Needs Are Not the Holy Grail

There is often an assumption running quietly through much of how Nonviolent Communication is practiced, including how I practiced it when I first encountered the work 27 years ago. It is the unspoken assumption that our needs are above questioning.

I have found it useful to challenge that assumption. Human beings, after all, are not simple creatures. We contain competing impulses, layered histories, and contradictory desires. We can name a need from the very part of us most committed to preventing its fulfillment. We can want change desperately while remaining, at a deeper level, committed to the status quo.

Join me as I explore the part of us that would prefer things to stay as they are and distorts our needs. I think it serves us well to seriously consider that needs are not the Holy Grail but rather a starting point. The real work begins when we're willing to look honestly at what's underneath them.

Referenced in this episode:

• John Gottman — perpetual problems in relationships (approximately 69%)

• James Hillman — Jungian depth psychology

• Marion Woodman — Jungian psychotherapy

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés — Women Who Run with the Wolves

• Rainer Maria Rilke — Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final

• Walt Whitman — Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

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