Sometimes, when we suggest things that people aren't inclined to agree with, they'll laugh at us. When that's the case, we can play along and if our view doesn't change, sooner or later theirs will. The way this can fail is when one side is no longer having fun with the "making fun", and begins to act on a need to defend themselves.
Other times, people skip right over making fun and go straight to making war.
I'll illustrate with an example.
Once upon a time I was at a music festival, and like happens in places that are shoulder to shoulder crowded, I accidentally bumped into someone else. She was Ms.Grumpy pants about it, and I don't remember what she said exactly, but it was something intended to insult me and hurt my feelings. It didn't work, because "Nah, you're obviously just grumpy and unreasonable", but saying that would have escalated straight to a fight with no laughter phase. The reason this skips the respect layer and goes right to security is that she never actually believed that her actions were reasonable. She didn't have to transition from "Haha, how dumb!" to "Wait, might he be right!?". She knew she was out of line, and would have felt threatened by someone shoving that obvious fact in her face.
I didn't have anything to gain by fighting, so I just turned to her and asked "Are you okay? Will you forgive me?". It's a little silly, because the answers to these questions are pretty obvious. And I may have been a little bit laughing about it inside, and trolling the way I trolled the jacuzzi girl, but I was mostly just sincere. I really didn't mean to bother her, it really was an accident, and while I had a pretty good idea of the answer I did want to verify that she was okay and would forgive me; it is her decision, after all. And she wasn't going to make the decision without being invited to. So I invited her to, and gave her the space to decide.
She didn't seem to be expecting this, like she hadn't considered the possibility that I would not be hostile in return. Clearly uncomfortable with the situation, she muttered something about forgiving me, and then left me alone. That's a win.
A little bit later, in an amazing coincidence, someone else bumped into her. Again, this girl was Ms.Grumpypants about it. The girl that had bumped into her took offense to that, called her out for her anti-social behavior, and things escalated. When security came over to break things up, the first girl put on an innocent face while the second girl remained angry (and justifiably, IMO!), so guess who got kicked out and who got a free water bottle out of the deal.
I had been thinking about NonViolent Communication and it's proper place, and this scenario makes for an interesting test. Clearly there was a lot of "violent communication" on both sides. Clearly things would have gone better if both sides -- or even either side unilaterally -- adopted the spirit of NVC. And equally clearly, teaching these women about NVC would be completely ineffective. Intention-to-Treat is not the same as Per-Protocol
Let's look at what NVC would encourage and why this encouragement wouldn't work.
The first woman, instead of saying something like "Don't bump into me, asshole", would be encouraged to say something like "I feel frustrated and uncomfortable when someone bumps into me. Could you please be mindful of my space?".
The second woman, instead of saying something like "It was an accident, no need to be a bitch about it", would be encouraged to say something like "When I hear your response, I feel defensive because I value understanding and want my intention to be recognized. I notice I accidentally made contact with you, and I need mutual respect in our interaction. Would you be open to acknowledging that this was unintentional while we both take a moment to check if we're okay?"
Can you imagine either woman being inclined to say such a thing because they went to an NVC workshop and this guy highlighted the possibility and explained why they should? Can you imagine either of them saying it without a snarl that betrays the true meaning of "please"?
Me neither -- and I say this as a fan of Mr.Rosenberg and his puppets.[1]
So why not, and what can we do that would work?
When I put myself in those shoes, I feel like I don't have space to consider such things. It's like trying to do NVC with a brown bear guarding her cubs. If that thing snarls at you, are you going to lower your spear to invite her to feel comfort with you, or are you way too uncomfortable to be inviting in that way, white knuckling the spear, and doing fight or flight? You're not going to ask if someone could be mindful of your space, or acknowledge that you bumped them on accident if you can't handle hearing "no". If you stick to the script and say the words, your body language will make it clear that you're not really asking.
While it is definitely possible to face legitimate threats unflinchingly, without raising spears, it's impressive when it happens, and not something you could really expect to come from an NVC workshop no matter what protocol they teach. It's just too real of a problem to address with technique and choice of words. There needs to be actual security. The reason I was able to respond effectively in that situation is because I wasn't threatened. She couldn't hurt me. Whatever flaws I may have and be sensitive about, she wasn't finding them. The question "Don't you think you're being kinda a bitch?" would be threatening to her, because the answer kinda seemed like "yes", and what do you even do with that? How do you see yourself as "okay", if that's true about you, and you don't know how to not be a bitch, given the things that compelled you to act in such ways?
