Taking the War Out of Words With Non-Defensive Communication

You're sitting down to your desk to begin work at 8:10 a.m., when your co-worker looks at his watch and then over at you and asks: "Had a little too much fun last night?"

Ha, ha, you laugh. But inside, your story is going like this: Who does he think he is, Mr. Perfectly On Time Every Single Day? What's wrong with being late one day? Jerk. He's always so critical.

Freeze frame.

If an offhand comment such as that one can provoke such feelings of defensiveness, imagine what can happen with the larger issues at work, emotional issues at home or ethical issues in our community.

What happens, says Sharon Ellison, M.S., is essentially war.

Ellison, founder of Powerful Non-Defensive Communication, teaches that the way we communicate with each other uses the same principles and tactics we would use in physical combat, based on the belief that we must protect ourselves by being defensive. As soon as we feel any threat, either of not getting what we want or of being harmed or put down in some way, we choose from among the three basic defensive war maneuvers: surrender, withdrawal or counterattack.

"It's a sad commentary on our use of human imagination," Ellison says, "to realize that for centuries we have essentially used a war model as the foundation upon which we have built our entire system for spoken and written communication."

O.J. Harvey studied this connection between language and violence when he was a psychology professor at the University of Colorado. Using random samples of pieces of literature from countries around the world, he tabulated the frequency of words that classify and judge people—the types of words that often provoke defensive reactions. Not surprisingly, he found a high correlation between the frequent use of such words and the incidence of violence.