Jen: 00:01:43 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I'm so excited for today's episode because I think it really pulls together a lot of threads from previous shows and it will also give you some really concrete new tools to support you in your parenting. It’s not like these are concepts that we've never discussed before, but sometimes hearing them in a different framework can be the key to making them click for you. I'm releasing this particular interview today because these tools are ones we are learning how to use and the challenge that I'm kicking off on Monday, July 8th. In the challenge, we're going to spend a couple of weeks learning why our children trigger us so much and how to stop being triggered and how we can move beyond the power struggles we get caught up in with our children so we can have the kind of relationship with them where their true needs as people are respected and met and so our ours. Jen: 00:02:30 To help us with part of this, I'd like to introduce my guest, Christine King. Christine is a credential K12 teacher, mother of three and describes herself as a teacher and perpetual student. She says on her website that when she discovered the tool we're going to discuss today, which is called Nonviolent Communication or NVC “it seemed like my entire worldview fell into place my lifelong interest in politics and justice, self-transformation and mindfulness.” Christine is a center for nonviolent communication certified trainer and has been teaching NVC principles and strategies to children, college students, teachers and parents for over 17 years. Currently, she teaches NVC at San Quentin State Prison and at the University of California. Today, we're going to talk about how to bring NVC, which helps us to truly understand ourselves and our children to bring a new depth of relationship and ease to our family. Welcome, Christine. Christine: 00:03:23 Thank you so much for inviting me to your program, Jen. I have listened to a few of your podcasts. I found them inspirational and educational and so I want to thank you for the work that you're doing in this world to promote more respectful and more conscious parenting. Jen: 00:03:45 Oh, thank you. You've got a lot to live up to then, don't you? Christine: 00:03:50 Yeah, that's right. Jen: 00:03:51 So let's start by asking the question that everyone who's listening, who has never heard of NVC before is thinking, what the heck is nonviolent communication? And if I've never heard of it and I'm not practicing it, does that mean that I'm communicating violently? Christine: 00:04:06 Well, I have to smile hearing your question when you say, if I'm not practicing NVC, does that mean I'm communicating violently? And we get that response a lot in the NVC community. When people first hear the words nonviolent communication, they often say, I'm not a violent person so I don't need this. I think their thought is that violence is primarily sort of a physical aggression and they don't see that it's really embedded in the language that we use. So to answer your question, what is nonviolent communication? I once asked that question to Marshall Rosenberg, who’s the founder of NVC, and what he said to me was exposed that communication process on the one hand and a consciousness on the other. So, we need both the process and the consciousness in order to stay in that place of connection and compassion, especially when people say things that are maybe painful to hear and difficult. Christine: 00:05:20 So, getting back to that consciousness and the process, the consciousness is this desire to share power with the other person. That includes children, which means being aware of both their needs and being aware of our needs and trusting that it's possible for both of us to get our needs met like even when there's a disagreement. So, before just continuing, I want to say a bit more about shared power because children are smaller than us, it’s so easy for adults to use power over children to get them to do what they wanted them to do. So, parents often will make demands on their children. And especially of course the parent were tired, were stressed, maybe we've had a long busy day and we get home, we just want to rest and the child wants to run around and go crazy and have fun. So, to get them to be quiet or do what we want, we can resort to all kinds of means like bribery, threats, demands, coercion. So, I guess I would say if you're communicating with those tactics then Marshall Rosenberg might say it is a more violent way to communicate and therefore that's going to affect the child's trust, their self-esteem and their willingness to cooperate. Jen: 00:06:47 I'm not sure before I learned about this, would've equated those sort of techniques that are a regular part of the parenting arsenal I guess brings it right back to violence, doesn't it? But these are things that we do without even thinking about because we feel as though we need our child's cooperation. So we're going to talk today a lot more about what else is there. But I think parents are probably thinking, what else is there if I'm not doing these things? Christine: 00:07:15 Yeah, yeah. We’ll talk a lot about that hopefully. Yeah. Jen: 00:07:17 Yeah. So, the idea, I just want to make sure we tease this out fully, you’ve mentioned sharing power with the other person and I think that