In my position though, it was just "No, I don't". So I had space to think, and to figure out how to give her space to think -- and therefore to realize that she didn't need to pick a fight.
First principles of security
Security, on a fundamental level, is an ability to compute acceptable responses to the new information we're presented with. Whether we're "okay" has nothing to do with the objective reality in isolation. My cousin with the burned hand didn't flip from "not okay" to "okay" because his injury healed in an instant. He flipped because his expectations changed in an instant. He went from "I don't know how to handle this!" to "Lol. Of course I do, actually".
In this light, assurance that "you are okay" is a statement both about the what the information says about reality and about their current state of knowledge. I could tell my cousin that he's okay if I'm willing to assert that the pain information has no relevance to him -- but that would be a little silly, without knowing what lesson(s) he's learned and which he hasn't. In this context, it made more sense to ask instead, and when I asked, he found right away that actually he is okay.
The wider the range of information we can face productively, and the wider the range the people we're talking to can face productively, the easier things go. It's so much easier, it's hard to put into words how big a deal this is. When you finally get to work with someone who is secure, it's... nice. A relief that you might not know there is to be had.
Everyone knows this stress on the other extreme of this spectrum. It's stressful having to walk on eggshells all the time, ever careful that if you ever show anything slightly threatening -- even to let slip "Ugh, this so tedious" -- you have a fight rather than a cooperative endeavor. You can still give criticism to extremely insecure people, you just have to do all the cognitive work to figure out how they were causally constrained and couldn't have done better. "No one has told you this? Okay, then it's not your fault. Let me explain what they were supposed to teach you". If you want to expect more of them, like for them to figure this stuff out themselves like you did, then you better know exactly what allowed you to figure it out and not them so that you can portray that as not their fault too. What's less obvious is that so much of what limits us even in "normal" situations, is this walking on eggshells.
You know that whole "politeness" thing, which people take as if it's an inherent good? It's bullshit. Think of all the times you've self censored in service of "politeness" or "not being a total ass and starting fights for no reason". Imagine that's not necessary, because they won't fight. Won't need to fight, because they can just look.
"Dude, that's stupid"
"Oh. Huh. What am I missing?"[2]
When security is in excess, bids for respect get easy, and you don't have to worry about offending. You get to say whatever you want, with true freedom of expression, and not only find out whether your thoughts hold up, but also just find out what your thoughts are. You get to say -- or at least consider saying -- "You're the worst! I hate everything about you. Including your mother", and hear "Okay I'm sorry. What should I do differently? (and should I pick a different mom?)".
When given the freedom to go over the top without concern, it becomes hard to fixate on problems. Things often come out over the top just for fun, showing that despite the serious complaints here we're still having fun. We can still engage in playful cooperation without fear of ending up getting hurt while we each try desperately to defend ourselves. Okay, maybe you can keep your mom. Just please chew more quietly, or whatever.
Insecurity is rampant in part because as a culture we don't know how to create security, value security, or even recognize insecurity. Before exploring how this applies to arguments, let's first examine it in context of hypnosis where it is more clear.
Feynman was successful as a hypnotic subject, despite the well known tendency for "analytical" types to struggle with it. The stereotype is for science nerd types to be so attached to "truth" that when the hypnotist suggests "You cannot open your eyes", they reflexively test to see if they're being bullshitted, try to open their eyes, and succeed in falsifying the suggestion. Whew! Almost believed something wrong there.
I make fun of this response, and hold Feynman up as an example of an intelligent and effective thinker doing better, but I'm not positioning myself with Feynman while making fun of the "insecure dummies". I'm making fun of myself here. That was 100% me when I started looking into hypnosis. I wanted to experience it first hand to see what it's like, but I wanted it to be real and to not be fooled by bullshit, so when the hypnotist would say "Try to open your eyes", I would, and surprise surprise, I could.
At least, that's one way of explaining it. There's a little more to the story.
One day I was playing around with my girlfriend (now wife), having her play hypnotist while I played subject sorta as a "pop quiz", like "can you do this at all". I hadn't really taught her anything other than what she inadvertently picked up by osmosis, so she didn't really know what she was doing and I decided to make it easy for her -- to start with -- by kinda playing along.
She stumbled along with a somewhat awkward but not altogether wrong attempt at a hypnotic induction, and because I wasn't "really" being hypnotized, I didn't have to test whether I could actually open my eyes; I could just act like they weren't going to open, like I was genuinely hypnotized, and I didn't have much reason to keep a hold of "BUT I'M JUST FAKING I SWEAR".
