MW: What are the skills?
MR: This is a good time in my life to try to answer that. It took a while for me to get it through my thick skull that I was chosen for some reason. Whatever the skills are, there’s no question that they work, number one, and they work for wondrous people in wondrous ways. So after asking for a long time “why me Lord? I ain’t complaining, but why me?” lately I’ve been asking myself the question you’re asking. It seems strange to me that I don’t still know the answer. I have spent a lot of time in the last three months trying to find an answer so I can tell people what I do so that I can get money from them. For a long time, perhaps this comes from the Jewish tradition, I haven’t wanted to put names on this good thing, you know. I am what I am, or it is what it is, and to try to almost label or classify it diminishes or insults it.
The history of what I have called it can be documented from the titles of the little manual I sell. It was first called A Manual for Responsible Thinking and Communicating. Then From Now On. I didn’t want to give it a name. From Now On was a poem I wrote. Then, A Model for Nonviolent Persuasion, and then Nonviolent Communication. Vicki and I and our group in California used to sit around like the old theologians, for hours talking about what to call it. None of us could stand the words like “the model,” with the political and spiritual nausea that provokes. The word “communication skills” rankled us.
But, now I think I know somebody who knows the answer, and I’m very excited about her. I think she will be another Vicki in my life. Her name is Annie Muller, and she is married to Martin Muller, who is a religious leader of great power, who lives in San Diego. Annie has extraordinary religious powers herself and has a group of people for whom she is a leader, a powerful leader. Annie saw the power I had in the first five minutes she was with me. She saw me mediate a conflict between her and another person, and she understood better than I do what I do and what the skills are. I’m trying to pump her for what it is.
Let me try to give a quick answer to your question, which is the best answer I’ve come up with. The first time I skied was on a hill with a rope tow. It was one of the most miserable days of my life. I’d grab on too quickly and fall. People behind me would whine and complain, and I’d get mortified. By the end of the day, I finally got the hang of it, but my muscles were so sore, I dreaded doing it again. Somebody told me about this simple little metal thing you attach to the rope. It cost about a dollar. The skills are like that little metal thing. Not knowing the thing existed, I suffered. Once I discovered it, going up the hill was a breeze. Just as the clamp uses the power of the rope to tow you to the top of a hill, which opens up all kinds of possibilities, the skills are a way of tapping into this wonderful, warm, great source of power. When I tie into it, miracles happen with people—that’s not too strong a word. So what are the skills? They are this little device, simple device.
MW: It sounds like the power is something that melts away the barriers between people and creates an experience of solidarity or connection.
MR: That’s it. I have no better way of describing it than that. My agnosticism dissipates when I experience that, especially the inevitability of it. There’s something so awesomely beautiful in that that it makes doubts flee away. I know God through that. The power is always there, and it can be tuned into at any time.
Talking about this stuff is extremely frightening for me. Once, in the throes of all the stuff that was happening in San Francisco with Vicki, a newspaper reporter interviewed me and followed me around for two days. Then he wrote an article which made me seem like a cross between Billy Graham and Rasputin. I didn’t mind people not understanding it, or even calling me names or misinterpreting it, if I can pour out to them the things that are the most important to me. I don’t like to share something of beauty with somebody who just doesn’t know how to receive it. I usually don’t talk about it if there’s even the likelihood that people will not understand and think I’m some strange person talking mystical language. It has been wonderful to be able to share this with you because you understand at such a beautiful level and ask me questions that help me to get at the fun stuff. It gets me thinking mystically about your coming at this time, because there is probably nothing more important for me to do than to stop at this time when I’m so caught up in so much a frenzy of activity, setting up all of these things, to take time to review what’s been good and what the purpose is.
We haven’t clarified something that has happened in the past seven years, which you could call the feminization of the model. Let me describe several of the major ingredients in it. One was the Midwest Radical Therapy Conference, which I attended about eight years ago. I had gotten really excited by Repression or Revolution, by Michael Glenn and Richard Cunas, which took a political perspective on psychotherapy. They were part of the radical therapy collective, so I took a chance and went to their conference when I saw it advertised. I say I took a chance because of how broke I was then. Brett, my son, was living with me, and I didn’t know how to get the rent together, and almost didn’t have money for food.
