Self-Empathy: Developing a Needs Literacy

Learn to articulate requests and responses with true empathy and transform your relationships.

My personal growth journey into self-empathy has been a slow, life-giving journey. The technique I’m focusing on in cultivating self-empathy is Non-Violent Communication (NVC) by Marshall Rosenberg. Grounded in the principle of “unconditional positive regard” by Carl Rogers, NVC is a needs-based language focusing on the depth of empathetic connection in listening to one’s needs and the needs of others in resolving conflicts. At the heart of human communication, it’s either to express gratitude or to get a need met.

Just like picking up any new language, NVC takes time to learn. Don’t expect transformation overnight. With that, let’s take a deeper look at this self-growth modality.

How are you speaking to yourself?

The UNESCO Constitution states: “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”.

The events that trigger us, whether pleasant or unpleasant, create an internal story within us. If it is a pleasant sensation, we tell a good story and engage in affirmative responses. If it is unpleasant, we tend to evaluate the experience with a negative bias and attribute more mental pain to it. We can see pain as pain, and suffering starts when we actively engage in aversion from pain.

There are a range of responses available to us when it comes to processing negative situations:

Avoidance, Distraction, Repression

Some people disassociate or detach from painful situations by actively distracting themselves. Literally, they shut down and don’t deal with the issue. That’s just a form of repression or avoiding pain. These people go through life on autopilot, not truly knowing what is causing their pain - but just attempting to find externalities to validate themselves. This can look like self-identifying with a career, relationship, public perception, escapism into drugs, alcohol, etc — something external of the self. Over time, layers of validation (or reactivity, because there is nothing mindful about repression or distraction) accumulate over the pain, forming a Frankenstein-like structure of band aids on a festering wound. If there is no healing or personal growth journey, the soul suffers a long, drawn out death, manifested through anxiety, depression or suicide.

“An awakening occurs when we are so exhausted, so deep in our suffering that we have no choice but to stop sleepwalking in life.” ~ Dr Nicole LePera

I find a lot of people are confused about the term detachment in Buddhist philosophy or wrongly apply it. Detachment in the truest sense as practiced by Buddhists is radical acceptance of the situation; seeing reality as it is, and not what we judge it to be. This non-judgemental acceptance in other words, is a form of empathy. Some think detachment is a form of self-flagellation and self-righteous suffering (“throw anything at me, I can deal with it because I’m a big boy, and big boys don’t cry.”), which is also incorrect application.

Take for example, the Wim Hof method. Wim Hof was a guy in the Netherlands who lost his wife to suicide from depression. Left on his own to fend for his four kids, he felt that life had lost all meaning. Wim Hof went on his own personal growth journey, and found himself being drawn to extreme cold experiences like jumping into freezing cold lakes or trekking in snow in his underwear. He went onto develop a body of breath work (which I practice from time to time) and extreme cold exposures to build a happier, healthier mind and body. He isn’t doing this for his ego (“let’s see if I can beat my PB / others by how long I can hold my breath in this icy water!”) but rather, he is training his mind body awareness to accept his extreme reality, i.e. the cold / body sensations and induce resilience or relaxation. In the Wim Hof app, you can hear him say “it’s OK” (inducing acceptance) as your physiology starts changing with the breath work (which most of the time, isn’t pleasant).

Inability to Express Own Needs

Another response can be articulated as a state confusion:

“I don’t feel good about this, and I don’t know why.”

“I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling.”

"I don’t know how to respond.”

Interpretation: "I don't have any needs literacy / emotional language to describe what I'm feeling, hence I don’t know how to respond to your request.”

Some people just do not have the capacity or skillset to respond in empathy. There should not be any judgment about this. Rather, if you have developed your own needs literacy, look upon the other person with empathy and compassion, and accept that they need to undertake their own personal growth journey to do this for themselves. You don’t judge a child for not knowing how to read or write when they have never been taught or given a book or pen. It’s about showing unconditional positive regard for the other, and seeing the person as who he truly is, unable to meet you where you are or see you fully. The area to be developed lies in emotional intelligence, to learn to be aware of one’s own emotions and feelings. I say this because you can’t be rational if you are not emotional:

“All emotions are essential for rational thought. Learn to name your emotions, work with the emotions using logic, and then help manage the emotions of your partner.” ~ Fred Kofman

The whole toxic masculinity movement has shed light on why men struggle being vulnerable and emotionally woke. This is a whole separate topic unto its own, for another day.