Eventually, she got to the point where she said something like "You can no longer remember your name. What's your name?", and instead of instantly saying my name, I just said "Uh....".
"That's weird", I thought to myself. "I guess I decided to play along further than I expected to". My name was there, and I could reach it if I wanted, and I knew that I was choosing to not push back and retrieve my name... but at the same time choosing to recall my name would be against some resistance. Against the flow of things.
So another moment or two went by, and she was starting to believe more and more that she actually got me and that I wasn't just "playing along". It was also getting more and more true, as I could feel my ability to reach the intention of remembering slipping away. If I'm in a self flattering mood I'd say "She was getting too cocky, I had to show her that I still got it", which is true. But what's also true is that it freaked me out. Watching myself begin to lose control of my own mind -- lose awareness of where I am, mentally, and how to find my way out of it -- was a little panic inducing. A little. Not something I couldn't push through should I have had sufficient reason, but something that definitely guides my behavior when I'm not explicitly choosing to act against it -- which, perhaps unsurprisingly, I don't tend to find reasons to do.
Feynman didn't seem to have this panic over the idea of losing control of his own mind, the way I and other "difficult subjects" did. For him it was "if it works it works, we'll find out!", whereas I had been taking a perspective of "I need to know exactly what's going on in my own mind at all times", which made experiencing what amounts to known delusion tough for me. I'm not saying Feynman's response is "better", in general. The more sensitive you are to avoiding believing things that you can see to be wrong, the more motivation you have to avoid delusion, and no doubt that sensitivity has been useful to me in warding off poor thinking. At the same time, I'm not saying his response was wrong for him either; he was clearly a very effective thinker, and his intellectual security and willingness to play with unusual ideas no doubt helped him be effective.
I've moved in that direction myself too. The more I get comfortable with how my mind works, the more I know what kind of playing around with ideas is safe, and therefore not freaky. With competence comes confidence and all that, so the better I understand how to keep my thinking from being led off the rails the more secure I feel to explore increasingly different modes of thought.
Which is where "regular conversations" come in.
"Hey, have you considered [the other side]" doesn't sound like some crazy dangerous labyrinth to avoid, but it very much can be. Because many people much of the time[3] cannot ground their beliefs.
Even when you get to something quite simple like "Is the earth flat or round?", when you try to have regular people argue against flat earthers they're liable to say extremely stupid stuff like "When you use a telescope to zoom in on a ship that you can't see anymore because it has gone over the horizon, you can see it again". The atmospheric lensing thing he's referring to does exist[4]... sometimes. But if the light is blocked by the curvature of the earth, pulling out a telescope doesn't magically change the refraction of light in the distance, so wtf? Are we to believe this guy is too stupid to be able to think one step ahead, and notice the validity in the flat earther's argument here?
Or might it be that he's choosing to not think things through, because he knows that it's likely to end up with "Good point. I don't know how to explain that"?
How do you feel telling the obnoxious flat earther that he has a good point, and that you don't know how to refute it? How do you think this round earther feels?
The information is "He made a good point, and I don't know how to explain why he's wrong", so what does that mean? That the earth is flat? That's a shameful belief to have in todays society; we definitely want to avoid coming to that conclusion. Or that he's dumber than a flat earther? That's not any more palatable. So of course he's going to flinch away from engagement, afraid of where engaging could lead.
This may be especially clear in the case of flat vs round earth, but it also explains essentially any debate about politics or religion ever. Especially when you have a professional political arguer show up at a college campus and make fools out of unprepared kids who don't share his belief. Of course they can't argue their points, and if they were foolish enough to truly engage they'd have no choice but to change their minds -- and risk being wrong, and/or socially punished for it -- or, you know, to find humility and say "I dunno". But that's an option they probably haven't seen role modeled much in an obviously winning way, so that option probably isn't on their table because probably no one has put it there.
Diagnosing insecurity becomes simple, once you understand what it is and what it serves to do.
If people are listening, and having fun, then updating is happening. If you make a bid for attention, and it isn't granted, laughed at, or ignored, that's insecurity. You've managed to find something they don't trust they can defend.
That means if someone makes a bid for your attention, and you don't grant it, find it genuinely funny, or genuinely uninteresting, that's insecurity; they've found something you don't trust you can defend.
If you're annoyed, that's insecurity.