So I went out to drive a cab and that had to be one of the most discouraging days of my life because with my Ph.D. and all, I didn’t qualify to drive a cab because I didn’t have a chauffeur’s license. I had to gather pop bottles to get the money together for the chauffeur’s license. Driving a cab, I had time to look hard at a dilemma that’s plagued me for a long time the whole time. There’s the power of this process, and all of the people so grateful about it, and I’m to survive driving a cab. I realized that people thought I was wealthy. They thought I had more work than I needed. Also, I usually waited for the people to initiate stuff. So I decided to request more help of people, and that was one reason I spent my last fifty-five dollars to go to the conference. It turned out to be the best investment I ever made, because l met people and made connections that I still have. But more than anything, it really gave me the stimulus for the feminization of the process.
The conference brought to my attention the idea of strokes, which I came to see as very important. At first it seemed contrived and artificial, but these people and some experiences I had with them really opened my eyes. I started to see the power in it. I saw the hunger that people have for affirmations and appreciation. I talked about this with some of my colleagues who were at the conference, and decided to build strokes into the model, so that it would be not just a way of resolving conflicts, but a way to really enhance life.
I also started to be aware of how little celebrating and playing I did, both in my personal life and in my workshops, and how my preoccupation with violence and how to get out from underneath it had colored things. I saw how much more powerful it would be to bring into the teaching the concepts of appreciation and celebration and nurturance and compassion. My workshops before this time used a language of conflict resolution, and talked about how to get power with people and stuff like that. They focused entirely on helping people deal with behaviors that were painful to them and finding ways of changing them. There is nothing about celebrating with people or affirming each other, or the words “nurturance” or “compassion”. Now, I bring these things to the fore and want people in my workshops to see very early that this is what it’s about. So that is a radical departure that I’ve made
One of the people who really helped me with is feminization process was Uta Simons. She was profoundly influential in my life for the past few years. She has compassion and an exquisite skill of seeing the beauty that exists even in a lot of terrible stuff, and of creating beauty in the world. She just has an antenna that goes out for seeing who is hurting and needs compassion, but also sees how to bring joy and beauty into a situation. So the importance of beauty and thinking of how to make the environment nurturing and supportive, is all part of the learning that I got from Uta and people at the Midwest Radical Therapy Movement. This is part of a broader movement away from an achievement, competition kind of thing in my life to trying to be more nurturing and compassionate. So this has affected not just what I teach, but also who I am.
The other change that goes along with this is becoming more open, and being able to be more vulnerable and risk stuff. I have been doing that for quite a while, but even doing that, I would be very frightening to a lot of people. It’s a big risk to be open but also to be nurturing, be really caring about people’s well-being and then to devote my full attentions and energies to that, to get that integrated into the whole process. It became very clear that compassion is what it is all about. I have always struggled with not wanting to sound like a religious zealot, and so I have been very conservative about bringing the spiritual into things. For me, the spiritual and the feminine go together.
Vicki encouraged me to come out of the closet about the political nature of the skills. I worried that if we were too political and make things too clear people would label us Communists, and it would be harder to get jobs in the school systems. But I started, with her prodding, to come out more, and I am very delighted with how this has worked out.
MW: How are the skills political?
MR: This goes back to Szasz and Hakeem who showed that by confusing value judgments with scientific judgment, people could be used as tools of the state. By labeling people as depressed and implying that there’s something wrong within them, the social structures that make that world depressive for any person to be in are ignored. The reason we have many of the hang-ups that we do is because we are trained to be docile and subservient so we can function within hierarchically structured industrial settings. That’s really the purpose of our education, and that is not a purpose that is likely to eventuate in peoples’ psychological well-being. In almost every workshop, I say to people “you know why it is that we’re all sitting around here having so much trouble saying what we want? Because we have never been taught to express what we want. We were taught to be good little girls and boys, and why? Because if we are going to be hired, we’ve got to know that there are some things you have to do whether you like to do them or not.” My political message is that we have been taught things that are really anti-human. We have been taught them not by bad people, but because the society we live in required this kind of learning.
Next: Wedlock