Resolving conflict through constructive empathic inquiry

In the first post of this series, I argued that most conflicts suffer from inadequate resolutions and tend to spiral into vicious cycles of increasingly antagonistic defensiveness that can end up having drastic consequences on a large scale. I identified poor internal and external understanding and deficient communication as its main causes. In this second and final post, we'll delve deeper into the specifics and explore concrete procedures we can follow to work on solving these issues through the lens of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a framework for empathic inquiry.

This post will answer many of the questions raised in the previous one. It will expand on what makes our default mode of communication unhelpful and the bad habits we need to overcome to untangle empathy bottlenecks. It will also lay out some practical steps we can start taking to practice and improve constructive communication.

Let's start with a brief presentation of NVC.

Nonviolent Communication #

Nonviolent Communication was developed in the 1970s by Marshall Rosenberg, an American psychologist. It takes inspiration from Carl Rogers' person-centered approach to therapy and the philosophy of nonviolence, which strongly promotes refraining from causing harm to other living beingsIn thoughts, words, and deeds, regardless of circumstance. This can even apply to self-defense in many cases. It's mostly derived from the spiritual Indian concept of ahimsa promoted by Gandhi, though one can find echoes of it in many different traditions, such as Christian martyrs, for example. and has been embodied by several movements of civil resistance such as those spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Before we get started, I'd like to disclaim that I don't have any official certification and am by no means an expert when it comes to NVC. I still have much to learn and improve upon when it comes to its implementation and I am writing these posts as much for myself as for the readers. However, I do find it very inspiring and have been incorporating it into the way I communicate increasingly for a few years now.

If you would like to learn more, you can read the book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life and watch recordings of Rosenberg's teachings, which I quote a few times in the following paragraphs. I think that an important aspect of NVC's philosophy eludes written explanation, so I particularly recommend the latter. It only really clicks when it can both be understood on an intellectual and emotional level, which is much more likely to happen when you see it in action.

With all that said, what can we learn from this framework? One of NVC's main concepts is the distinction it makes between two different communication paradigms: Jackal and Giraffe languages. Jackal is the language we're taught by default in our current societies and it is intrinsically woven with violent undertones. Giraffe language, named after the land animal with the biggest heart, is the alternative laid out by the framework, although it's presented as the more natural, if less habitual, of the two.

In the previous post, I claimed that breaking free from our vicious loops of fruitless and bitter conflicts would require dropping some bad habits. It's time to describe them and understand where they come from by delving into Jackal language.

Jackal language #

Domination and judgements #

Whose fault?

Let's play the blame game, I love you more
Let's play the blame game for sure
Let's call out names, names, I hate you more
Let's call out names, names, for sure

I'll call you bitch for short
As a last resort and my first resort
You call me motherfucker for long
At the end of it, you know we both were wrong

— Kanye West, "Blame Game"

Jackal language is predicated on a zero-sum game of domination. As such, it's optimized for competition rather than collaboration and delineates winners from losers. It arbitrates this classification on the basis of mutually exclusive "rightness" and "wrongness", with all contestants vying for the monopoly on the former, which necessitates pigeonholing the competition in the latter. Through the lens of this framing, interlocutors become adversaries.

The weapons of choice to wage this war are moralistic and inflexible judgments. In cases of conflict, both direct and indirect, we'll often resort to the labels they provide in an attempt to indelibly taint our competitors' very essence with wrongness. We'll brand them as selfish, dumb, greedy, incompetent, lazy, evil, and so on. Whatever sticks.

This serves two major purposes. The first is to win the race—to beat them to the punch at being right. If we can't outshine them from the heights of our virtue, the next best thing is to push them lower than where we stand. The second is to make them feel bad about themselves in the hopes it'll make them more amenable.

Rewards and punishments #

Operant conditioning, i.e. modulating behavior with rewards and punishments, is a cornerstone of Jackal language. It's how you get people to do what you want them to. Guilt and shame make for easy and versatile punishment tools, and as such, are a staple of this mode of communication. You can also use them as rewards by slightly alleviating their weight once the victim has complied with your requirements.

According to Rosenberg, "sorry" is one of the most important Jackal words. It's indeed a good illustration of this process. Someone does something we don't like, so we cast aspersions upon them until they feel bad enough to be ripe for subjugation, at which point we can exact an apology from them. This is the only token we're willing to trade to redeem some of their human worth. In doing so, they must officially capitulate and acknowledge that we were right whereas they were wrong. Obviously, it doesn't work as well with every type of situation and person, but it's quite effective in familial settings and with close ones who already have a substantial emotional investment in us.