If you're angry, that's insecurity.[5]
If you're frustrated, insecurity.
If you're offended, insecurity.
If you're sneering, that's insecurity.
If you're laughing, and think it's genuine, but you can't do it with the kind of warmth, openness, and eye to eye contact that leaves you actually feeling them being tugged into security, you're wrong, that's insecurity
At least, if these feelings last for more than a moment without resolution.
What these responses all have in common is that they involve being displeased at reality being what it is. It's a divergence between your expectation/intention/setpoint and measured reality; it's prediction error. If you can control reality to conform to your expectations, then great! If you touch a hot stove, by all means flinch away. If you're aiming at a target and drift slightly left, then sure, drift slightly right to compensate.
If reality continues to violate your expectations in a predictable direction, facing this quickly teaches you that your expectations are wrong and to adjust your expectations to match. Sure, maybe you're just wrong about them not being a dumb jerk and it's totally them that's in the wrong. But your expectation that they wouldn't be a "dumb jerk" is looking wrong too. Clearly wrong, in many cases. Which means that you're navigating based on a false assumption and that's why it's so uncomfortable; you're beating your head into a brick wall of a dead end, you dummy. And you'll notice that, and update -- unless you take steps to make sure you don't.
i.e. insecurity.
This can be really subtle. Even when you're feeling "confident", that very well might be insecurity if it's conspicuous -- because if you really know how to face people challenging you, why the need to hint that you're ready for challenges? Why not just face them should they arise?
Even subtle effects can accumulate, because "insecurity limited" isn't a binary thing where either you "are" or "are not". Maybe someone shows you a study that challenges your preconceived notions, but the p-value is marginal it's not super well controlled, so having "analyzed the evidence", you dismiss it. Or maybe most of the studies on "this sort of thing" are negative. You might pat yourself on the back for being willing to update if the study were strong evidence, and you might be right that you would, and this might bound your irrationality. But would you have predicted that this study would have turned out this way? Are you looking at the data, and letting your beliefs shift as they do? Or are you coming up with a reason to prevent this shift -- in the same way that you naturally shield from "When I scratch my nose you will find it hilarious and have no idea why, because you won't remember this conversation"?
What do you think the cumulative effect is of passing everything through a subtle insecurity filter, where you'll update and face the consequences -- but only if the discomfort of ignoring the data rises above some threshold? And only if it also stays below another threshold where you can dismiss the person for being a "pushy jerk" trying to get you to read something you disagree with. Errors compound.
If you want to see how subtle this can be, watch Dr.Mike talk to Dr.K about ayurvedic medicine. I would describe Dr.Mike as intelligent and open minded. He's even open minded enough to hear someone tell him to his face that he doesn't have an open mind, and nod along listening before voicing his disagreement. "Insecure" and "closed minded" aren't high on the list of descriptors that come to mind. He's clearly interested in learning about ways of thinking different from his own, and he clearly respects Dr.K on this topic
And yet, in his conversation with Dr.K on ayurvedic medicine Dr.Mike was clearly (and self admittedly) frustrated, and despite being friendly respectful and good faith, the conversation was also antagonistic to the point that it interfered with efficient learning. Dr.K even stops and addressed this explicitly, pointing out a lot of what I'm saying here. Dr.Mike is already functioning at a high level of openness to challenging ideas, it's just that Dr.K's ability to see what is going on with people and compute good responses is on another level.[6]
Even the not-entirely-straw Vulcan trope is a result of insecurity. Those of us with aberrant needs for precision want to be Less Wrong. This isn't entirely a bad thing; sensitive instruments can detect even minute errors, and high gain controllers control really well -- that is, when they're able to keep the error signal within the smaller acceptable window in which they can avoid saturation. Autistic tendencies lead to poorer ability to read faces not because it's harder to perceive the information people wear on their faces but because its easier. Avoidance of eye contact comes because the information conveyed by eyes can be overwhelming, and hard to parse confidently. Math is nice partly because it's useful, but also partly because we can actually expect to get things provably right, which is a relief from prediction error. The ability to decouple enough to give calm considered analyses of problems is great. Yet it's decoupled, and knowing which answer we're supposed to reach only helps to the extent that we can recouple to object level reality, reach the answer, and believe what evidence suggests to be true.
On top of that, with few exceptions we are meta-insecure. The idea that you have to be perfectly clean, or you don't get to "have an opinion" in the only way you know how, and therefore don't get to feel like you're worth anything, is quite threatening. Especially to people who think they're doing the work already, and have earned it, and are now being told what sounds like "Sorry, you're just as bad as everyone else. Your efforts are not valid and not appreciated. Have some humility, loser".
