The Hardest NVC Practice: Finding the Need Behind the Vote You Can't Understand

NVC Rising Platform Desk
May 6
7 min read

Two silhouettes facing each other across a cracked-earth divide at late afternoon — painterly illustration

There is a vote I keep coming back to.

Not because I agree with it. Because I don't. And because NVC tells me that if I can only find the human need in the people I already understand, I'm not actually practicing NVC. I'm practicing selective empathy — which is just a more sophisticated form of the same disconnection I'm trying to heal.

This post is an attempt to do the harder thing.

Why This Is Hard (And Why That's the Point)

NVC makes a claim that is easy to accept in theory and extremely difficult to live: every action, every choice, every vote — no matter how harmful it looks from the outside — is an attempt to meet a legitimate human need.

Not a legitimate method. The method might be terrible. It might cause real harm. NVC does not ask you to endorse the strategy.

But the need underneath it? Universal. Human. Recognizable if you're willing to look.

Here's where most people stop. Because looking requires something that feels, in politically charged moments, like moral surrender. It feels like saying the thing is okay. It isn't. Understanding why someone does something harmful doesn't make the harm disappear. It makes the person visible.

That's the practice. Not endorsement. Visibility.

The Mechanism That Makes This Impossible: Enemy Images

Before we can talk about finding needs, we have to talk about why it's so hard to start.

NVC has a specific name for the mental structure that blocks empathy: the enemy image. An enemy image is not just a negative opinion about someone. It's a totalized story — a label that converts a person into a category. Once someone is inside the category, they stop being a person with a history and a nervous system and unmet needs. They become a symbol of threat.

Research confirms that this isn't just a figure of speech. Studies on partisan dehumanization have found that many Americans demonstrably see members of the opposing party as less than fully human, and that both sides dramatically overestimate how much the other side dehumanizes them — by an average of 32 to 55 percentage points. The enemy image is partly a projection. We are fighting ghosts we've partly invented.

This is not comfortable news. It means the obstacle to empathy isn't just them. It's the story I'm carrying about them.

One Real Political Position. One Real Attempt.

Let me try to model this instead of just describing it.

Take a position that many readers of this post likely find baffling, even morally wrong: voting to restrict immigration sharply, including turning away asylum seekers at the border.

What's the enemy image version? The voter is xenophobic. Cruel. Indifferent to human suffering. Probably racist. That story is available, and for some portion of voters it may contain real truth. But if I stop there, I've learned nothing. I've confirmed what I already believed, and I've made myself unavailable for anything harder.

What happens if I ask: what need could this vote be an attempt to meet?

Safety. That's usually the first one. Not safety as a reasonable policy calculation, but safety as a raw nervous-system experience — the feeling that something stable and familiar is becoming unrecognizable. The research on identity threat and political behavior is consistent: people who feel their community's way of life is under threat are more likely to support restrictive policies, and that threat response is emotional before it is ideological.

What else? Fairness. A significant number of voters who support immigration restrictions also report frustration that they or their relatives followed legal processes that were slow and expensive, and they cannot understand why those processes should be bypassed. Whether or not that reasoning holds up to policy scrutiny, the underlying need — to live in a world where rules apply consistently — is recognizable.

Belonging. The fear that the community where you were raised, the culture that held you, is dissolving. This is different from xenophobia, though it can produce similar policy preferences. The need underneath it is real: people need to feel at home somewhere.

I am not saying these needs justify the policy. I am not saying the harm to asylum seekers doesn't matter — it does, enormously, and NVC does not ask us to ignore it. What I am saying is that I can now see a person rather than a symbol. And that changes what's possible next.

The Line NVC Walks (and Doesn't Always Walk Well)

There is an honest critique to name here, and it belongs in this post.

Miki Kashtan, one of the most important thinkers working in the NVC tradition, has argued that NVC applied only at the interpersonal level — two people listening more carefully to each other — misses the structural dimension of political conflict entirely. Power imbalances, institutional design, resource distribution: these don't dissolve because both parties feel heard.