This is the pernicious violence that Nonviolent Communication shuns. Within the parameters of Jackal language, we threaten to make the other suffer and are more than willing to follow through in order to secure getting our way. Physical aggression isn't the only way to play this game. It's simply the next step in the escalation cycle if the previous strategies didn't do the trick.

As you can imagine, this type of interaction is neither conducive to tenderness and merriment on both ends nor sustainable and harmonious relationships. Actually, its frequent and acute usage strongly correlates with estrangement. John Gottman, one of the leading researchers on marriage, identified that one of the highest predictors of divorce is the presence of criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and/or stonewalling in a couple's communication. All of these fall neatly within the scope of Jackal languageI acknowledge stonewalling isn't always used as an intentional punishment. However, in that specific case, it's a coping mechanism caused by emotional overwhelm and underdeveloped self-regulation, which can both be alleviated by following NVC..

If the entire process is undesirable for all parties involved, then why do we keep enforcing it? As stated in the previous post, part of it is due to feedback loops. It's easier to snap back and resort to aggression when we're feeling hurt and defensive. However, it's also a reflex because that's what we were taught through example as we grew up. We even use Jackal language when we castigate ourselves for our own perceived failings.

Pervasive addictive violence #

In his recorded San Francisco workshop, Rosenberg shares a disquieting insight from Walter Wink's book, The Powers That Be. In order to sustain themselves, domination cultures must instill an enjoyment of violence in their populations. According to him, we've done a good job of that and I'd have to concur.

He points out that we're taught violence as a pillar of problem and conflict resolution starting at a very early age, not only from the interactions with adults and older kids we witness and endure but also from our fictional role models. Watching most heroes solve their quarrels through beatings or murders and emulating them represents a generous portion of our recreational activities.

The Romans cheered at the sight of gladiators gutting each other in the arena. Since then, moral standards have evolved and we're a touch more subtle in our approach. Nowadays, I get my kicks out of witnessing troubled people berating each other online, watching action movies where the protagonist single-handedly causes demographic declines, when I'm not the one improvising facial terraforming on unsuspecting foes by means of sawed-off shotguns in video games, or indulging in meat-based products predicated on industrialized violence on a monstrously large scale. All of it can be very pleasurableI might be reaching diminishing returns on the first. It takes a decent amount of skill and care to make a good invective. I find run-of-the-mill slanderous insults depressing for the most part.. My name is Arthur, and I'm a violenceaholic. I'm part of the problem.

If I'm feeling mighty reluctant to give up on most of these pastimes despite a natural aspiration towards nonviolence, what does that say for the world at large? It ain't looking good...

To be clear, I'm neither trying to cast moral aspersions on the act of partaking in these activities nor demanding people cut them from their lives. I'm simply pointing out that violence permeates a substantial amount of our daily gratifications, and if we truly are committed to worldwide harm reduction, that's probably an important factor to take into account. It suddenly makes more sense that progress on curtailing violence is so sluggish despite everyone loudly claiming it's what they want if we're all unwittingly heavily incentivized to maintain the status quo to varying degrees.

Social justice theory has an interesting concept of internalized oppressionGranted, it's not always brought up in the most thoughtful manner. (such as racism, homophobia, or sexism). I think if we dig a layer deeper, we'll find that we're all united in suffering from an epidemic of internalized violence.

In a similar vein of leftist analysis, Mark Fisher popularized the concept of capitalist realism to describe the social resignation to view capitalism as the only system to organize society around, to the point of struggling to even conceptualize alternatives. Again, substituting capitalism with violence works just as well, if not better, I'd argue. The resignation is even stronger on that one. A concerning number of communists drool at the fantasy of slaughtering their landlord when striketh the time of the proletarian revolution (whilst not being proletarians themselves, mind you).

We tend to cherry-pick a couple of causes and a few effects to focus on and are quick to condemn those who resort to a bit more violence than our personal threshold of comfort, but it is far more pervasive than we'd like to admit. It's not just internalized but also institutionalized, our entire societies are steeped in it. Even most of our proposed solutions to violence are completely reliant on it. If we kill all the "bad guys," let them stew in a forsaken hole in atonement long enough, or revile and beat the compassion back into them, we'll fix the world. In the end, we're only perpetuating the cycle. Wick referred to this as the "myth of redemptive violence."