So if you're mildly annoyed when someone doesn't agree with you, and it seems like the reason is that they're probably flinching away from reality themselves, it's super easy to let yourself off the hook with "I'm basically right". At the same time, that difference between "basically right" and "right" becomes the difference between someone putting up resistance to your ideas, and the person just listening because your stance represents truth. It also frequently becomes the difference between "wrong in surprising but avoidable ways" and "actually right".[7]
If you just want to rant and whine in some cases, that's entirely understandable. I don't do zero of that myself. Sometimes that's an easy way to express thoughts and emotions which feel in need of expression, and then reflecting on this can shift your perspective to better align with reality. I fear we often miss this reflection step, because we don't recognize the existence and importance of subtle signs of our own insecurity. The moment we notice, we can ask: what facet of reality are we flinching away from in order to maintain our unfulfilled expectation of success? What happens if we look?
Insecurity is everywhere, and super important, but we can't just print out more security and have it work by fiat. It requires actual cognitive labor to parse mountains of information such that we can trust ourselves to be less wrong in more contact with reality than in less contact with reality. Those women at the music festival can't "just get along" because they literally can't expect to compute a solution by opening themselves to contact with reality.
If the first girl said "Could you please be mindful of my space?", with spear and shield down, she'd be opening herself the other girl laughing in her face. "'Your space'? This is a music festival hun!". If the second girl said "I need mutual respect" and "Would you be open to acknowledging", that opens her to a "No". And neither girl knew how to make sure this wouldn't happen, or end up better off than fighting if it did. If you try to force them to use NVC, you'll be trying to force them to do things that work worse for them in their expectation. The very fact that you have to force them in the first place shows that this prediction error is itself predictable -- i.e. insecurity. It's insecurity about "What if people don't act secure!?!?"
Security isn't an unlimited resource and it often pays to do the cognitive labor to develop more, but it also pays to keep track of when it's in short supply, and the limiting factor.
At this point, it makes sense to introduce an analogy I find quite useful when thinking about security and maintaining cooperation over conflict.
Everything we do is a combination of an invitation to cooperate and a threat of violence.
Consider a few things you could say to someone that is doing something that you don't like.
The first almost looks like they're just letting you know so that you can cooperate better, and the last sounds kinda like an order that doesn't even take into account your needs - and so people are going to feel more compelled to cooperate with the first than the last. It's sorta a blend of "invitation" and "threat", with a balance shifting towards "threat" as the list goes on. Yet these aren't even the extremes of the spectrum. Even the first puts blame for their emotions on the other person ("makes
me"), and even the last doesn't declare "I don't care if you need it to live. If you don't stop I'll stab out your eyeballs".
There's a continuum here. Just about everything we say and do has at least a hint of both, and the idea is to focus on attenuating the threat of punishment and amplifying the invitation to cooperate. Instead of saying "I want you to pass the ketchup" with a subtext of "And if you don't, you're breaking the norms and being a jerk" -- which isn't far removed from a threat of punishment.[8] You could also say it with the subtext of "Because that would be cool, and I'd do the same for you". Sure, maybe refusing to pass the ketchup is a jerk thing to do in context. Passing the ketchup would also be cool, and I'd do it for you. The degree to which we focus on one vs the the other makes a big difference in the extent to which others focus on responding to one vs the other.
NVC literature will have more to say about the cleanest possible ways to word things, but the basic idea is that if you want to foster cooperation and non-violence, it helps to limit yourself to sharing your actual experience and allow them the room and trust to respond cooperatively to that without trying to "push" or "pressure" them in any way. Not "It 'makes' me scared", because why are you blaming them, if not to push them to do something about it. Not "When you are a jerk to me" if they might use different (and more charitable) abstractions to describe their behavior. Boil it down to the actual experiences. When you raise your voice, I feel afraid.
Try that on:
When you raise your voice, I feel afraid.
Notice how that has some impact, and in a different way than "Why are you yelling at me!?"?
It's there as a thing to be dealt with. It can still provoke preemptive defense like "That's not my fault!", but at least the communication itself isn't saying they did, and that outburst is essentially caused by a "delayed neutron".
