Compassionate Communication Immersion
Dear Human is a Verb Community-
Last weekend, Steve and I facilitated a 2-day training in Haverhill, MA, helping counselors develop compassionate communication skills—for themselves and for their clients. It sure was fun to partner with Steve in facilitating a space for people to grow their inner capacity for conflict transformation. We modeled in real time some of our own ‘stuff.’ We both came home saying—teaching this stuff is good for our marriage. And it is!
I want to tell you about another training opportunity coming up in person in Boston, June 13-14! See below. If you are local, I hope you’ll consider joining us.
Peace,
Julene
There is a particular kind of silence that follows a meeting where the hardest thing in the room went unspoken. Everyone felt it. No one touched it.
Most of us were never taught what to do with the hard things that are spoken about at the board meeting, the family dinner table, or the weekly team meeting. We were taught to be nice. To be professional. To keep the peace, which usually means keeping things quiet. And so we develop a kind of relational paralysis: we feel the distance growing between us and someone we care about, or we sense the dysfunction deepening in our team or congregation, and we do not know what to do.
Marshall Rosenberg spent his life working on this problem. Nonviolent Communication, the practice he developed, is a way of learning to listen to what is alive in you, and in the person across from you, before you decide what to do with it (Rosenberg, 2003). It is a somatic and relational practice before it is a communication technique. You have to learn to feel your way toward generative engagement.
My husband Steve has been doing this work for years. He trained directly with Rosenberg and with Robert Gonzales. He is certified by the Center for Nonviolent Communication. He is also a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, which means he pays attention not just to the words we use but to the body that holds them. He knows that conflict lives in the nervous system before it arrives in the conversation.
On June 13 and 14, Steve is leading a two-day immersive Nonviolent Communication training in Boston, at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, alongside Yoojin Lee, who has been practicing and facilitating NVC for nearly two decades.
I’m totally biased, but this training will be amazing! If you have ever left a hard conversation feeling like you said the wrong thing, or said nothing at all, and you are tired of both options, you’ll appreciate this training. If you lead a team or a congregation and can feel the cost of unspoken conflict, this training is for you. If your relationships, at home or at work, feel stuck in the same patterns and you suspect there is a better way, this training is for you, too!
It is not for people looking for a communication hack or a quick fix. Nonviolent Communication is a practice. It asks something of you. But what it returns is the capacity to stay in the room with people you love, and with yourself, through the hard things.
The training runs Saturday, June 13, 10 am to 5:30 pm, and Sunday, June 14, 11:30 am to 5:30 pm, at 138 Tremont Street, Boston. Fees are on a sliding scale.
I will tell you honestly: I have watched this practice change Steve’s life, and mine, and the lives of the people they have walked through it with. It does not make hard conversations easy. But it makes them possible in a way they were not before.
If you are in the Boston area or can get there, I hope you will come.
Register here: https://forms.gle/5yowWNWNy7yEutZj7
References: Rosenberg, M. B. (2003). Nonviolent communication: A language of life. PuddleDancer Press.