why NNTD matters
No content on this page itself — see linked references below.
2 linked references
August 21st, 2022
- a new pithy articulation of why NNTD matters
- collective agency matters
- common values and goals are vital to collective agency
- but they're insufficient—you also need common ground in terms of perceiving the world together
- finding common ground is an important skill
- but you may also need to make common ground
- this involves welcoming different perspectives and holding them until a larger perspective emerges
- certain types of perceptions are hard to integrate and share
- particularly judgments, blames, and sometimes apologies
- part of why this is is that often these perceptions are closely tied in with some sort of emotional flashback that the person is bringing, that other people can tell isn't about them, and they don't want to participate in being inside it
- but that doesn't mean that the perception is invalid or "just projection"
- it is in fact that person's best attempt at making sense of the situation
- and telling them to set it aside is telling them not to trust themselves
- NNTD functions as a universal interface-creating process for allowing judgments, blames, etc to be welcomed, without having to diminish the meaning in them or shoehorn the perspective into some other language
- the simple transformation is just from "X" to "I can't trust that not-X"
- but X can stay as it is
- eg from "you're lying" to "I can't trust you're not lying"
- this transformation can also be performed mentally by the listener
- eg "she's saying I'm not listening... okay, she can't trust that I'm listening"
- (and this isn't so much a verbal transformation as simply a recognition of the actual state of experience of the other person that would cause them to say such a thing)
- being able to respect other peoples' distrust is in some ways an easy move since it's a simple matter of fact
- it keeps the statement full strength while completely removing the accusatory quality
- contrast "I think you're lying" which feels weak somehow
- it seems like an opinion
- "I think you're lying" "well I'm not; you're wrong"
- whereas "I can't trust you're not lying" ..."well I'm not, but okay I guess you can't trust what you can't trust"
- it's not an opinion, it's a perspective
- contrast NVC "I have a need for #unfinished
- (I'm actually not sure how to render this, but I've tweeted asking for someone to fill it out for me)
- but it's a very powerful move because it establishes a baseline of everyone's perspective being valid and welcome, and nobody being asked to trust something they can't
- which means that trust-building can proceed as fast as non-naively possible, which may be slower than people hoped especially if they're calibrated on naive trust
- but it means that the trust that is built is robust
- and the system is fully recursive
- eg if A says they respect that B doesn't trust them and B is like "I don't buy that" then A can then accept that B can't buy it. B may not be able to buy that either (in which case A & B might need some space) but nobody has to lose or back down
- or perhaps C says that they think all of this language about trust is secretly manipulation, and D internally goes "okay, C doesn't trust that I'm not trying to manipulate them by talking like this, so I guess I'm gonna have to find another way to talk" and externally says some other thing that makes sense
trust as an unquestioning attitude
- > “To trust, then, is to set up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world — to permit external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability.”