An Exploration of Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

Yann HOFFMANN

17 Dec 2025 — 101 min read

Non Violent Communication (NVC) is a fascinating language developed by Marshall B. Rosenberg in the 70's. He was inspired by Carl Rogers's person-centered approach to psychology. Carl Rogers was one of the pioneers of the humanist branch of psychology in the post-war era and discovered or rediscovered the power of an empathetic connection in the therapeutic context.

NVC gives us a playbook, a set of deceptively simple rules, to help us bring our attention to what is alive in our interlocutor and thereby achieving this important empathetic quality of connection. NVC has proven to be a potent framework for fostering understanding and collaboration and has gained a lot of traction in the fields of conflict resolution and education over the years.

I found it personally quite valuable and have therefore developed a set of tools to help maintain an awareness of the process. NVC is based on the observation that human needs are universal and that emotions are the direct expression of needs being met or not. The first tool below helps us explore various feelings and needs listed in Rosenberg's book with simple scenarios generated by Claude.

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State of Research in Luxembourg (April 2025)

Language Models Can Reduce Asymmetry in Information Markets – Slides

Analyzing Multi-Dimensional Data for Clinical Tests: A Practical Case Study

Master Thesis: Reinforcement Learning for Optimizing Compute Clusters