When people hear the words “Nonviolent Communication,” something happens. An assumption forms — almost instantly — that this is going to be about suppression. That if you do a course or learn this approach, you’re going to have to become someone who never raises their voice, never judges, and certainly never swears. That it’s a kind of enforced niceness.
I’m here to tell you that’s rubbish.
In fact, here is the genuinely good news about Nonviolent Communication: you get to keep your swear words. You get to keep your judgements. You can embrace them. And then — only then — you can do something else with them.
I think that’s really, really good news. And I’m not sure it gets said enough.
I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with Amy Eleftheriades, founder of CHMLN, a workplace culture change consultancy, who has been using NVC in her organisations for several years. She introduced me to an ancient Greek word I hadn’t heard before: Lalochezia. It means the emotional relief experienced while using swear words.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Amy was using it in the context of working with a colleague who was stuck. The colleague could describe her feelings — could name them accurately, could talk about them intelligently — but she wasn’t actually moving through them. She was, as Amy put it, saying them “in a very intellectual way.”
So Amy turned the camera off on their Teams call, told her colleague to take five minutes alone, and invited her to lalochezia it out — to swear out loud, to herself, in whatever language came naturally, exactly what she thought about the situation and the person in it. To go out the other end of it rather than hovering above it in careful, nice language.
This is what NVC is really pointing at. Not suppression — the opposite of suppression. It’s about allowing the part that rages, that gets genuinely furious when our needs haven’t been met, that has strong feelings and strong words for them. That part is not the enemy. That part is carrying important information.
The risk isn’t in having those feelings. The risk is in not processing them — because unprocessed, they don’t disappear. They find somewhere else to go. They leak into our conversations, our decisions, the way we show up for other people. They do harm in the dark that they wouldn’t do in the light.
NVC gives us a way to bring them into the light. To hold them responsibly. To go through them rather than around them — and come out the other side with something useful.
So if you’ve been putting off exploring NVC because you thought it meant becoming a different, blander, more controlled version of yourself — I’d gently invite you to reconsider.
If any of this has sparked your curiosity, my next NVC course in London runs on May 2 & 3 — there’s still time to join.
I'm curious — does the word "Nonviolent Communication" put you off, or draw you in? What assumptions did you bring to it? I'd love to hear in the comments.