Marshall Rosenberg: The Man Behind Nonviolent Communication

He would arrive at a workshop with two hand puppets. One was a giraffe, one was a jackal, and a grown man in his sixties would put them on his hands in front of a room of lawyers, or prison officers, or a couple who had not spoken kindly to each other in four years, and start doing voices.

Sometimes he brought a guitar. He sang. People who came expecting a psychology lecture from a man with a doctorate often spent the first ten minutes wondering whether they had walked into the wrong building.

Then something would shift in the room, usually when he turned to the angriest person present and reflected back what they had said in a way nobody had ever bothered to do before, and the puppets stopped seeming ridiculous.

Marshall Rosenberg is the person who created Nonviolent Communication, and the biographies of him are strangely flat. They list the degrees, the sixty countries, the awards. They rarely tell you what he was actually like to be in a room with, which is the part that explains why the practice travelled as far as it did. This is an attempt at both: the verifiable life, and the working method underneath it.

Who was Marshall Rosenberg?

Marshall Bertram Rosenberg (October 6, 1934 to February 7, 2015) was an American clinical psychologist, mediator, author and teacher who developed Nonviolent Communication, a process for resolving conflict by attending to feelings and needs rather than to blame. He founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984 and served as its Director of Educational Services until he retired in 2011. He taught in more than 60 countries, in war zones, prisons, corporations and schools, and he wrote Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, which is still the standard text.

He was born in Canton, Ohio, to a Jewish family, and raised mostly in Detroit. That is where the story properly begins.

Detroit, 1943

The Rosenbergs moved to Detroit about a week before the 1943 race riot, in which 34 people were killed and hundreds injured. Rosenberg was eight years old and spent days inside while the city burned.

At his new school he ran into a second thing: antisemitism, aimed at him, for a name he had not chosen. He said later that he internalised it.

Both experiences left him with one question that he never really put down. Why do some people do violence, and other people, in the same situation, do the opposite? He kept adding the second half of that question, the one about compassion, and it is the half most people forget when they retell the story. He was not only trying to explain cruelty. He was trying to explain his grandmother.

His maternal grandmother, Anna Wiener, spent her final years living with the family while paralysed by what appears to have been ALS. Rosenberg credited the way his family cared for her, without resentment and without keeping score, as an early sight of what he later called giving from the heart.

From clinical psychology to a taxi cab

He went to the University of Michigan, then to the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his PhD in clinical psychology in 1961 and studied under Carl Rogers, whose work on empathy and unconditional positive regard runs visibly through everything Rosenberg later built.

Along the way a sociology professor, Michael Hakeem, taught him something that stuck harder than the clinical training: that psychology and psychiatry quietly mix scientific judgements with moral ones, and then present the result as diagnosis. Rosenberg read Thomas Szasz and Erving Goffman in the same period. By the time he qualified as a psychologist, he had substantial doubts about the whole apparatus of labelling people.

He set up a successful private practice in St. Louis and then walked away from it. The version told at NYCNVC is that he drove a cab for a while, using the time to work out how to apply what he knew to something other than affluent individual clients.

What he moved toward instead was the civil rights work of the 1960s. He worked with Black liberation organisers in St. Louis, mediated between rioting students and college administrators, and helped desegregate schools in regions that had been segregated for generations. NVC was not developed in a seminar room. It was worked out in rooms where the stakes were high and the parties had every reason to distrust each other.

What he actually taught

The four components, observation, feeling, need, request, are what most people know. They are the visible part, and Rosenberg himself said repeatedly that they were not the point.

His actual claim was more radical and harder to sell on a slide. He argued that all human behaviour, including behaviour we find appalling, is an attempt to meet a universal need, and that most of what passes for communication is really a moralistic sorting of people into deserving and undeserving. He called the sorting “life-alienating communication,” and he thought it was learned rather than natural.

So the practice he taught was a shift in attention, not a script:

• Separate what actually happened from what you made it mean. This is the observation versus evaluation distinction, and almost nobody does it naturally.
• Take your feelings as information about your own needs, not as evidence about someone else’s character.
• Treat needs as universal and strategies as negotiable. Two people rarely have a conflict of needs. They have a collision of strategies.
• Make requests that a person can hear as requests, which means you have to be genuinely willing to hear no.

The giraffe and the jackal were his shorthand for this. The giraffe, land mammal with the largest heart, speaks in feelings and needs. The jackal speaks in judgements, diagnoses and demands. He was careful, when he was doing it well, to make the jackal sympathetic rather than a villain, because his point was that jackal language is a tragic expression of an unmet need and not a moral failure. Anyone who has watched him work knows he gave the jackal the better jokes.

If you want the full framework in plain terms, we keep an overview at what NVC is, and the same practice under its other common name at compassionate communication.

