Roberta
Wall offers training in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a communication
process created by Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960s in order to promote
more effective and peaceful communication in times of conflict. Wall
works with families and individuals, as well as in the Middle East with
Israeli and Palestinian communities, training them in NVC. Wall recently
came into Adorn and agreed to an interview about her work. She
explained about a process she is creating called “Living at the
Intersection,” focusing on the intersection of fundamental needs between
two parties.
Wall elaborated:
There’s an intersection between one person’s needs and another person’s
needs and what happens when those needs come together. How can we
create a relationship? How can we create solutions to conflict that
really take into account what’s important to both parties? The same
process also applies within myself. Let’s say I’m a parent, and I am
fearful that my child will grow up without a sense of love, support, and
acceptance. I want to support her freedom, and individuality, but on
the other hand, as a parent, I also have other values I’m holding, such
as learning, growing, and the child becoming successful and independent
in the world. So there’s an intersection between these two sets of
needs and values. The work I’m doing is exploring how do I learn to
integrate seemingly contradictory needs? Sometimes my own needs seem to
be in contradiction with my child’s. It may be that I want him or her
to get up in the morning and be happy and excited to eat the breakfast I
prepared and then walk happily off to the school bus. Instead, they
don’t want to get out of bed, they don’t want to eat what I’ve made for
them and they don’t want to go to school. So it seems like the two
different sets of needs are in conflict. This work of NVC is actually to
learn that the needs, the underlying values, that all human life shares
are actually never in conflict with each other. What is in conflict are
the strategies we employ to meet those needs.
Wall
continued to explain how each person (in this case, the child and the
parent) are employing their own strategies to meet their underlying
needs - the parent’s need to have the morning schedule adhered to and
appreciated by the child and the child’s need for understanding and more
choice in the morning. She recommended offering the child five more
minutes to stay in bed. Wall said that very often this slight shift
acknowledges the child’s needs and allows them to feel as if they have
more of a say in the shared experience of the morning ritual.
Wall spends many months each year with Israelis and Palestinians utilizing the same philosophy of mediation.
A
few months ago, I was so touched when I was sitting with a group of
Israeli Jewish and Palestinian people. In the beginning of the dialogue
it seemed like their needs were in conflict, but as we explored more
deeply everybody started to see: wow, all of us want security for our
children, respect for our way of life, we want a relationship where the
world and our neighbors care about our needs. Slowly everybody started
to see, ‘We want the same things, don’t we?’ The way they could see that
we value the same things, it created a shared reality - there wasn’t a
sense of conflict it was a sense of shifting - this is what I call
shifting from conflict to shared dilemma. That was a really inspiring,
powerful moment for me when I actually had some hope that things could
be worked out even in an area where people are essentially at war with
each other.
How long have you been going to the Middle East and how did you begin working there?
I
just completed my fourth yearly trip to the Middle East. I’m Jewish,
so I’ve always had a sense of connection to what is being done in the
name of Jewish people and to the struggle of the Jewish people. I want
to figure out how we can have a sense of safety and independence in the
world and how we can exercise that without compromising other people’s
sense of safety and acceptance in the world. I’d actually been giving
this training to Jewish communities in the U.S. for almost 10 years - so
people had always been saying, ‘You ought to go to Israel,’ So finally I
went.
Wall told us about a time when the barriers of religion and culture were broken down:
Two
years ago, I spent four days in the Palestinian community of Tulkarem
and I was hosted by a Palestinian Muslim family whose son had come to a
nine-day training that I helped organize for Jews and Palestinians in
the desert. He loved his training and was getting really involved in NVC
and he really wanted me to come and stay with his family while I was
teaching in this town. It was the Jewish Shabbat and I thought - Well,
you know, when I’m home I light candles for the Shabbat, so I’m going to
check in with his family and see if it’s okay if I do that. So I said
to the son, who spoke a little English, ‘You know, it’s the Shabbat,’
which he knew because at our gatherings. When we bring together Jews and
Muslims and Christians, we observe every religious tradition, so we
have Muslims coming to the Shabbat services and non-Muslims we get to go
to the Muslim prayer - so it’s a real learning experience also.
So Wall asks the son if she can light the candles...
He
was excited because he really liked the Shabbat service. We do what’s
called ‘Jewish Renewal Style’ so men and women are together and there’s a
lot of singing - it’s not your usual service. Anyway, I lit the Shabbat
candles in the livingroom of this Muslim family in this Muslim
neighborhood and it was really sweet because as soon as I put the
candles out, his father went to light them and I said, ‘No, no, no!
Women! Women do that,’ and then they translated that into Arabic and
they loved that, they loved that what I was doing is something only
women do. I think it was because, again, it showed them the similarities
that, ‘Oh! Yeah, in our culture too we have things that women do and
things that men do.’ That’s something that I’ve been very, very
surprised about is how little the Jews and the Muslims seem to know
about each other over there.
How did you original get started in your work with NVC?
I grew up in New York City and I became very active in the movement
against the Vietnam War when I was an early teen. I’d always been in a
huge amount of pain about the violence of the world and was really
looking for ways to contribute to more peaceful ways of living. When I
was younger, I started doing a lot of Buddhist inspired meditation. A
number of people in the Buddhist community, who I knew, met Marshall
Rosenberg - the founder of NVC - and started talking about him. Also,
I’m a lawyer by training and I worked as a Civil Rights lawyer for many
years in NYC and I became increasingly discouraged and distressed by the
way the legal process seemed to be impacting people in conflict. It
seemed to be too often, for my comfort, fanning the flames of people’s
conflict, so I became a mediator. I worked in the court system and at a
certain point I thought, there’s got to be another way, where mediation
processes help teach people how to avoid getting in these conflicts.
Wall
now gives training in NVC to the court systems. In addition to her work
in the Middle East and her work with families, she also uses her training
within her own home, in her relationship with her daughters. She says
that she always knew there was a more effective and peaceful way to
communicate. Urging the people she trains as well as herself to "connect before you correct," she said:
I
have tools so that when I feel anger and frustration arising in me, I
have tools to take care of myself. I’m here in Asheville planning my
daughter’s wedding and through my work I’ve developed enough awareness
that I can get some space and keep reminding myself that this is her
wedding and respect that.
You can find out more about the work that Roberta Wall does on her website: www.steps2peace.com
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