So what is the solution, then? Is fully abstaining from violence even possible? Should we bury our pipe dreams of earnest, joyful, and consensual coexistence? Based on the example of a few outstanding individuals, we can note that it takes courage, effort, time, and a lot of unlearning, but it can be done. One of them even laid out a how-to guide for our everyday interactions. He called it Giraffe language.

Giraffe language #

The four components of honest expression #

As you might have guessed, Giraffe language avoids the good guy, bad guy routine altogether without sacrificing honesty in the process. Actually, it makes communication clearer and more genuine because it addresses the heart of the issue instead of wrapping it in insults and judgments.

It's made of four elements: observations, feelings, needs and requests.

Nonviolent communication shows us both how to make these four components clear to people and [they] basically answer two questions: what's alive in us—you see when we say what is contributing to our well-being, how we feel, and what needs are behind our feelings, that answers the question of what's alive in us at a given moment—and a second question that nonviolent communication directs itself to is what would make life more wonderful? And that's where our requests come in.

— Marshall Rosenberg (source)

Observations #

Observations are specific, factual, and neutral descriptions of what triggered an emotional reaction, which can either be pleasant or unpleasant. For example, "We agreed you would clean the dishes on weekdays, but when I came back from work Monday and Tuesday, it was still in the sink" rather than "You never do the dishes" or "You're such a lazy ass." On a more positive note, it could also be "when you brought me a snack after my long work session."

Notice that specificity is important both when you're satisfied and unsatisfied with the situation. NVC shuns punishments and rewards alike, which include pretty vague compliments (i.e. positive judgments) like "you're so sweet" or "you're really smart". Use these four components instead.

Feelings #

The next part is expressing the feelings sparked by what was described in the observations. Feelings and thoughts are two distinct types of entities. As a rule of thumb, a feeling can usually be described with one or two words. For example, in an unpleasant situation, you may feel "worried", "frustrated", "lonely" or "baffled". On the other hand, in a pleasant situation, you may feel "warm", "touched", "serene" or "delighted".

They should be centered on you, not on your interlocutor's perceived behavior. Refrain from sneaking in some half-judgments in disguise, such as feeling "betrayed", "rejected", "judged" or "insulted".

If you struggle with identifying and/or expressing your feelings, you can find online inventories to help you triangulate what's going on inside. There used to be a set of them directly accessible on the official NVC website, but they've now been transformed into a PDF. You can get it for free, but you need to fill out a form first. The inventories are also a available on this website with no requirements for access.

Needs #

As we covered in Part 1, feelings are spawned from needs. Pleasant feelings arise when our needs are met, and unpleasant feelings when our needs aren't being met. They may well be the most important element to identify and communicate. Like feelings, they're usually described in one or two words. They are also mostly interchangeable with values.

Examples include "intimacy", "to understand and be understood", "authenticity", "joy", "harmony", "independence" and "learning". The aforementioned inventories also contain a list of needs and can help you unearth them. Do note that no inventory is fully exhaustive and it's perfectly possible to have needs that don't figure in it.

Requests #

The previous three elements help convey what's going on clearly and empathically. A request helps "make life more wonderful", to quote Rosenberg, by opening up negotiations with an initial suggestion serving as an example. Note the emphasis on suggestion. It isn't a requirement, and our interlocutors are free to refuse. The goal is for all people involved to get their needs met, so counter-offers are welcome.

A request should be a clear, explicit, and optional proposition for a strategy to better fulfill a need.

So let's take it from the top by illustrating what the four elements might look like when put together. What would the following unhelpful Jackal statement: "I can't believe you're so selfish and rude! You always leave me hanging!" look like in Giraffe? Here's an example: "When I send you a pretty long text message and you don't respond for several days, I feel anxious because my need for visibility isn't being met. Would you be willing to send me a short message to let me know that you've read it but are currently unavailable and give me a rough estimate of when to expect an answer?".

The exact order in which you mention these four elements doesn't really matter. They serve more as guidelines than strict rules. Occasionally, you can skip some of them, depending on the context. The most important part is establishing an empathic connection and maintaining it from this point forward.

Now that we've covered the basics, let's mention a few additional things to keep in mind.

Avoiding criticism #

When you try to apply this model in your life, try to do your best to avoid slipping in some sneaky judgments and/or passive-aggressiveness, as it'll make your interlocutor more defensive and harm the empathic connection. This is surprisingly harder than you might imagine. One general tip is to always stay focused on yourself and avoid making statements about your interlocutors. If you must, favor mentioning specific behaviors ("when you did X") rather than stapling cagey labels on the person ("you are X").