The books

He published for nearly fifty years, and the bibliography is longer than most people realise. The essential ones:

• Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (PuddleDancer Press, first edition 1999 as A Language of Compassion; third edition 2015). The core text.
• Speak Peace in a World of Conflict (2005). The social and political application, closer to what he actually cared about at the end.
• The Surprising Purpose of Anger (2005). A short book, and the one that changes the most minds, because it refuses both suppression and venting.
• Raising Children Compassionately (2004) and Life-Enriching Education (2003), for parents and teachers respectively.

Long before any of these there was A Manual for “Responsible” Thinking and Communicating in 1972, revised repeatedly through the 1970s as From Now On, and then A Model for Nonviolent Communication in 1983. The model took him twenty years of redrafting. It is worth knowing that when somebody tells you they learned it in a weekend. A fuller reading order is in our guide to books on nonviolent communication.

Awards and recognition

He received the International Listening Association’s Listener of the Year award in 2000, a Restorative Justice appreciation award in 2002, the Religious Science International Golden Works Award in 2004, and the Bridge of Peace Nonviolence Award from the Global Village Foundation in 2006. In 2014, the year before he died, the Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance named him a Hero and Champion of Forgiveness.

He was not especially interested in any of this. By 2004 he was travelling to around 35 countries a year, which is a schedule that suggests where his attention actually was.

He died at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on February 7, 2015, aged 80.

What he got wrong, and what he left unfinished

Every page about Rosenberg on the first page of Google is admiring, and that does him a disservice, because he was more interesting than a saint.

The most serious criticism, and the one raised most often by practitioners of colour and by people working in situations of real power imbalance, is that a practice built on universal needs can flatten actual differences in power. If a manager and the person they can fire are both invited to express their needs, the invitation is not symmetrical, and treating it as though it were can quietly serve whoever already holds the power. Rosenberg was aware of this. He worked in prisons and war zones, and he spoke about structural violence. But he left the question underdeveloped, and the field has spent the decade since his death working on it rather than resolving it.

The second problem is one he named himself and could not stop. The four steps are so teachable that they escaped the consciousness that was supposed to animate them. Reduced to a formula, NVC becomes a way of sounding non-judgemental while judging, and people on the receiving end can feel it immediately. We have written about that failure mode at length in beyond the four steps.

He also had the ordinary flaws of a charismatic founder. A practice held together by one man’s presence has to survive the loss of that presence, and some of what looked like method turned out to be him.

None of that reduces what he built. It just means the honest way to relate to Rosenberg is as a first draft of something, rather than a finished doctrine. He would have been comfortable with that. He revised his own manual four times.

Frequently asked questions about Marshall Rosenberg

Who was Marshall Rosenberg? An American clinical psychologist, mediator and author (1934 to 2015) who developed Nonviolent Communication in the 1960s and founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 1984. He taught the practice in over 60 countries and wrote Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

When did Marshall Rosenberg die? He died on February 7, 2015, at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of 80. He had retired from directing the Center for Nonviolent Communication in 2011.

What did Marshall Rosenberg believe? That everything anyone does, including violence, is an attempt to meet a universal human need, and that conflict comes from colliding strategies rather than incompatible needs. He also believed that the language most of us learn, which classifies people as good or bad and deserving or undeserving, is itself a form of violence.

Did Marshall Rosenberg study with Carl Rogers? Yes. He completed his PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, where he studied under Carl Rogers. Rogers’ emphasis on empathy and unconditional positive regard is one of the clearest influences on NVC, though Rosenberg took it in a more structured and more explicitly political direction.

What is the giraffe and jackal in NVC? They are Rosenberg’s teaching metaphors, often delivered with actual hand puppets. Giraffe language expresses observations, feelings, needs and requests. Jackal language expresses judgements, blame, diagnosis and demand. He treated jackal language as a clumsy expression of an unmet need rather than as bad behaviour.

Which Marshall Rosenberg book should I read first? Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. It is the complete framework with worked dialogue, and the third edition from 2015 is the one to buy. If you want something shorter to start, The Surprising Purpose of Anger is around 48 pages.

Is Nonviolent Communication still taught after his death? Yes, and more widely than during his lifetime. Certified trainers teach it in more than 65 countries through the Center for Nonviolent Communication and independent organisations, and the practice has continued to develop, particularly on questions of power, trauma and race that Rosenberg himself left open.

What he actually left

The tidiest summary of Rosenberg is that he spent his life on a question he first asked as an eight-year-old in a city that was burning, and got far enough with it to hand something usable to the rest of us.

What he handed over is not a technique for winning arguments more politely. It is closer to a discipline of attention: the practice of hearing what someone needs underneath what they are saying, especially when what they are saying is unpleasant, and of knowing your own needs well enough to say them without a weapon attached. Some days that is simply beyond you. That has never meant you are doing it wrong.

The learning is also not really a solo activity, which he knew, which is why he taught in circles rather than lecture halls. Our year-long NVC learning community is built the same way, in small home groups practising over months with trainers who learned directly in that lineage. If you would rather begin on your own, what NVC is is the place to start, and his book is still the best twenty dollars in the field.