She's right. Finding the need behind a vote does not change a law. Empathizing with a voter who supports policies that harm vulnerable people does not protect those people. If NVC becomes a tool for making the powerful more comfortable while leaving structures unchanged, it has failed at the level that matters most.

This tension doesn't fully resolve. The practice described in this post — finding the need behind the vote you can't understand — is necessary. It is not sufficient.

What it does is clear one specific obstacle: the enemy image that makes political conversation a performance for people who already agree with you, instead of a real encounter with someone different. That obstacle is real and worth clearing. The structural work still has to happen.

What to Actually Do With This

If you want to try this, here's the sequence that works:

Start with your own reaction. Before you go looking for anyone else's needs, find yours. What are you afraid of when you think about that vote? What's the need underneath your fear or your anger? Self-empathy first. Otherwise you're trying to do advanced technique on an empty tank.

Name the enemy image out loud. "The story I'm carrying about this person is..." Naming it doesn't make it false. It makes it visible. Once it's visible, it has slightly less power over you.

Ask: what could someone be trying to protect? Not what you think they should care about. What might they actually be trying to protect, given what their life looks like, given what they've been told, given what they've experienced? Safety, fairness, belonging, dignity, predictability, community — these are needs most people recognize when they see them, even across sharp political differences.

Don't rush to the conversation. This work is mostly internal. You may never talk to the person whose vote you've been trying to understand. That's okay. The shift in how you hold them is real and it changes what's possible — in you, and in whatever encounters do happen.

If you want to practice this with others, the NVC Learning Community is where that work happens. Join us at nvcrising.org/lc

FAQ

Q: What does NVC say about political conflict?

A: NVC holds that every political position — including ones that seem harmful or incomprehensible — is an attempt to meet a legitimate human need. The method (the vote, the policy, the stance) may cause real harm; the need underneath it is universal. NVC asks us to distinguish between the two: oppose harmful strategies while remaining in contact with the humanity of the people who chose them.

Q: What is an enemy image in NVC?

A: An enemy image is a totalized mental story that converts a person into a category. Once someone becomes the category — "the racist," "the naïve liberal," "the threat" — they stop being a person with a history and unmet needs. NVC names this structure because naming it is the first step to loosening its grip.

Q: Does empathizing with someone's political views mean endorsing them?

A: No — and this distinction is the core of the practice. Understanding why someone holds a position (what need they're trying to meet) is not the same as agreeing with the position or the harm it causes. NVC separates strategy from need: the strategy can be opposed clearly while the person behind it is seen humanly.

Q: How do you apply NVC to political disagreements?

A: Start with self-empathy (what's your own fear or anger about?). Then name the enemy image you're carrying. Then ask what need the other person might be trying to protect — safety, fairness, belonging, dignity. The goal is not to reach agreement; it's to shift from contempt to contact.

Q: Can NVC actually change political outcomes?

A: Not directly. NVC at the political level clears a specific obstacle: the enemy image that makes genuine encounter impossible. Miki Kashtan has argued persuasively that interpersonal empathy doesn't touch structural power imbalances. The structural work requires different tools.

The Question This Leaves

I said at the beginning there's a vote I keep coming back to.

I've done this process with it. I've found the needs. I still disagree with the policy. I still think the harm it causes is real and matters. And I can now hold the person who cast that vote as a person — not a symbol, not a category, not an enemy image.

That's not resolution. It's something smaller and more durable: the ability to stay in contact with someone's humanity even when I think they're wrong.

NVC doesn't promise that this will change political outcomes. It promises that it will change who you are in the conversation — and that's the only place any of this actually begins.

The harder question I'm sitting with: what would it mean to bring this same practice to the people whose votes I do understand, but whose methods I find destructive?

That's a longer post. Maybe the harder one.