that's more natural to do when you're perhaps thinking about communicating differently with your partner. When you're thinking about it with your children, I think that's a really kind of radical concept to think that you might share power with your child instead of having power over them. If you do share power with your child, you're not saying, I'm not the parent anymore, you and I are equals, you get to say just as much as I do and what's going to happen? Christine: 00:07:50 Exactly. Jen: 00:07:51 So, can you just kind of talk us through how that sort of power sharing works in a parent child dynamic? Christine: 00:07:57 Yeah, so I think it's not about being a permissive parent per se, like we talk about, you’re either permissive or you are a strict parent. It's really just about acknowledging that your child also has needs and also has feelings. So, if we put our needs above the needs of the child, then the child's going to think my name don't really matter. I mean, they're not going to think that in a concrete way, okay, my names don't matter here, but they're going to feel it and they're going to experience it. So if they are cooperating with us because we make a demand on them or we somehow reward them or punish them or in some way expect them to do what we want them to do, then they're going to do it. But they might do it, but it's not going to be out of this sense of yeah, they're really wanting to do it because they feel honored and they feel that they really matter. Jen: 00:08:52 Okay. All right. So that leads me nicely to my next question. So, we talk a lot on the show and on the resources that I put out in blog posts and things like that about self-determination theory and that's the idea that all people have a need for autonomy and competence and relatedness. So, I see some connections here in how this intersects with NVC. Can you help us think through that a little bit? Christine: 00:09:15 Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the idea of self-determination and specifically self-determination theory fits in beautifully with NVC. We all have these natural tendencies to want, to learn, to grow, to master our environment and to also integrate new experiences into who we are. So, NVC encourages that self-determination and self-exploration. So, one interesting aspect of these three elements that you mentioned autonomy, competence, relatedness is how much all of them are related not to extrinsic motivations but intrinsic ones. So, NVC is based on intrinsically motivating and also power sharing. In nonviolent communication, the belief is that everything we say, everything we do is related to a universal human need and that these needs that connects us to the humanity of others. So, I want to encourage these intrinsic qualities in children because it's going to make them stronger and more independent adults as well as strong and independent children. Jen: 00:10:41 Yeah. Okay. So, before we get into sort of what our needs, and we might think I know what a need is, but there's sort of a very specific idea here. Can you help us think through what are giraffes and jackals and how do you use those to explain principles of NVC? Christine: 00:10:57 Well, giraffes and jackals are animals and Marshall Rosenberg started using giraffe and jackal puppets to illustrate his message of nonviolent communication. So, the idea is that the giraffe stands for her connection, caring for the needs of both parties. The reason he used giraffe is because it's got a huge heart, one of the largest hearts of any land mammal. So, it's very loving illustration. The jackal is meant to illustrate a more critical perspective. So, who's right, who's wrong, who wins, who loses. There's a sort of kind of win-lose thinking. It's not that the jackal is bad, giraffe is good, we don't want to be thinking in those kinds of right-wrong thinking. But rather the jackal represents habitual behaviors and can be a reminder to return to our compassionate giraffe nature. So, if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos with Marshall Rosenberg and other trainers using the puppets. Jen: 00:12:17 There's one or two of you, isn't there? Christine: 00:12:19 Yes. We have so much fun with those puppets. Jen: 00:12:26 Yeah. I will post a link to those in the references for the episode. So, if anyone's curious to see how that sort of explained with these puppets, it's a pretty cool sort of elementary way of understanding some of these concepts. So, I want you to help us to understand what are some of the central ideas of NVC? Because then I think that kind of gives us the foundation to moving towards putting these into practice. So, it seems to me as the crux of this is kind of differences between things that maybe we haven't even thought too much about there being differences between before. So, let's start with the first one being what's the difference between observations and evaluations? Christine: 00:13:05 Great. I'm really glad that you asked me that. So, earlier I mentioned nonviolent communication being a consciousness and a process. So now we're talking specifically about the process or the tools. So, the first one is observation. When we're trying to use the language of nonviolent communication, we want to see things as they really are and not as we judge them or evaluate them to be. So we might say, what