This advice will sometimes be formulated as making "I feel" statements in pop psychology circles, but it's far too easy for those to go completely off the rails. Most often, they actually convey a thought rather than a feeling and only serve as a milquetoast disclaimer of subjective interpretation before laying it thick with the judgments. They're basically the same as an "in my opinion" or a "but I could be wrong," if not worse, due to their deceptive framing. "I feel that you're being abusive." "I feel that you're hiding things from me." "I feel that you don't care about me." Well, I feel that "I feel" statements are pretty aggravating rhetorical sleight of hand.

If you're anything like me, you'll most likely fail to heed this advice on the regular. Try not to be too hard on yourself. Reinforcing your inner Jackal doesn't help temper its external counterpart. Notice where and how you floundered, and try your best to do better next time.

So far, most of what I've described is heavily focused on expressing ourselves. However, Giraffe language goes both ways and also applies when we're on the receiving end.

Giraffe ears #

Unfortunately, even if you start striving to communicate in a nonviolent fashion, the people around you aren't suddenly going to change their ways in sync with you. You may slowly influence them with time, but in the beginning and with most new people you encounter, you'll have to deal with both struggling to overcome your interactional conditioning and withstanding their Jackal onslaughts. The latter don't help make the former easier, as retaliation tends to have been pretty deeply ingrained into us, and keeping a patient and compassionate composure under a shower of pernicious jibes takes practice.

That's where Giraffe ears come in. They mostly consist of shifting our interpretations of the criticism we're subjected to. Instead of focusing on ourselves and endangering our sense of self-worth, we focus on our interlocutors and try to decipher what they are actually trying to say behind the Jackal adulteration. Indeed, through the lens of the NVC framework, they are emotionally reacting to a specific situation because one or more of their needs aren't being met, just like you. They're simply suffering from a partial lack of awareness and a very unhelpful means of communication. That's what Rosenberg meant when he said that "every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need."

With [Giraffe ears] all you can hear is the only thing human beings are ever saying: "Please" and "Thank you." That's all. We're going to show you today, that what used to sound like criticism, judgments, blame are simply tragic suicidal expressions of please.

— Marshall Rosenberg (source)

This can be more or less challenging depending on the situation. When you're unfazed by the criticism coming your way, it's easy to take a step back and kick-start the inquiry process. However, when they hit square into a chink in your armor, a long-neglected, recurrently misunderstood part of yourself forgotten in arid loneliness and beseeching for a smidge of genuine empathy, it's easy to get overpowered by your inner Jekyll JackalYes, I know, the monster alter-ego is Mr. Hyde, not Dr. Jekyll. Stop ruining my snazzy puns, you meanie. and only remember your pledge to nonviolence once you've quenched your thirst for rampage with reckless abandon. As Ram Dass put it, "If you think you’re spiritually enlightened, try spending time with your parents."

This is why developing a good understanding of yourself is an important part of transitioning to this new communication paradigm.

Empathizing with yourself #

Peace from within begets peace from without #

The first step to letting go of hostility in your interactions with others is to start by nurturing a compassionate, empathic connection with yourself.

If you want to use the four components of NVC, you'll have to identify your inner feelings and needs before you can convey them. By default, most of our reactions will come to us encoded in Jackal ("I can't believe the gall of this boorish mumpsimus") rather than the more helpful alternative of a neatly sorted pile of situations, feelings, and needs ("When this gentleman repeatedly interrupts the other speakers, it makes me feel indignant and frustrated because my needs for respect and consideration aren't being met").

Building a habit of empathizing with yourself, especially when strong inner reactions emerge, will help you become more aware of your own needs and how they influence the types of situations that soothe or aggravate you.

The better you get at self-understanding and regulation, the less susceptible you'll be to outbursts. As mentioned in the last post, feedback loops play an important role in determining whether the level of antagonism in an interaction escalates or deescalates. If you're able to remain even-tempered on your end, it will help dampen the vicious cycle.

Furthermore, since most people will suck at providing you with first-rate empathy—assuming they're even trying to in the first place—if you'd like some, your best bet is to start learning some self-sufficiency.

So, how do we go about that?

Practice, preparation and reframing #

As stated above, the first step is to identify the specific triggering event and the feelings and needs involved. Each of these can be pretty tricky, depending on the situation and your natural proclivities, or lack thereof. It helps to pull out the aforementioned inventory, whittle it down to a category, and find the best matches within.

