And what I mean by giving compassionately is first of all of it, whatever we do is done willingly. It’s not done out of guilt, or shame, or fear of punishment, or trying to buy love by submitting to what we think others expect us to do. I saw that the intention I wanted to live by, I thought was necessary for compassionate giving, is that we give solely out of the joy that comes naturally from contributing to life. Our own life and the lives of others. And I organized what I was learning about this into the program that I now call nonviolent communication. And at the time, I was in private practice of psychology. So in my private practice, people were coming to me because of depression. Children were sent to me because they were having problems in school. And couples were coming to me because of marital problems. I found that this process that I was putting together was much more effective as a healing tool for people than the way I hadn’t been taught to do psychotherapy at the university.

At first I was shocked by this because it was so different than how I had been trained to analyze people and provide psychotherapy. It seemed too simple to just show them how some different ways of behaving different ways of thinking communicating using power, how quickly this could correct problems that were taking me months and not getting the same result. But then when I really saw the power that the program had. I also saw that the way I was offering it to people was not the way that I wanted to continue. By offering it in a private practice as a psychologist, the people who were coming to me, were defining that there was something wrong with them, something mentally ill about them for which they needed healing. And I was seeing more and more how that very concept of mental illness was a destructive concept because it implied something was wrong with people that needed fixing. And that very concept is I’ll talk about in subsequent sessions, I see gets in the way of people’s evolution and human development.

https://anchor.fm/nvc-archive/message

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