would a video camera see or hear? So video camera, it's not going to see my child being a “brat”, right? Because that would be an evaluation or a judgment of the child. However, a video camera can hear my child say, no, when I say, hey, could you put your toys away? So, video camera would not see the child's room as a mess and could see toys on the floor, clothes on the bed, and dirty dishes on the counter. The reason this is so important is that if we are coming from a judgment or an evaluation, we've already decided who's right and who's wrong. When we come from an observation, there is no moralistic thinking about who's to blame, who's at fault, and what they need to do to make it right again. Does that make sense? Jen: 00:14:37 Absolutely, yeah. When we make that evaluation, almost always we're the ones in the right, right? Christine: 00:14:43 Right. Of course. Why is that? Jen: 00:14:45 Yeah. If they would do things my way or the way that I need them to be done, then things would be better around here. Christine: 00:14:53 And you know for me, I'll have to say that observation was the hardest of all the tools. There's only four tools, but that one I spent years just going, okay, that's an evaluation. That's such… Christine: 00:15:09 Okay, so that's my jackal and it's a reminder to try to return to a consciousness that is more open, more curious more, you know, just like, okay, so this is what happened. Nobody did anything to anybody. This is actually what happened. Jen: 00:15:27 Right. I just also want to point out, it seems to me to be sort of very western centric view of the world, the idea that there is a truth and that people from other cultures may have other ways of seeing this. What do you think about that? Just briefly. Christine: 00:15:41 I love that. I love that. I think we do tend to be a little bit more, like you say, a little more moralistic, we're kind of dualistic in the sense of this is right, this is wrong, this is good, this is bad, this is appropriate, this is inappropriate. And can we have a more fluidity in that and look at something and just see it for what it is. Jen: 00:16:05 Okay. So, let's go into the second of the four tools. What's the difference between feelings and thoughts? Christine: 00:16:11 Feelings and thoughts. So, we often talk about feelings and we talk about false feelings that are attached to a thought. So sometimes we call that faux feelings or victim feelings. So a true feeling is from the inside out. So you're probably not going to argue with me if I say to you, I feel sad, I feel scared, I feel confused, I feel frustrated, I feel mad because it's my true feeling, right? So, false feeling it may sound like a feeling, but actually it's a thought when the judgment attached. So for example, I might say to a child, I feel taken for granted, right? Christine: 00:17:01 Or I feel unappreciated. So, you can see that's kind of from the outside in. It's not from the inside out. Jen: 00:17:08 Yeah. And when you say outside in, it has that kind of evaluation baked into it. It’s not truly something you're feeling. They're probably our feelings that you're feeling that are making you feel uncomfortable, but being taken advantage of is not one of those feelings. Christine: 00:17:23 Yeah. So when we come from this kind of thinking, then you know, or we say it's a feeling, we're actually blaming the child and we're not taking responsibility for our true feelings and our true needs. So, let's say I say I feel unappreciated. So what would the parent actually be feeling? Maybe sad, maybe unhappy because they're wanting some sort of understanding or acknowledgement or something like that. So, there's kind of a should thinking, you should appreciate me, you shouldn't take me for granted. And again, there's blame. So we're trying to avoid that. Jen: 00:18:04 Since we're on that topic of feelings, we hear a lot these days about emotional intelligence, which I think is defined as the ability to recognize and experience and name our feelings no matter how uncomfortable they might be. And we touched on this in my episode on Emotion Regulation and can you say a bit more about that emotional intelligence idea? Christine: 00:18:23 Yes, I'd be happy to. I think that there are many parents, I think I was one of them who want to protect their children from uncomfortable feelings, which is completely understandable. We don't want our children to feel badly. We don't want them to suffer. So, a parent might sort of in a way I wanna say unconsciously, they might deny a child's feeling or discount the feeling, they might say something like, there's nothing to be afraid of or don't be sad, I'll get you another hamster, thinking that this is going to help the child minimize these feelings of fear or sadness or loss and therefore the child is going to suffer less. Right? So, what can happen if we try to protect our children from feelings that we think are uncomfortable or hurt is that the child might subconsciously think their feelings don't matter. Christine: 00:19:31 Their feelings are not important or not allowed. So, when those feelings might come up for them, they might start to repress them and repressing or exiling feelings of course can lead to other problems. So, the idea then is to allow and encourage our children to feel their feelings as normal and healthy. Then this is going to...