Collecting Fragments of a Soul – Lottie Child

Lottie Child – NVC Supporter and sharer explains how learning in her own family led to an exploration of NVC for Men in a five week, course in Dorking.

Cockney rhyming slang for mate is china plate. I find myself continually going back to fragments of joy and piecing them together. The pieces of blue and white china I’ve been finding in the stream in the woods will never again be a large flat surface to pile with food. The fragments of beauty in unexpected places and memories of shared moments are shining out in day to day struggles and I maintain that the glimpses of beauty, creativity, peace and love co-created on life’s journey are what my soul is made of. 

I’m one of those people who really benefits from having a listening ear when I’m finding things a bit tough.

And I’ve learned to love listening to my partner when he’s upset. I have realised that I don’t have to fix his problems or be defensive because; really being heard for his experiences, having his feelings acknowledged and needs guessed at too seems to make problems lose some of their charge and his body calm.

I also really like it if he has another source of support other than me. I think the nuclear family asks a hell of a lot of people, we’re expecting to be many things for each other. A source of emotional balance and growth is ideally one of them and not so easy in the day to day of keeping family afloat.

He and I have been to a number of NVC trainings together and have done our best to integrate what we have learnt into our relationship.

We both agree that listening to each other and having a structure when things might be spinning into conflictual chaos helps us. Our parenting and our relationships within our family have changed in the last 6 years, we have more and better connection and perhaps acceptance of a range of feelings and behaviours because they are pointing to feelings, often about things we deeply value and need rather than ill intent or lack of care, as we might previously have assumed.  

The NVC trainings that I attend nurture regular exchanges of empathic listening, they have been punctuating my week for the last few years. Empathy exchanges have been absent from my partner’s weeks. After a few years of being listened to with warmth and without judgment, I have some new found compassion for myself when things are hard. I can’t always connect with a caring part of myself but I do it more often now and I’m sure this is as a result of having given and received a lot of empathic listening

Taking into account the sheer mass of difficult situations and emotional reactions within a family ongoing I was glad of the support for myself.

I found myself asking my partner to please find some emotional support for himself too.

He did, he found a men’s group. His monthly full days at a woodland, with a group of men, sitting around a fire and talking about their lives seemed to nourish him. He always made sure to take loads of things to cook on the fire and came home tired and happy at the end of the day.

It’s hard to say how it helped our relationship, perhaps it was having any burdens and challenges shared with more than one person. I have no idea what they talked about or who the other men were, but I got a sense of the pride my partner took in being part of it.

I’m pretty sure I noticed him being more flexible at  flash points in family life and for that I was grateful.

I think he heard some stories of very painful life experiences which may have changed how he thought about his own. After a few years the owner of the woodland where it took place decided to move and sell the land and the group had to close.

Very gradually I sensed that what it had given him and thus me and our family ebbed away slightly.

I was about to offer a 5 week course where I would share the idea of universal human needs, make space for talking about feelings and practice empathy and self compassion.

The numbers of sign ups were low and unusually all those signed up were men.

The courses I run are usually attended by more women than men. One day after I had been asking him again to find some emotional support he suggested he attend the course I was running. At that point I decided that it would make sense for it to be a course for men. My curiosity and a degree of trepidation arose. I was walking the dog daily by a small stream in the woods near our house and began to notice fragments of blue and white china among the stones submerged in the stream. Watching the water flow over them, shimmering in the light, I wondered at the value and beauty of these things.

What could I piece together with my partner and for men?

The sessions I offered are not men’s groups, they are 2 hour sessions over 5 weeks. They are for coming together, being heard, learning some tools for handling internal weather, theirs and other people’s.

Who knows what will emerge after some more men have learnt and practiced these ways of being with themselves and others. It turns out that two of the men in the group have wives who have done courses with me.

I’m now halfway through my first 5 week course. The fear I experienced before they set foot in the venue may have come from stories I had about what a group of men would be like. I need not have worried, the men are receptive and very engaged. I’m keen to offer more of this for men. 

A Mutual Learning Process Ensued.

