Non-Violent Communication and Family Estrangement
Non-Violent Communication is an excellent model for estranged adults to look into. This blog will look a little further into the differences between violent and non-violent behaviors. It will explore why having needs in any relationship, including family, is always valid.
Who is responsible for our feelings?
The underpinning principle of NVC is that, in adult life, we are all responsible for our own emotional landscape, our reactions, our choices, and responses to others.
I want to start with a trigger warning here. This fundamental aspect of self-responsibility in NVC can be challenging to grapple with if we have survived abuse, gaslighting or highly authoritarian models of parenting or behaviour. Reading this blog could feel quite unsafe, triggering and too challenging if you don’t yet have the embodied belief that the abuse you experienced was wrong and not your fault, or you have not recovered from the gas lighting, and know your thoughts, feelings and responses to harmful behaviour are always valid. It is a cognitive model of communication and can be healing when you have processed key trauma.
We become violent communicators when we label our own behaviour or our violent responses as someone else’s fault or responsibility. You made me do it, you make me feel like shit, you make me so angry, you made me leave, you make me explosive.
When we communicate violently, we are saying we had no choice in the matter, and our response is the other person’s creation. It is a disempowered place where we don’t recognise any control over our inner world and our ability to respond consciously.
I want to be clear and stress that this doesn’t apply to children in our care. A parent has a clear responsibility for a child’s health and wellbeing, both physical and psychological. That is in the contract of having children and choosing to raise them.
We can be responsible for our feelings and emotions in adult relationships because we have the critical function to make choices, and an ability to respond around how someone is behaving in relationship or stimulus from the world. Our brains are developed in our mid-twenties, and we have choices about how much we expose ourselves to in relationship, and what we internalise from others feedback. When we have processed our trauma, we have more awareness from what place we are responding from. We are in choice.
Yet sometimes society might make us imagine otherwise, when it comes to family relationships, and position them as relationships we should always maintain, no matter how you feel or how someone behaves.
We may well have trauma responses that feel out of our control. With the right space, help and support we can recognise these patterns and understand when it our wounded child responding vs. the adult part of us. This is where we can take responsibility. We are capable with time and healing to form responses that show others that we understand how the past may have impacted us and how it is showing up.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t feel how we authentically feel in response to someone communicating violently, which I will go on to talk about later. What I am outlining is that we all have the capacity to take personal responsibility for our behaviour and our responses. Maturity rests on us doing so. And for many people I see, this is what we wish others who have hurt us would do. We want people to own their actions and understand the impact these actions have on others.
Generational Trauma and Violent Communication in Family Life
The root of many estrangements I see in my practice is from parents that didn’t honour this responsibility towards their children’s wellbeing in childhood or adulthood.
With heavily authoritarian parenting styles being the norm in wartime and 50s generations, so came the norm that a child’s duty to respect the parent was more important than the child’s own health. It led to parenting where a child’s thoughts and feelings didn’t matter, weren’t heard, or were heard and ignored, deflected, and sometimes mocked or castigated. The needs of the child weren’t attuned to, and often if they spoke up for them, they were punished. All of which is violent communication.
Family was more of a household regime than a relationship and physical punishment, shaming, stonewalling and ostracising were normalised practices in controlling children.
What we now know from research is that these practices cause trauma and are considered adverse childhood experiences. Many of these parenting practices are now illegal in developed countries such as the UK, Australia, Spain and Canada.
The baby boomer generation, who are the parents of Gen X and Y, and the children of the wartime generation, therefore didn’t have a healthy model to draw from in their own experience of being parented. It was highly unlikely that their own parents ever allowed them the space to voice their feelings or challenge behaviour and label it unhealthy. Even as they grew into adulthood and had their own children, there was still a hierarchy and power dynamics in play.
How did they deal with the traumatic impact of this parenting for themselves? They did what their generation taught them to do with pain and trauma – swept it under the carpet and carried on supporting their parents dutifully. The heavy stigma around mental health and accessing external support gave them few other options. And when they became parents, their subconscious parenting instincts were highly influenced by authoritarian parenting playbook. In return, they expected that same sense of duty to emerge from their own children. Even if the values were watered down by the passing of time, and the changes in material wealth, authority was still present as the blueprint.