I like to think of nonviolent communication as neutron moderation between two masses of fissile material. Threats of violence tend to provoke threats of violence. As long as the average number of violent neutrons kicked off for every violent neutron is below one, peace can be stable. The moment it goes supercritical, you got a problem. With all the myriad of ways to perceive a Defect when Cooperation was intended, it's no wonder Tit for Tat with forgiveness beats pure tit for tat.
NVC, as a "technique to try" or a "ethos to [attempt to] live by" can make the possibility of nonviolent response and the costs of violent response salient, and this can moderate neutrons on the margin. If you're anywhere near criticality, this can be a game changer. If you're able to notice that you were starting to spiral into violence when you could instead choose to de-emphasize threat and emphasize invitation to cooperate, then that can be the difference between getting along and melting down. And if the NVC framework can guide you by giving you an example of how it can look to communicate nonviolently, great.
Those two women though? They were supercritical no matter what. The only realistic option in the moment is separation -- either physically or metaphorically. "No politics at the dinner table". Good luck getting them to ask nicely and accept no for an answer.
On the other extreme, I didn't follow the NVC protocol either. "You okay? Forgive me?" is nonviolent[9]. But doesn't fit the NVC framework of "observation, feeling, needs, request". It's just that in this case I knew what I didn't have to say, and had no need to advocate for my side, and it would have been goofy and out of place to go on a long monologue like:
I realize I bumped into you, and it seems that upset you. Are you feeling angry or frustrated because you need more respect and awareness of your personal space? Would it help if I’m more mindful of giving you space in the future?".
If the system isn't near criticality it's just not near criticality, and it's not hard to come up with a nonviolent response.
As a result, efforts to do NVC can be anywhere from woefully insufficient, to absolutely critical, to just not needed.
Or, as we'll cover in the upcoming "navigation" section, actively counterproductive.
Sometimes we have to slash and burn around the edges to create a larger field for safe play.
In the next post, we will cover how to get your two year old daughter(s) to enjoy getting her flu shots. The challenge I leave you with today has two parts. First, How do we do that? Second, how is enjoying flu shots rational?". I have ended on a clue.
His workshop is available on YouTube, and is pretty good
"Sorry for being a overly mean about it", "No problem, idiot".
The prevailing norm that the initial aggressor is unconditionally deserving of scolding is mistaken. If the communication channel can handle such things in play, then there is no harm.
Most people most of the time?
In this clip you can watch the kid move from subtle insecurity -- and getting challenged because of it -- to flat out stating the truth.
Notice how much harder it is to take a step forward when the kid is no longer telling you that he's not sure you'll take him seriously? Notice how much less wiggle room there is than if the kid were overtly angry?
I'm not alone in this view. People make "How to flip someone from rude to respectful" videos studying his conversations.
If you want to develop a sense for what it looks like to intentionally navigate insecurity and skillfully face surprising and challenging information that comes up in conversation, Dr.K's conversations with people are a great place to start.
A lot of this sequence has been about what looks more like "psychological issues" than "rationality". For example, while one might describe makeup girl's idea that she couldn't risk her makeup washing off as "irrational", it's the kind of "irrational" that looks like "a psychological issue". It's the kind of thing for which you'd say "You should see a therapist about that", not the kind of thing for which you'd say "You should read LessWrong!". It's still about her not seeing reality for what it is, but the cause of that looks less like "Figuring out what is true can be technically challenging" and more like "She's not even trying to make sense and doesn't even believe herself because something wrong in her head".
When insecurity gets more subtle though, people actually do start believing their own rationalizations of insecurities. When people say "That study really is bad! I really do update on evidence!" and "Being mildly annoyed doesn't mean I'm insecure, I'm annoyed with what he is doing wrong!", they often actually believe it. When these insecurities are subtle enough that they are legitimately unseen, it goes beyond "solving psychological issues" and becomes directly about the practice of rationality itself.
NVC isn't doing the oversensitive "Words can hurt feelings, which is basically the same as violence (if you've never experienced the latter)" thing. It's doing the libertarian "All law is ultimately enforced at gunpoint" thing. Break enough little norms, and you'll be forced to concede or break bigger ones. If you continue down the path of "violent" language for long enough, you'll learn the reason for the naming.
The language that NVC refers to as "violent" is language that threatens and leads towards real sticks and stones, break your bones violence. It's just a question of how far that path is taken before someone backs down or disengages
When insecurity is threatening to explode everything and you're wanting to play it safe, then you are going to be very careful to strip your behavior of all implicit threats and focus entirely on direct observables that they can’t take issue with... which sounds a whole lot like NonViolent Communication