Gathering at the Wooden House

On the first session, we did an exercise for ‘presencing’  being here in the moment with what is available to the senses. The theme that I continually came back to throughout the session was creating a space between the stimulus and the response.

I proposed an exercise that uses NVC-UK’s, blue, ‘needs cards’ . These cards, a word on each, reflect a long list of values that contribute to our lives. The idea is that we all share them universally which unites all humans.

At the level of needs we can all be aligned even if our strategies for meeting those needs conflict.

Needs are things that contribute to a good life, they are things like:

To Matter, Understanding, Fun and Play, Warmth, Self Care, Connection, Belonging

Imagine the blue ‘needs cards’ in the centre on the floor surrounded by ‘black-and-white thinking’ cards, given to me by NVC trainer Barry Jones.

On them are written the kinds of judgemental thoughts we habitually have in our interactions with people.  As this was the first time I had ever done this exercise, I wasn’t sure how many ‘needs cards’ to use and I decided to edit some of them.

During the session, I gave people a scenario to consider. You are in the right place at the right time to meet your mates, half an hour has gone by and they have not turned up.

I asked them what kind of thoughts they might be having.

This is how we gently circled in from judgemental thoughts, to feelings, to needs.

We opened with laughter and swearing, the atmosphere was very warm and very animated, and I got a sense of men’s relief and enjoyment in being there.

One of the men kept on picking up cards, holding them, he said “I want all of this blue stuff” about the sea of blue on the carpet in front of us.

Much later during this first session, I proposed  a needs guessing activity, in pairs.

This involved talking about something that had gone well in the last week, with the other person guessing what needs the positive experience had met for them.

At that point, I produced the cards that I had edited out at the beginning and added them in. After an enthusiastic group reflection on the experience of having their needs guessed by someone who is really listening to them, we were in the process of finishing two minutes over time. I was just about saying goodbye to everybody when one of the men asked me:

“You know you put a few extra cards out of the end. Why was that?” 

I stopped and I had to wonder why I had done that.

What I realised, was that in setting up the activity, imagining working with men, imagining what men might be needing in relation to each other, I had edited out these needs: Love, Intimacy, Beauty and Peace

So I owned up and said that this had been my attempt to try to have a shared reality with them and guess what they might be needing. Now when I saw that I felt sad!

I think we were all a bit awed by this process. 

One man said “they are precisely the things that men need in their relationships, otherwise why have relationships why are you meeting your friends in the first place?” Another man said “intimacy yes, love, peace and beauty no”

Another man said “In that scenario, my friend may not have turned up because of his own fear of abandonment”.

There was still more reflection, one man told of the time he spends on the water in a kayak with a friend. He said that doing that meets needs for all of those things.

Perhaps the left-out-needs make an amazingly accurate portrait of the things that stereotypes, assumptions and dominant culture say men don’t need in their relationships with each other.

Is that making it even harder for men to look out for their mates, connect with each other? To share hard things and grow?

I’m conscious of the devastating consequences of a lack of space for expressing feelings and a sense of belonging in many men’s lives.

During opening and closing circles, I have heard the phrase “I don’t know” when asked about feelings and about what needs have been met by the sessions.

When held in community, with warmth, it is precisely this open space of “I don’t know”, where the glimmers, the beautiful blue fragments of what is possible, what might grow and what might heal happen to live.

Exploring the possibly wild and mysterious places, I think I’ll  go back down to the stream to look out for another piece of china plate.

Lottie Child – lottie@malinky.org

Lottie Child’s practices are seeking to nurture and grow the co-creation of regenerative life. She does this primarily in her roles as a learner and a teacher, a leader and a mother, partner, daughter and community member. 

Lottie runs courses in person in Dorking and online, the heart of which are self compassion, empathic listening and handling conflict as a call for change. Devoted to the emergence and nurture of beneficial relationships. 

Her key practices are Nonviolent Communication, and learning, specifically how living systems learn in relationship. She does this by spending her days learning with her family, without school, nested in various communities. 

She has recently started teaching groups of men tools for self compassion and talking about feelings and organising life around the concept of universal human needs in order to nurture relationships.