Adult family relationships have often become so problematic for adult children of these baby boomer parents, as they often grow into adulthood feeling at odds with the relationship, as it wasn’t meeting some very core human needs for love, warmth, acceptance and respect. These are all the aspects that research shows are common of a nourishing human relationships. And the expectations for relationships to be nourishing and fulfilling is very much now present, where it might not have been before. Generation X, Y, Z as they have much greater access to self-help and mental health support. The stigma around mental health and accessing therapy has decreased significantly, and for good reasons, meaning that suddenly we have a generation that is looking at and dealing with inter-generational trauma, and who are wanting to do it differently.
The phrase I hear the most from Gen X, Y and Z is that ‘I want to break the cycle’ and for many that means not having the influence of their own parents in the picture as they raise their kids, if their parents can’t grapple with how hurtful and unhealthy they may have been. They feel the hangover of the authoritarian model is just so toxic that they simply don’t want it as an influence.
So didn’t Gen X and Y try and talk about this? For the majority I see, yes, they did and do try and raise their feelings. Yet in this rigid model of parenting, the parents couldn’t accept responsibility for their behaviour and its impact. It was seen as disrespectful to their efforts and deflected back as the child’s problem in how they perceived or received their parenting. In this, there was a lot of violent communication and blaming the child for their feelings and reactions.
I’ve seen many parents diagnose their children with mental health issues for feeling something wasn’t right, or label their generation as wrong or self-obsessed for wanting something more nourishing from family relationships. Or belittle them with labels such as ‘snowflakes’ for being sensitive to what feels healthy in a human relationship.
I’ve also seen parents deflect strongly with the idea that they gave their children a home and an education and that they should be grateful for what they received rather than raising issues about what was missing. We can label these violent responses, as they don’t show respect to the other in terms of allowing them to have separate needs and the right to make requests.
These types of responses further denigrate the trust and sense of equality that we need in all adult relationships. It also gives rise to the belief that the person isn’t worthy of a voice in a relationship and that somehow their needs are wrong, and they don’t have the right to feel as they feel. This type of relationship cultivates some challenging core limiting beliefs. Fundamentally people may feel wrong to have relationship needs and express them. It can form the basis of people pleasing, where we go along with others needs as it feels like the safest way to live.
Relationship research shows that healthy relationships are seen to be open, honest, equal, boundaried and respectful with an ability to express discontent and move through into a new dynamic with compassion. Respect for the other human being and their individual truth and reality is the basis of how we communicate non-violently. We are all different and we all deserve respect for our differences.
Your needs are always valid
So in Non-Violent Communication, when we say that we are responsible for our own feelings, it is not to say that any feeling is thus wrong. We don’t want to shut down how we feel in response. It is always valid and very important to feel it. Feeling is healing. When we are activated, it is our work to feel authentically and process, but to come back to a place of regulation before we express and respond.
However, we can also do some work to appreciate why we might feel as we do, and what needs underpin these feelings. What needs shape my reality? And here lies an important point for those who are estranged from family members who never had the right to needs growing up. Whatever our needs may be, our needs are always valid.
So rather than spending time ruminating if our needs are realistic or unrealistic, valid or invalid, we can work to accept our authentic selves and tell ourselves it’s always OK to have needs. We are always right about what we need, and we are always best positioned to know what we need individually.
Other family members won’t always meet our needs
However, it can be challenging to accept that we can’t always guarantee that others will meet those needs. We can make request, for behaviour to stop, to see our grandchildren, to listen to a different perspective, to stay neutral, to go to rehab, to attend Christmas or Thanksgiving. Yet others are their own individual people and they may not be able to meet you in that way, even if they are family. Others have their own separate reality and their own needs to respond to. Ruminating on why others won’t change can be a real barrier to healing.
It’s healthy to spend time understanding how our trauma, our environment and our generational conditions might influence what we need as a human in these relationships. We can cultivate self-awareness and generational awareness. We can also work to understand how our needs might differ from others, and understand and be compassionate to why they need what they do, and why they may not be able to meet our needs and expectations. We can ask ourselves important questions. Do we have realistic expectations of others considering their circumstances? Are we respecting their differences and their individual human truth?
This is where I see family rifts and estrangements really take hold, as members tell each other that their needs and feelings aren’t valid, or that they have no right to have them if they can’t be met easily. Instead of accepting differences, we work to make the other one wrong. Instead of sitting in the tension and difficulty of two differing realities, and working on understanding each other with compassion, we respond by pathologising, othering and scapegoating individuals (or whole generations) if they don’t act as we feel they should in response to us.
Making powerful requests of family members
It’s an empowering step to be clear about what we need from family
“Are you open to hearing my truth and my experience about our relationship? When is a good time for me to share this with you?”
