust my own capacity to recover from the shocks fast enough if I am exposed to the details of what is going on in the world.

With all of that, I nonetheless continue to have some fountain of faith in human beings that, although brittle, is endlessly renewable. When I first heard from Marshall Rosenberg, the man who gave us Nonviolent Communication, the simple and radical idea that every act of violence was a tragic expression of an unmet need, and, more generally, that everything that anyone ever does is an attempt to meet a human need that I myself would have, these ideas gave form and substance to my faith in a way that has sustained me and supported me in finding more courage, power, hope and even pleasure in life than anything I ever had before.

Becoming the Other Person

Humanizing Others and Empathy

One of the early discoveries I made while learning Nonviolent Communication was that whenever someone is heard, they find more willingness to hear another. This is one of the reasons why I find the practice of empathy to be so transformative and why conflict resolution practices of all kinds converge on the irreducible role of people being heard. It’s also, undoubtedly, the main reason why a certain conviction has taken root within the community of Nonviolent Communication which I have been trying to overcome: I regularly hear people say, as if it’s a “rule”, that we can’t offer empathy before we receive it. I want to overcome this habit, because in situations of conflict someone is always going to be the one to listen first to the other if the conflict is to be resolved rather than suppressed, avoided, or escalated. I want all of us who believe in nonviolence, who learn Nonviolent Communication because we want to be agents of change in the world, to find access to our hearts sufficiently to be able to respond empathically without waiting to be heard first. It’s clearly the case that in order to respond empathically in any kind of authentic way, to truly be interested in hearing what the other person has to say, we need to be able to see that person’s humanity. My own experience with myself and others leads me to believe that we can do that directly, and that in the process we diminish our own suffering. Humanizing the other person is something that benefits me even before it ever translates into anything relational.

Some people can reach a level of cognitive mastery of empathy that is so high that it becomes possible to use words of empathy even without having an open heart. I know I have done it at times, and I have seen it any number of times in practice settings. Even though such apparent empathy is clearly designed to defuse the conflict, the mechanical nature of it has been known to infuriate others and escalate the conflict rather than defuse it.

In order to be in empathic dialogue, I must be able to imagine being the other person. It’s a deep discipline for me. It requires me to overcome the righteous pleasure of writing off the other person; of making myself ever so slightly superior, more human, more caring; of keeping my world safe and protected by eschewing others. I come face to face with the undeniable reality that this person who did this act is human just as much as me. I plunge into that other world, that other and different experience that gave rise to that which is mysterious to me. Through that, I find them, I find their heart, even if they have lost it. I find their care, however deeply buried it is, even if they actively protest and deny it. I reach for their heart even when it’s well hidden and protected, so well that they themselves don’t see it. I am reminded, as often, of Longfellow’s quote: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” I wish I were joined by many more in this most magnificent and excruciating task. I wish I succeeded more often, with or without the company of others to do it with.