Day 39: Compassionate communication recap

That workshop that Andy and I attended on compassionate communication? Man, it is coming in quite handy already. It was so worth attending, even though I swore I wouldn’t travel in December. I suppose a little recap is in order?

The background: I first heard about compassionate communication a couple years ago from my friend Lisa (who is I think too shy for blog links). It’s also called nonviolent communication (NVC), which is such poor framing that we will not use that term again. On Lisa’s recommendation, I checked out the library book but never read it. I also got an audiobook from the library but accidentally listened to the discs out of order, got confused and gave up.

I heard about it again from the amazing Havi, and since familiarity with compassionate communication is a prerequisite to being one of her Right People (and hello, genius idea for having that in your Right People qualification list), I got the book out of the library again. Still didn’t read it. Andy read some of it, though, and he was chirping about how good it was. Eh, I planned to get to it eventually.

Well, Thanksgiving weekend in our household sucked big time. What we both hoped would be four solid days of togetherness and productivity and basically an all-around lovefest became a perfect storm of miscommunication, hurt feelings, self-flagellation and dread. Majorly sucktastic. I haven’t felt that bad in a while, and it was no picnic for Andy either. We were pretty desperate. Monday morning Andy got the idea to go to some other workshop by himself, but then I found this one and we decided to go together instead.

We got lucky not only on the timing but on the content as well. If we had sat down with the leader of the training and explained our habitual communication problems, they would have been hard pressed to design a better program. The only thing I didn’t like about the training was that it went about 3 hours too long for me. I get saturated quickly, and we learned so much in such a short time that, well, I had to sleep for an entire day when we got back just to give my body time to process everything.

I honestly don’t know how I could have appreciated the value of learning these new skills without seeing them used live. Reading the book could not have done it for me. At the Friday evening introduction, the organizers demonstrated three conversations: #1 with no compassionate communication, #2 with half (one person using it but not the other), and #3 two people both communicating compassionately. The difference was staggering, even between #1 and #2, which is a good thing since I’m not expecting any of the many people with whom I struggle to communicate to start learning this stuff any time soon.

On Saturday we got to practice ourselves, using some creative exercises (you know they are good if Andy is enjoying talking to strangers while doing them), and we also learned a routine (they call it a dance) for self-empathy, empathy being the big secret ingredient in communicating compassionately (which to be frank is also not the best framing because hi, way too many syllables).

Since I’ve barely left the house since we got home (bliss), mostly I’ve been using these ideas in talking with Andy and with myself. And how I’m using them is the main thing I want to tell you about, but I’m going to save that for tomorrow. Stay tuned!