“When you criticise my career choices in front of my girlfriend, I feel ashamed and disrespected. My need is for you to show me respect and love as my parent when I am out with other people. My request is that you talk to me privately if you have problems with my choices.”
“When I don’t see the grandchildren, I feel lonely and worthless. My need is to feel part of raising the new generation of my family. My request is to see them more than once a month or if I can help you more with the childcare.”
“When you tell me that you don’t believe my experience in the family to be true, I feel lost and unsupported. My need is to feel that my truth and experience matters. My request is for you to try to listen to me more neutrally and accept my right to a different experience of our family.’
We can make requests, but we can’t hold expectations for others to always meet these. The most we can do to change others is to voice what we need in a healthy non-violent way. We can then make a decision about how we manage the response and the outcome of raising our truth. We may feel that because they are family, they should meet all our needs in adulthood and are wrong not to. This, I feel, is an unrealistic train of thought and perhaps some form of societal conditioning at work and indeed perhaps that sense of duty.
Our families aren’t always going to give us supportive relationships in adulthood, even if they seem to do in the media. And in this sense, we shouldn’t be so wedded to these unrealistic expectations of family.
Safety in family relationships
The pain I see in my practice is when people receive violent responses to very carefully phrased non-violent communications where they speak their truth and want to heal the relationship.
It is undoubtedly more easeful to practice non-violent communication with someone else who knows about it. I have a lot of compassion for older generations, who are somewhat on the back-foot, and it might all seem very alien and hard to learn.
Violent responses can include:
“You’re just being immature”
“I don’t care how you feel”
“Stop with this nonsense”
“We just need to get on with it.”
“I’m not sure how useful it is to think about all this.”
When we receive this kind of response, we need to take some time with ourselves. What are our needs? Do we need to be in a relationship where someone is quite openly saying that your feelings don’t matter, or where there isn’t the space to be heard without being criticised or minimised. The choice is really any relationship or pursuing more communication create a safer relationship…
“When you respond this way, I don’t feel safe.”
Should I have a relationship with someone who is communicating violently?
How do you feel? What is your tolerance to this? Only you can know what you need in your life. I have spent my career talking about how every family is different and each human will have a different level of tolerance for certain behaviours. I see people who can tolerate very violent behaviour with a limited relationship and a lot of boundaries, and others who can’t and don’t want that in their life at all. Each person is different and each of these choices deserves respect.
Relationships aren’t always perfect, and not all humans will meet all of our needs. It is likely in life we will have unmet needs, and feel disappointment that our preferences have not been met. Yet some needs are too fundamental to be left unmet in relationship.
I will speak from my own perspective here, but my core need is that there is safety in relationships. The space for me to express how I feel (at the appropriate and agreed time) and to be heard non-judgementally creates safety for me. It shows me that I matter to the other person and that the relationship matters. That sense of safety extends to my relationships with my family members. They don’t get a pass to be violent in any sense just because we are biologically related. I don’t feel a duty to have to tolerate disrespect as perhaps previous generations might have.
In keeping unsafe relationships in my life, I brought myself major struggle and it had a huge impact on my wellbeing. I made the choice to have a different and more peaceful life than to struggle with violent communication and its impact constantly.
In the end, I accepted that some of my close family members just couldn’t take responsibility for their actions or responses. My need for them was to do the work to be more self-aware but they couldn’t meet that need. Accepting this was painful, but it was necessary, and I had to grieve the parents I wished I’d had, and fully accept the ones I did get. And accept that for me, a safe relationship with them just wasn’t possible. I love them but there is a difference between love and relationship.
I do often feel all the emotions that come with estrangement, it doesn’t mean that choice has been easier necessarily. But I am glad I stood by my own need for safety and gave that to myself. I feel that my life is healthier and I have been more functional in the world.
The question I had to ask myself was if there was space and capacity for violence of any kind in my life?
Moving on from family estrangement
If we wish to break the cycle, it must be us focussing on how we behave going forward. We can’t change the past, or how others behaved in the past, or how we behaved in the past. We can change how we understand it in relation to our self worth; we can listen to ourselves, support ourselves and be mindful with how we play it forward with our own responses. We can do the work to be non-violent and that is as much as we can realistically expect.
Moving on, in my view, starts with accepting and being at peace with the fact we had important needs that couldn’t be met, and not questioning whether they are valid.
Our need for safety, respect and compassion is always valid.