In the beginning, it's easier to practice by yourself or in the presence of friendly interlocutors without the added challenge of external antagonism. As such, ideally, you want to find strong emotional triggers from a remote source and sort things out from the comfort of your home. For example, this could come in the form of artwork like songs, movies, and books or online content like videos, essays, and comments. Mulling over the memory of an unresolved situation that still stirs up feelings can also work.

As you keep up this practice, you'll start to notice some recurrent needs that seem to carry more weight than others for you. These are good indications of strong personal values and you should take note of them. This makes NVC-powered introspection an effective strategy to improve your self-knowledge, especially in times when you're particularly impassioned, be it positively or negatively.

The Internal Family System (IFS) psychotherapeutic model names these reactive sparks "trailheads". Focusing on them and fleshing them out is a significant component of its process of healing and growth. In my opinion, NVC and IFS complement each other very well; the latter is a good lens to better understand inner conflict and, in turn, external conflict. Unfortunately, this post is already protracted as it is, so I'll save this topic for another time.

With this in mind, try to shift your mindset regarding becoming aggravated. See these situations as opportunities rather than gratuitous ordeals. Following "what's alive in you" down the rabbit hole will lead you to previously unidentified yet important parts of yourself. Be thankful for the tasteless twits that cause your raging bouts of exasperation for bringing you closer to yourself through butthurt-fueled epiphaniesA substantial amount of progress and clarification on this blog was due in part to me getting repeatedly triggered by otherwise thoughtful people dismissing the value of the rational/subjective balance and inconsistently adjudicating what has the right to be considered reasonable. Sometimes going so far as using it as a demarcation line for enforced ostracization.. Without even realizing it, they're actually helping you out—in an obnoxious, infuriating way

To conclude this section, let me share this interesting exercise Marshall Rosenberg suggests for cultivating more resilient Giraffe ears. As stated earlier, it's an unforeseen, nasty jab in one of our sensitive spots that will usually knock us off our empathic listening stance. Accordingly, we can become sturdier if we lower our odds of being blindsided by making preparations in a safe environment beforehand. To this end, he recommends making three lists:

1. What our inner critic most often says when lambasting our own shortcomings (e.g. "You can't ever do anything right").
2. What we most often say or think when we're levying judgments on others (e.g. "Stop being such a sniveling wimp").
3. Which castigations we're most afraid of being struck down with (e.g. "The problem with you is that you're too sensitive").

Once we've compiled these lists, we can start applying the NCV deciphering protocol to each one and try to infer what feelings and needs underlie them. This way, if we get ambushed by one of them in the future, we'll already know how to break it down into NVC components, which will come in very handy to keep a cool head.

Now that we've become half-decent at empathizing with ourselves, it's time to tackle how to proceed with others.

Empathizing with others #

Zeroing in collaboratively #

As I said in the previous post, it's good to keep in mind that, on average, people fare just as poorly at empathizing with themselves as with others. Hence, they may miss the forest for the trees and get overly attached to one inadequate strategy to comfort a latent need. This means getting to the bottom of the issue is most often an iterative process. The more we connect to "what's alive in them," the stronger our empathic bond. Conversely, the more we invalidate or overwrite their experience, the faster we'll sour the exchange and alienate them.

The Imago Dialogue framework is a good guide to follow. The first step is making sure we're on the same page. We want to secure a clear understanding of what they're sharing with us and explicitly show them that we do.

This is easier to do when we focus on small steps that lay less ground for misunderstandings. In order to ensure we aren't mistaken, we frequently check in with them, so should we be, they can nip it in the bud; otherwise they have concrete proof we do get it. We can do this by mirroring what they say, i.e. paraphrasing their words back to them, as well as asking for further clarifications if needed. In the latter case, try to make a show of good faith by laying out a few possible interpretations and doing your best to pinpoint the areas of confusion, rather than simply shutting them down with "I don't get it" or "This doesn't make any sense to me".

Once we feel we have a firm enough grasp on what they're telling us, the next step is positing hypotheses about the feelings and needs alive in them. If we get it right, they'll get a strong sense of confirmation that we do indeed empathize. If we get it wrong, we keep zeroing in patiently and optimistically based on their corrective feedback.

During the entirety of the process, do your best to clarify and help the other person self-empathize by explicitly pointing out and referring to the four NVC components: specific situations, feelings, needs, and requests.

