Compassionate Communication

What Is It?

Compassionate Communication means communicating in a gentle, respectful, and loving manner, in a way that makes people closer to each other and is effective in advancing everyone’s wellbeing.

This style of communication is the opposite of alienating communication, which stems from the negatively judgmental mind, our own emotional pain, and emotionally violent language that we absorbed from our surrounding. This kind of communication is tragic in the sense that it reduces the chances that we’ll get our needs met, while also causing emotional disconnect with or harm to others.

Components

Compassionate communication includes:

  • Learning how to play the most wonderful game there is in life, namely: making life more wonderful for ourselves and for others.
  • Connecting to our heart, to our natural desire to give, and communicating from this place.
  • Increasing the chances that our needs and other people’s needs will be met.

Sources

The material presented in this section is based on this workshop given by the psychologist Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, who developed the topic of Non-Violent Communication – NVC (on this website, the term “compassionate communication” is preferred because it focuses on what is desired rather than on what is not desired: “non violence”). Included are a few minor additions of our own. See also this channel for wonderful demonstrations of compassionate communication.

Chapters

See Also