Are we what we consume?

We want a mindset, a worldview, that lives outside of traditional binaries and judgments

Why? We feel fearful and concerned by the unmet need for choices available in binaries. Gay/Straight leaves out other and shifting orientations. Man/Woman gender binary leaves out other ways of being and seeing and the shifting that can occur. Right/Wrong are judgments that are based on individual feelings and the metness of various personal needs. We declare them as facts: you are wrong. We are right.

What we translate those statements into is this: we feel _____ when we see ____ because we have a/an met/unmet need for ______.

We observe that judging and using binaries are so much easier than experiencing and considering the complexity of every situation, of trying to decipher ours and everyone else’s feelings and needs, than collaborating and connecting and communicating and understanding, then empathy, compassion and consideration.

And we want to do that work until it becomes more automatic. We want to live outside the fear of judgments by able to translate them.

We worry that the practice, the doing the work, is made more difficult by our unmet needs for support and partnership and community. We have a therapist who meets our need for support of nonviolent communication and one who is trying to meet their and our needs for understanding and one who does not meet our need for understanding and support of NVC.

We have not found individuals who practice or want to learn NVC. Media and most other people do not meet our needs for shared reality.

So we fear that constant interactions with binaries, judgments, and forms of violence like coercion, manipulation, demands, criticism and guilt will not contribute to meeting our needs for progress and support

We worry that the more we consume ways we don’t want to interact, think, view the world, the more ingrained those ways become.

Establishing new ways without repetition, reinforcement, immersion does not meet our needs formovement, efficiency, progress

Strategies to limit binaries and violence include reducing media exposure, reducing engagement with people who prominently use binaries and judgments, taking the time to translate every interaction, every consumption of ideas, that we can.

Reducing engagement with virtually everyone is also likely to leave unmet needs for connection and closeness, so we hope translating interactions will prove a more effective strategy

Strategies to increase nonviolent interaction or thought might include taking the Compassion Course again through NYCNVC. A new year-long Course starts maybe next month. We tried it twice and did not meet need for community and did meet needs for learning. It didn’t meet our needs for community maybe because others still used judgments and binaries in interactions, which did not meet our needs for peace. Maybe those point to our strategy to increase our ability to translate violence into Nonviolence.

Another strategy is to keep speaking and writing Nonviolence in the hope it attracts people who are interested, with whom we might build community and connection and a shared reality

We asked our therapist who learned NVC to see us more than once per week as we usedto do before a 17-week leave by the therapist. They said no. We feel dejected.

Can you think of other strategies to reduce our binary and judgmental thinking? Do you agree that regular exposure to what we don’t want is contributing to unmet needs? Can you think of order e strategies to increase our ability to think nonviolently? and interact with others nonviolently? to increase our ability to translate violence into Nonviolence?