If you'd like an example of what this may look like, I'd recommend listening to this striking example narrated by Rosenberg in this fairly short video. In the same video, he also mentions some behaviors we tend to confuse with empathy, which reap bitterly counter-productive results. Let's cover a few of the main offenders.

Be wary of deceptive empathy impersonators #

The video opens with the example of an exercise he gave to some psychiatrists. They had to come up with an empathic reaction to a patient coming in and saying, "I'm feeling so depressed. I don't know that I want to keep alive. I think the world would be better off without me." One of them got very upset because her submission made other participants wince audibly. She had written, "That's ridiculous! You have everything to offer."

People tend to have the bad habit of focusing too much on the statements attached to the feelings expressed, rather than the latter. Empathy isn't placating or cheering up the other person with empty reassurance. It's not fixing the issue with our pristine problem-solving skills and unsolicited advice. Neither is it debating their emotions down into submission with facts and logic. That's the surest way to dissolve any smidgeon of trust they might've held that we would ever understand them. These tactics are more geared toward helping us escape the discomfort of the situation than actually being present with our interlocutor's experience.

Empathy isn't about you. It's about listening and connecting with the other. What's ironic is that we all already know this because we've suffered from these empathy impersonators firsthand when we were on the other side of the interaction. They feel more like a slap in the face than support. They're invalidating and give off the impression that our conversation partner is seeing straight past us. We have a pretty good genuine empathy detector and can easily sniff out counterfeits. Nevertheless, some of these bad habits are deeply ingrained and hard to shake off when we're back on the empathizer hot seat.

It's also unfortunately too easy to muddle two different concepts frequently associated with empathy, namely feeling with and feeling forI've borrowed these names from the second edition of Internal Family Systems Therapy by Richard Schwartz and Martha Sweezy.. To make matters worse, people never seem to be able to agree on which term to use for which (empathy, sympathy, compassion, the list goes on):

• Feeling with refers to feeling the same thing as the other, for example, physically cringing when you see someone have a nasty fall or becoming sad as you watch someone cry. It's a form of emotional contagion.
• Feeling for on the other hand, doesn't necessarily entail synchronizing with their emotions but building an accurate inner representation of what it must be like to be in their shoes.

In our case, the empathy I'm talking about is feeling for. It's fine if you feel with the other too, but it's neither required nor sufficient to build the connection. If a friend tells you someone close to them has passed away and you share that you feel sad about it, you're still focusing on yourself rather than them. Prioritize demonstrating feeling for first.

To recap, validating a feeling doesn't mean you endorse all the statements that accompany it. However, you won't be able to address and make progress on those until you've established an empathic connection, and endless quibbles over their rightness or wrongness aren't going to help get you there. All the things I've listed can be perfectly fine, as long as they're not passing themselves off as empathy. They might even be welcome depending on the context, but be sure that your interlocutor is interested in hearing them and that you've secured understanding and trust first.

Conclusion #

When people trust that you value what's alive in them, what they're feeling and needing at a given moment, that that takes more precedence for you than whether what they're saying is right or wrong, this has a big impact on the relationship. It makes compassionate connecting much easier when people really feel that what's alive in them is what matters to you.

— Marshall Rosenberg (source)

In the first post, I described how unproductive conflict resolution can be explained by a generalized lack of proper empathy inquiry. In this one, thanks to Nonviolent Communication, we explored both a new lens of analysis for understanding this problem and a framework to bypass it. Indeed, this bonding impediment is caused and upheld through the use and internalization of what NVC dubbed Jackal language, a paradigm of interaction predicated on domination.

It keeps us divided and confused by concealing our true feelings and needs under criticism and judgment. NVC provides tools to help us overcome these misdirections by focusing on more essential and genuine components of our internal experience. The more we lean on its wisdom, the better we're able to be compassionately present with that of others and assertively vulnerable about our own.

It's important to remember that disentangling the empathy bottleneck by establishing an empathic connection is a prerequisite for conflict resolution and, more broadly, unobstructed communication. This is why overlooking questionable claims, at least initially, and validating the underlying feelings they are hiding is crucial, whereas getting bogged down on factual legitimacy is largely inefficient, if not outright detrimental.

The best way to help others is to help ourselves first by focusing on healing our own inner wounds, as we'll bring enhanced clarity and equanimity along with our presence and cause less harm in the long run. Inspiring the people around us through our example is the most constructive way to enact sustainable change.