Marshall Rosenberg described three stages in a person's development towards emotional liberation. [[Literature Notes/Nonviolent Communication]]: *Emotional Slavery* > Stage 1: In this stage, which I refer to as *emotional slavery*, we believe ourselves responsible for the feelings of others. We think we must constantly strive to keep everyone happy. If they don’t appear happy, we feel responsible and compelled to do something about it. This can easily lead us to see the very people who are closest to us as burdens. *The Obnoxious Stage* > Stage 2: In this stage, we become aware of the high costs of assuming responsibility for others’ feelings and trying to accommodate them at our own expense. When we notice how much of our lives we’ve missed and how little we have responded to the call of our own soul, we may get angry. I refer jokingly to this stage as the *obnoxious stage* because we tend toward obnoxious comments like, “That’s *your* problem! *I’m* not responsible for your feelings!” when presented with another person’s pain. We are clear what we are not responsible *for*, but have yet to learn how to be responsible *to* others in a way that is not emotionally enslaving. *Emotional Liberation* > Stage 3: At the third stage, *emotional liberation*, we respond to the needs of others out of compassion, never out of fear, guilt, or shame. Our actions are therefore fulfilling to us, as well as to those who receive our efforts. We accept full responsibility for our own intentions and actions, but not for the feelings of others. At this stage, we are aware that we can never meet our own needs at the expense of others. Emotional liberation involves stating clearly what we need in a way that communicates we are equally concerned that the needs of others be fulfilled. NVC is designed to support us in relating at this level. In [[Unfinished Business]], Vivian Gornick describes in graphic detail her movement through the three stages after she encountered feminists in New York in 1970: *Movement out of Emotional Slavery* >Within days I had met Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, Shulamith Firestone, and Ti-Grace Atkinson. It seemed as though they were all talking at once, and yet I heard every word each of them spoke. Or, rather, it was that I must have heard them all saying the same thing because I came away from that week branded by a single thought. It was this: the idea that men by nature take their brains seriously and women by nature do not is a belief not an inborn reality: it serves the culture and is central to how all our lives take shape. The inability to see oneself primarily as a working person: this, I now saw, was the central dilemma of a woman’s existence. > > The insight felt new and profound and, above all, compelling. Of a sudden, I saw the unlived lives of women not only as a crime of historic proportion but a drama of the psyche that came brilliantly to life no sooner than the word “sexism” was applied—and that was the word that now governed my days. Everywhere I looked I saw sexism: raw and brutal, ordinary and intimate, ancient and ever-present. I saw it on the street and in the movies, at the bank and in the grocery store. I saw it while reading the headlines, riding the subway, having the door held for me. And, most shockingly, I saw it in literature. Taking up many of the books I’d grown up with, I saw for the first time that most of the female characters in them were stick figures devoid of flesh and blood, there only to thwart or advance the fortunes of the protagonist whom I only just then realized was almost always male. It occurred to me that all my reading life I’d been identifying with characters whose progress through life was at a vital remove from any I would ever make. > > The exhilaration I experienced once I had the analysis! I woke up with it, danced through the day with it, fell asleep smiling with it. It was as though revelation alone could deliver me into the promised land not only of political equality but of inner freedom as well. After all, what more did I need than the denial of women’s rights to explain me to myself? What a joyous little anarchist I then became! The pleasure I took in the excitement of casting conventional sentiment aside! How blithely I pronounced, “No equality in love? I’ll do without! Children and motherhood? Unnecessary! Social castigation? Nonsense!” Life felt good then. I had insight, and I had company. Everywhere I looked I saw women like myself seeing what I saw, thinking as I thought, speaking as I spoke. *The Obnoxious Stage* > Yet, by no means was it all bread and roses. For example, no one had counted on the level of rage the women’s movement had released in men and in women alike: strong enough, it sometimes seemed, to set a match to the world. Every day, marriages broke up, friendships ended, family members became estranged—and perfectly decent people were saying and doing the most abominable things to one another. One night at a dinner party, a pair of academics—one a tall, slim woman, the other a short, fat man—were listening intently to a distinguished historian whose field the woman knew well. She was adding her voice to that of the speaker with an occasional question or comment when her colleague impatiently demanded that she stop “interrupting.” At any other time within living memory, I was certain, this woman would have fallen silent after receiving such a rebuke. Now, her face hardened and she spat out, “Why, you ugly little man, don’t tell me to stop speaking!” The table went silent, and within minutes the evening was breaking up. I sat there, stunned. On the one hand, I was thrilled by the woman’s outburst; on the other, the loss of civility among us left me with the taste of ashes in my mouth. Who could have imagined that so much hate and fear had been festering for so long inside so many of us. > > Within the decade, 1970s feminists came to realize that while we stood united in political analysis, ideology alone was not about to deliver us from our own damaged selves. Between the ardor of our rhetoric and the dictates of flesh-and-blood reality, it seemed, lay a no-man’s-land of untested conviction. We became then, many of us, a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the discrepancy between what we declared we felt and the miserable complexity of what we actually felt more apparent with each passing day. > > The contradictions in my own character rose up daily to plague me, and patterns of behavior I had paid no attention to suddenly loomed large. I had always thought of myself as one of those ordinarily decent people who placed a high value on what is generally called “good character.” Now I saw that I did nothing of the sort. In conversation I was cutting and confrontational, at family affairs bored and dismissive, in the office self-regarding to a fault. Although I pined endlessly for intimate connection (I thought) I nonetheless sabotaged one relationship after another by concentrating almost exclusively on what I took to be my needs, not at all on those of my friend or lover. The narrowness of experience to which my own self-divisions had consigned me—how appalling that now felt! *Movement towards Emotional Liberation* > In no time at all an unimagined universe of interiority opened before me, one equipped with its own theory, laws, and language, constituting a worldview that seemed to hold more truth—that is, more inner reality—than any other; and a drama of internal anguish began to unfold. Every day now I struggled with myself, one part of me pitted against another, reason telling me which behaviors to break free of, compulsion demanding that I ignore reason. Again and again I suffered the humiliation of sustained self-defeat. In the goodness of analytic time it became clear—but this took years to absorb—that insight alone was never going to prove sufficient. The effort required to attain some semblance of an integrated self was going to be the task of a lifetime. As the great Anton Chekhov had so memorably put it, while “others [might have] made me a slave” it was I who must “squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.” Practitioners of NVC would indeed agree that achieving emotional liberation is "the task of a lifetime", and that we must squeeze the slave out of ourselves drop by drop.