Trainer Tip: In NVC we consider love to be a need. We all need love, but the ways in which we express it can be very different.

In this compelling interview with Liv Larsson, CNVC Certified Trainer from Sweden, the NVC concept of enemy images — how they develop, what they represent and how they affect our relationships with others and self — is explored.

If it's a tender topic and/or you are looking for a particular level of responsiveness, you can let listeners know what you want back before you share -- or you can ask them for a particular kind of response right after you share. The more you can do this, the more it can create supportive relationships in your life. Read on for ways to ask for a particular kind of responsiveness to meet particular needs.

Trainer Tip: Mary shares how staying present to our anger and finding the underlying feelings and needs can lead to deeper connection and more satisfying outcomes.

Trainer Tip: When someone acts in baffling ways we can either wonder about what’s going on with the other person, create our own stories about it (blame, resent, make assumptions), or inform ourselves by asking. This is an opportunity to learn something new.

Sharing more vulnerably provides opportunities for fulfilling connection. As social beings we rely on feedback to see our effect on others. We can get that feedback through body language, facial cues and words. To expand your capacity to share more vulnerably you can create supportive conditions and timing. You can ask for feedback by making in-the-moment requests of others and yourself before and after you share.

Mid-conversation you may find yourself sliding into defending, shutting down, attacking, or blaming. Here's a list of possible emergency interventions that can help slow down escalation and return you to connection.

In this book excerpt, Kathleen and Jared offer a path to reach deeper clarity, distinguishing between freedom and submission / rebellion.

For many, the word “need” is associated with lack, neediness, and scarcity. These associations are the opposite of the meaning of needs in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). In NVC, needs are the motivational energy of our innate wholeness and desire to grow, like the energy of a plant pushing it up through the soil and toward the sun.

The more we can support an interdependent flow of resources and energy in society and the economy, the greater we can increase both natural abundance and the chances of averting extinction. Accumulation is a strategy born of mistrust. It’s an attempt to control the flow of life to guarantee that we will have enough for the future. Accumulation and exchange has blocked this interdependent flow. We can transform this blockage by uncoupling giving from receiving, and shedding excess as much as we can, so that energy and resources can travel further to those in need.