Participant: There is also a need to make other people happy. Isn’t that true for all of us?
KK: Yes. The entire motivational system of us humans, the dopamine axis, the release of feel-good messenger substances, oxytocin, attachment hormones, etc. is essentially controlled by successful human relationships. We humans are addicted to that. We are social beings, our entire motivational system is geared towards this. There are a few other factors that play a role on the dopamine axis and that can affect these feel-good messengers – mainly music, movement and drugs. But the most important one is a successful human relationship.
In other words, we are biologically programmed to enjoy nothing more than enriching someone else’s life. This is how we are born, that is human nature, at least from the point of view of the model of nonviolent communication.
Two necessary conditions to enable us to contribute with joy
However, this only applies under two conditions.
It is only retained if two conditions are met.
The first condition is: I enjoy it when I do not experience or hear anything that threatens my self-determination or my autonomy.
When we hear something that sounds like to our ears. “You should“ or “you must”, then we start to defend our self-determination and react with resistance and defiance.
The second condition is that we humans trust that our needs matter in this world.
In the development of human maturity, there are also different focal points at different points in time, in which something occurs more or less frequently.
When children are very young, they cannot understand causal relationships over long periods of time. Telling a three-year-old, “Hey, brush your teeth because if you don’t do that, you’ll lose them when you’re fifty,” is completely irrelevant information to a three-year-old. The child can’t do anything with that.
Obedience – Trusting an Authority – Blindly following requests
Investigations have been carried out and observers have been introduced into a family with children of this age to see how people communicate there. A mother said to her three-year-old child, “Please clean up your toys and the little one did it. The observer then asked the child: “Why did you do that?” The child reacts with an astonished expression on his face: “Well, because mom said it.” What kind of strange question is that? There is a person here who is an authority for me who said: “Please do it, that’s why I do it.“ End of story. Nothing more to say about it.
In adulthood, a typical example would be “military”, where one makes a “vow of obedience”. If you ask a soldier, “Why did you do this?” He might say. “Orders from above!” “Yes, but haven’t you thought about it beforehand?” “No, why?” There’s nothing to think about (some laugh). Authority says to do it! – End. Deeper considerations – nonexistent.
Fear of Punishment
If children get a little older, and they understand causal relationships over time and understand “Ah, something that happens now could be the cause of something that I will experience later”, then it may be that this now plays a role, and if you ask a five-year-old whose mother has asked to clean up his room and who has done it, “Why did you do that?” Then he might say: “Because otherwise I can’t go out and play with my friends So the calculation is: “Hey, that could have unpleasant consequences if I don’t do what my mother asks me to do,” and then fear is the motivation to do something someone asks me to do because I want to avoid that there are unpleasant consequences. Or I am afraid that something pleasant will not be available. This is the level at which we try to control other people’s behavior by rewarding or punishing them. I’ll say a little more about that in a moment.
Guilt and Shame
When children are older and have been brainwashed long enough to understand, “Ah, I am responsible for other people’s feelings,” then guilt and shame are wonderful ways that other people can to bring to do what I want.
And if you then ask a nine-year-old: “You just cleaned up your room, why did you do that?” Then he might say: “You know, my mom feels so uncomfortable when it looks like this for me.” There is a person who has an important place in my heart and I believe I am responsible if the other is unhappy, dissatisfied or disappointed. Then that may be why I do what someone asks me to do.
By the way, if you ask people: “Where would you like the motivation to be at home when someone fulfills a request?” Then we will hear in unison: “Yes, I would like that he does it of his own free will, because he takes pleasure in making me happy. ”And, that also applies in many cases, if these two conditions are met.
When young children watch adults washing dishes, they say, “I want too, I want too.”
Do that to an eight-year-old who you taught that it’s his goddamned duty, something contributing to housework is no longer fun.
But we do enjoy making a contribution.
We feel the joy of enriching the lives of others when two conditions are met.
Childhood Experience – My Needs don’t Matter
Unfortunately, we have all had a time in our lives, all of us sitting here, where that basic trust, “Ah, my needs matter, my needs are important,” has been shaken. This phase in life is called childhood. This is the time when we enable children almost everywhere in the world to experience “Your needs are not that important”.
Marshall did the following exercise in parent seminars: Initially, he divides the seminar group into two groups of equal size. Each group gets a pin board with a sentence on it. Someone reads the sentence aloud and the whole group collects the spontaneous reactions together. The two groups have the same sentence to which they respond. There is only one difference: before they start brainstorming, Marshall goes back to each room and says to one group: “Please answer with the idea that this is your neighbor who says that to you.” He says to the other group: “Please answer with the idea that this is a child who says that to you.”
After all the reactions have been written down, both pin boards come to the same room. The whole group sits in front of the two resulting pin boards and Marshall asks, “Read what is on the two notice boards. Is there a difference in what expresses appreciation and respect for the other in the statements? Is there more appreciation for the other person on one wall than on the other?”
The result was always very clear. The neighbor gets more appreciation. In most cultures, the filter “It is a child” means that this person is not treated with the same esteem, appreciation and respect as an adult.
Participant: Klaus, do you know what sentence he used for this exercise?
Klaus: It doesn’t matter at all. It could be something like, “If it’s not clean enough for you, clean it yourself,” for example.
And the difference is even more drastic if you don’t tell people. “This is a child who says this to you”, but “This is your child who says this to you. There is often even less respect then.
There are people who say. “The relationship between people is shaped by how men treat women in a culture, which is the basis for the way we treat each other.” The Australian psychiatrist Gilligan puts forward the thesis in his book: “Not the way men treat women, but the relationship, how we treat children, is the basis for how people in a culture treat each other.”
He examined what we have done with children over the past 2000 years. Do you know since when children are considered human, officially? The “Human Rights Convention for Children“ was adopted by the United Nations in 1989 and came into force in 1990. Before that children did not have these human rights officially. And not all countries have signed – Somalia, for example, has not signed. Neither did the USA because they wanted to keep the freedom to execute children. And the fact that many nation states have signed the convention, saying, “Yes, children are real people, they have full human rights”, does not mean that this is lived reality in all countries.
[After that more information on the historic development of the human rights for children and women – and the difference between law/intention and practical lived realities.]
Excerpt from „Gewaltfreie Kommunikation – das Basistraining“ – Klaus Karstädt
Shortened and translated by John Gather, 2024