Another way that showcases inability to converse in a needs-based language is by jumping to judgments right away, instead of focusing on life-giving needs:

“I can’t believe you hurt me so much.”

“You disrespected me!”

“You are such a drama queen.”

Interpretation: These are all judgments articulated as a tragic expression of an unmet need.

This is why we need to start watching our inner dialogue. Before we form these judgments about others, we have already judged ourselves. Everyone else and all external events are really just holding up a mirror on how we truly see or perceive ourselves. If you are quick to judge others, it’s because you have a strong inner critic that holds you to a certain standard of conduct, making you psychologically rigid in the way you relate to others. Constantly deconstructing our mind, default judgmental attitudes and unconscious behaviors takes a lifelong effort of hyper-vigilance and self-reflection. It really isn’t easy cultivating our inner sanctum that is truly purposeful and life-giving for others. I say this, even after one year of intensive personal growth work, 1,000+ hours of Vipassana meditation logged over 10 years, and hundreds of hours in self-reflection and therapy.

To this day, I’ve sat with my mental and emotional pain for years on end and I can say I still experience reactivity. What meditation has done for me was to develop a hyper-awareness of my body sensations. I know when I’m not feeling good about a situation, and the discomfort can build up very quickly, within seconds. In the past 12 months, I’ve worked on a more holistic approach to my meditation, combining body-awareness with other positive psychology tools such as radical self-acceptance, positive affirmations, and NVC to name a few. The most I can do is try to slow down the reactivity and discharge it with equanimity, not by repressing but learning to identify my unmet needs by using my emotions, thoughts and feelings as reference points, and developing adaptive strategies to have my needs met.

It is truly hard work. Trust me, if self-work was easy, all of us would be totally zen-like and achieve god-like levels of inner peace by kindergarten. As adults, we’d all be Dalai Lamas walking around in monk robes, devoted to achieving spiritual enlightenment and world peace. There would be no wars, no violence, no poverty. We need to acknowledge that pain and suffering is real. Also, there is no timeline, no comparison to suffering. Suffering is universal, just like other shared human experiences such as anger, grief and fear. When people tell you to “feel your feelings”, its a lingo for us to really go deeply into mourning and discover what really caused our greatest pain. From there, we can discover what is most precious to us in life. NVC helps us provide a language framework to articulate these deepest, most tender needs that we have buried underneath the pain for so long.

Identifying Your Needs and Feelings

NVC is based on identifying needs universal to all humans. There is no enmeshment, no judgement, no reactivity in this language. Familiarise yourself with the universal needs/values and feelings list to get a sense of what resonates with you the most:

Another principle Marshall teaches is that we can all meet our needs, essentially, we can be self-efficacious. When we can articulate our needs by using our feelings as a reference point, “I feel ______________ because I need _____________” — this allows us to formulate a more creative response that is aligned with our needs/value system. Try this with yourself to see how you can find expansiveness in situations where you feel stuck. For e.g. in the event Option A doesn’t work out, there is Option B. Sheryl’s life story is a testament of such needs-based, purposeful living:

While “Lean In” grew out of a motivational speech, “Option B” arose from a public confessional: a letter that Sandberg posted to her followers on Facebook thirty days after Goldberg’s death, having completed a key period of mourning in the Jewish tradition. As readers of “Lean In” would have been aware, Sandberg was the kind of person to whom nothing bad had ever really happened, aside from a brief early marriage that could later be reckoned as a worthwhile learning experience, with no enduring cost attached. In the letter, Sandberg confessed her own prior insulation from tragedy: “I have learned that I never really knew what to say to others in need,” she wrote. She concluded with an anecdote that gave the new book its title: when Sandberg wept over the fact that Goldberg was no longer available for a particular parent-child activity, a male friend offered the following: “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.” ~ The New Yorker

Tip: generating multiple possibilities in times of tragedy / high reactivity is difficult. Ensure that you have done some grounding exercises like mindfulness to center yourself before embarking on any self-introspection, else you might start ruminating.

I hope this little exercise in self-empathy serves you. Do share this if you think someone would like to read it. Till then, sending you light and love on your personal growth journey.