Transforming Domination Culture from the Inside Out
I believe in the power of making requests.
Vulnerable, specific, actionable requests.
So many good things can happen when you make powerful requests:
~You offer people an opportunity to contribute to your life.
~You deepen your sense of self-connection and being “fully with” yourself.
~You exponentially increase your chances of having your needs actually met.
On the surface, making powerful requests is fairly simple:
Almost two decades ago, I passed through a toll booth on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. I held out my money to a toll taker, and in return he beamed at me, his smile radiant and his eyes kind. With the buoyant warmth of a parent talking to their beloved child, he asked, “How are you today, sweetheart?”
I thought to myself, “This person is spreading love to every single person who passes through. Amazing. What a meaningful way to spend your day.” He taught me in that 30-second exchange that anything we do, when imbued with love, can be deeply meaningful.
Every single human on this planet needs meaning and purpose. A sense that our life has a positive impact, and that our existence matters. An experience of making a meaningful contribution to one being or a lot of beings or the entire world.
What is your life’s unique purpose? What feels genuinely meaningful to you? And what keeps you from fully living that purpose?
I don’t know about you, but when I was younger, I accomplished a lot in my life through force, “willpower,” punishments and rewards, and deadlines (emphasis on the “dead” part, which is how I often felt at the finish line of projects and degrees).
I’d been conditioned to think that coercion, from myself or others, was the only way anyone got anything done—that left to our own devices we’d squander our lives and do absolutely nothing to contribute to the world—so I dominated myself and allowed others to dominate me into doing the things I loved until I no longer remembered what it felt like to love them.
I stayed in jobs, in relationships, in places, in situations, as long as there was even a shred of enjoyment. I was praised for my “stick-to-it-tiveness”—my tenacity, loyalty, and dedication. And I was pretty chronically angry and depressed from sticking with strategies that didn’t actually touch my needs.
Nonviolent Communication offers a vision that we all share the same universal human needs, and that there are infinite strategies to meet each of those needs. Violence arises when we lock into one strategy (one approach, one person, one group of people) to meet our needs, even if that strategy overpowers other parts of ourselves, other needs we have, other people, or our environment.
What would life be like if, instead, we put all of our needs on the table and came up with a creative set of strategies that touched all those needs?
What if we took our needs more seriously than our strategies?
–> Have you ever wanted to support someone, but what you said or didn’t say seemed to make things worse?
–> Do you rerun conversations afterward, cringing about what you said, and wishing you could have a “do-over”—even if you aren’t exactly sure what you’d do or say differently?
–> Do you fear conflict, because you’re not sure what turns tension into closeness?
–> Do you avoid reaching out to people because you’re afraid you won’t know what to say?
–> Do you long for your conversations to go deeper, to feel more intimate, to have more meaning, to leave everyone feeling warm and connected and cared for?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may be stuck in a “Response Rut,” such as:
When I started learning Nonviolent Communication (NVC) a decade ago, one of my first teachers heavily emphasized self-empathy—that is, sensing into our own feelings and needs as a method to understand and connect with ourselves—as the easiest and most readily available source of empathy and compassion. “Self-empathy is your best friend,” she said.
Her preference made logical sense. You’re with yourself all the time. If you’re in distress, why not soothe yourself?
Except that I couldn’t access self-empathy when I was in acute distress, or even mild distress. No matter how hard I tried, my attempts just didn’t make me feel better. They felt like a hollow, intellectual exercise that left me feeling worse.
I heard in her preference for self-empathy evidence of my own inadequacy: Why couldn’t I just decide to be there for myself, especially when I could see how much better my life and my relationships would be if I did “choose” self-compassion?