What Happens When Communication Becomes an Act of Peace
I have read Nonviolent Communication three times. In two languages. I attended a six-day intensive course in Montpellier. I understand the framework completely – observation, feeling, need, request. I can explain it to anyone.
What I cannot always do is use it. Particularly at home, in the high-intensity moments, with the people I love most.
Speaking Peace – a shorter, quieter companion to the main NVC book – gave me something I had not found in all those re-reads. Not another explanation of the method. An exploration of what has to happen inside you first, before the method is even possible.
That turned out to be exactly what I was missing.
Table of Contents
Who Is Marshall Rosenberg?
Marshall Rosenberg was an American psychologist and the founder of Nonviolent Communication – a framework for compassionate, authentic human connection that he spent over four decades teaching around the world. He worked with individuals, families, schools, organisations, and conflict zones. He died in 2015. His work continues through the Center for Nonviolent Communication and through trainers like Thomas d’Ansembourg, who brought his approach to French-speaking audiences.
Speaking Peace was published in 2003 and differs from the main NVC book in tone and emphasis. Where Nonviolent Communication builds the framework systematically, Speaking Peace goes to the heart of it – to the quality of inner attention that makes the framework work.
Empathy Is Presence, Not Technique
This is the idea in Speaking Peace that most shifted something in me.
Rosenberg is very clear: empathy is not a set of responses you deploy. It is not active listening techniques or reflective questioning or careful word choice. Empathy is a quality of presence – being fully with the other person, in that moment, without agenda.
Which means that you cannot fake it. You can use all the correct NVC language while being internally elsewhere – rehearsing your response, judging their reaction, defending your own position. The words are right but the presence is absent. And the other person almost always feels it.
This is why I can explain NVC perfectly and still fail to use it in the moment that matters. The framework is not the thing. The thing is the quality of attention I bring to the person in front of me. And that attention is only possible when I am not defending, not judging, not already composing my reply.
This is genuinely difficult. Especially with the people closest to you – where the stakes feel highest and the automatic reactions are most deeply grooved.
Life-Alienating Communication – The Traps
Rosenberg is specific about the ways we communicate that break connection, even when we do not intend to.
Moralistic judgements. Labelling the other person’s behaviour as right or wrong, good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable. The label replaces curiosity about what is actually happening for them.
Comparisons. “Why can’t you be more like…” A comparison is a judgement with extra steps. It closes the conversation before it opens.
Denial of responsibility. “I have to do this.” “There’s no choice.” “That’s just how things work.” Every time we remove our own agency from our language, we distance ourselves from our own choices – and from honest connection.
Demands disguised as requests. If a no would be punished – with withdrawal, with anger, with consequences – it is a demand, not a request. The other person can feel the difference even when the words sound polite.
I recognise all of these in myself. Not maliciously – but automatically. The patterns run deep, laid down long before I had any framework for understanding them.
The Giraffe and the Jackal
Rosenberg’s teaching metaphor is the giraffe and the jackal – and Speaking Peace uses it with particular lightness and warmth.
The jackal speaks from judgement. It evaluates, criticises, demands, and defends. It is not unkind by nature – it is just operating from a fundamentally different orientation to other people.
The giraffe – with its long neck and its large heart – speaks from a different place. It observes without evaluating. It speaks from feeling and need rather than accusation. It makes requests rather than demands. It listens with presence rather than with a prepared response.
What Rosenberg adds in Speaking Peace is the spiritual dimension of this: the giraffe way of communicating is not just more effective. It is more aligned with what we actually are – relational beings who need genuine connection to flourish. The jackal is a survival strategy. The giraffe is the authentic self.
This sits alongside what Thomas d’Ansembourg describes as the difference between niceness and kindness. The jackal can be very nice. It is the giraffe that is real.
Inner Peace First
This is the heart of Speaking Peace as a distinct book.
Rosenberg argues that you cannot bring peace to a relationship if you have not first found some degree of peace in yourself. Not calm – peace. The recognition that your own needs and feelings are legitimate. That you are not here to manage the other person or to prove a point or to win. That what you actually want is connection.
When I go into a difficult conversation without that inner orientation – when I am still in the mode of being right, or being heard at all costs, or defending against a perceived attack – the NVC language is a veneer. It sounds right but it does not work, because the intention behind it is not peace.
This is harder than learning a framework. It is a daily practice of checking in with myself before I open my mouth. Of asking: what do I actually want from this conversation? And is that aligned with connection, or with something else?
I do not manage this consistently. This is, as I have said before about NVC, exactly the point.
Practical Takeaways
- Before a difficult conversation, ask: what do I actually want? Connection, or to be right? The answer changes everything about how you enter the conversation.
- Notice which “traps” you fall into most automatically. Moralistic judgement, comparison, denial of responsibility, disguised demands. Naming your own pattern is the first step to having a choice about it.
- Practise empathy as presence, not technique. Put the phone down. Stop composing your response. Be with the person – in that moment, with curiosity rather than agenda.
- Hear the need underneath the words. Especially in conflict. The harsh thing said in frustration is almost always a need expressed badly. Ask yourself: what are they really needing right now?
- Apply self-empathy first. What am I feeling? What do I need? You cannot be genuinely present with another person while your own unmet needs are driving the interaction.
Why This Belongs in Heart
Heart on this blog is about family, relationships, and the quality of connection in our closest bonds.
Speaking Peace belongs here as the third layer of the Heart NVC reading list. Nonviolent Communication gives you the framework. Thomas d’Ansembourg gives you the honest inner account of why the framework is hard. Rosenberg’s Speaking Peace gives you the orientation that makes it possible – the inner peace that has to precede the outer communication.
It also belongs alongside The 5 Love Languages and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen as part of the practical Heart library on this blog – the books that have genuinely changed something in how I show up in my relationships. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But more and more.
The gap between understanding NVC and using NVC used to frustrate me. Speaking Peace reframed it: the gap is not a failure of knowledge. It is an invitation to develop something deeper – the quality of inner attention that the method, at its best, is trying to cultivate.
I am still working on it. I expect I always will be.
Et toi? Is there a relationship in your life where you can explain what needs to change but still cannot quite do it in the moment? Leave a comment below or come and share in the Notes from Soph community on Skool. This one is worth talking through out loud.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Book Details:
Speaking Peace: Connecting with Others Through Nonviolent Communication – Marshall B. Rosenberg
Published 2003 | Sounds True
📚 Amazon https://amzn.to/4cdmh7L
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