"We All Have the Same Needs" — And Why That's Not Enough
- NVC Rising Platform Desk
- May 6
- 7 min read
There's a moment many NVC practitioners recognize.
You're in a circle, or a training, or a difficult conversation. Someone says the words that are supposed to land as reassurance: "We all have the same needs." And something in you nods — because it's true. And something in you goes quiet — because it also isn't.
If you've felt that, this post is for you.
If these questions are alive in your NVC practice, the NVC Learning Community is where practitioners go deeper together.
The Premise That Holds Everything Together
NVC's architecture rests on a claim that is, in the deepest sense, true: all human beings share the same fundamental needs. Safety. Autonomy. Connection. Dignity. Belonging. These are not Western needs or privileged needs or any particular group's needs. They are human.
This premise does something powerful. It creates the possibility of empathy across enormous difference. If I can recognize that you, too, need to be seen — even when your behavior lands on me as harmful — then something shifts in how I relate to you. That shift is real and it matters.
But a premise can be true and incomplete at the same time.
"We all have the same needs" is true. What is not true is that we all have the same access to getting those needs met. And that gap — between the universality of needs and the inequality of access — is where NVC's most important unfinished conversation lives.
What the Critique Actually Says
The sharpest version of this criticism doesn't come from people who want to tear NVC down. It comes from people who tried it, found it genuinely useful, and then ran into something that didn't add up.
The charge: NVC, as commonly practiced, asks people with vastly unequal stakes to show up with the same kind of emotional vulnerability.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Imagine asking a Black employee who has just experienced a racial microaggression at work to say, in NVC form, "When you said that, I felt hurt, and my need for dignity wasn't met." The words are accurate. The model is being applied correctly. And that employee is now doing three things at once: naming their own pain, managing how their expression lands on the other person, and doing all of this in a context where people from their group are, as one teaching framework put it, "often ignored, sometimes punished and in some situations, even killed" for doing exactly this.
The stakes are not equal. The model treats them as though they are.
That's not an argument against needs-based language. It's an argument against applying it without structural awareness.
What Rosenberg Actually Said (And What Didn't Make It Into Most Trainings)
Here's something worth knowing: Marshall Rosenberg did not think NVC was only about interpersonal communication.
He argued that human beings have been shaped by roughly ten thousand years of what he called domination structures — systems in which a small number of people dominate many, and where that domination is maintained partly through the way people are educated to relate to each other. His vision for NVC was structural: significant change at the individual level, the family level, the community level, and the societal level.
That is a much larger claim than "use 'I feel' statements."
Most introductory NVC teaching doesn't carry this vision. The OFNR model is taught as a communication tool, not as a practice embedded in a theory of structural change. That gap — between Rosenberg's actual analysis and its mainstream presentation — is where a lot of the confusion comes from.
The critique "NVC is for the privileged" is often aimed at the mainstream presentation. It frequently misses the deeper tradition it's criticizing.
The Harder Teaching: Power With, Not Just Needs
Miki Kashtan, one of the most rigorous thinkers working inside the NVC tradition, spent years asking the question that most introductory NVC avoids: what happens when you take needs-consciousness out of the interpersonal context and apply it to structural power?
Her answer points to something NVC already has built into its framework, but rarely teaches at the beginning: the distinction between "power over" and "power with."
Power over is coercive. It operates through fear, hierarchy, and the threat of punishment. It is NVC's name for what domination systems actually do. Power with is something different — it's the exercise of influence in a way that actively tries to meet everyone's needs, including those of people with less structural power.
That distinction is NVC's own native language for privilege dynamics. And it asks something harder than "listen more empathically."
It asks: if you hold structural power, are you using it in ways that expand or contract the conditions under which other people's needs can be met? Not just in your personal communication — but in your decisions, your resource allocation, your silence, your complicity.
"Listen better and feel bad about your advantages" is not the NVC answer to privilege. That framing keeps the work in the realm of personal improvement. The harder teaching is that needs-consciousness, taken seriously, requires proportional action — using whatever structural position you hold to actively create conditions where needs currently being blocked by systems can be met.
That is a different ask. And it is not yet the dominant face of NVC.
Want to practice this harder work in community? The NVC Learning Community is where these conversations happen.
What's Missing for Many Practitioners
Communities of color and people from marginalized groups have named a specific experience with mainstream NVC culture: it can feel alienating, even when the practice has been personally useful.
Part of this is structural — the same dynamics described above. Part of it is cultural. NVC, as widely taught, carries assumptions about verbal expressiveness and individual emotional disclosure that reflect dominant Western, individualist norms. Non-native speakers face an additional layer: the vocabulary of feelings and needs requires a kind of fluency in the practice's particular language that creates inequity in the room itself.
Some advanced NVC practitioners are responding to this by moving from "equal empathy for all participants" toward something more like equity — deliberately offering more support and attention to members of marginalized groups so that everyone's needs can actually be held with comparable care, not just nominally.
This is not in the original Rosenberg framework. It is an evolution happening in the field right now, without formal consensus. Which means if you're practicing NVC and sensing something is missing, you're not wrong. The field is catching up to the critique.
The Distinction That Changes Everything
Needs are universal. Access to meeting them is not.
Holding both of those sentences at the same time is the beginning of a more honest NVC practice. Not abandoning the first one — it is still the foundation, and it still makes empathy across difference possible. But refusing to let it substitute for the second one.
When someone says "we all have the same needs" as a way to redirect attention away from structural difference, the sentence becomes a tool for comfort rather than a tool for change. When it's said as an entry point — this is why structural inequality is a human problem, because it blocks needs that every person on earth shares — it becomes something much more demanding and much more honest.
The NVC practitioner who senses something is missing from their practice is often sensing exactly this. The model they learned is real. Its foundation is solid. And it is not yet asking everything it could ask of them.
That is not a reason to abandon NVC. It is a reason to go deeper into it.
What Going Deeper Looks Like
A few honest questions to sit with:
When you use NVC in a situation involving structural inequality, whose comfort is the process serving?
Are you bringing "power over / power with" into your understanding, or is your NVC practice limited to the OFNR model?
If you hold structural privilege, what would it mean for your practice to be proportional to your position — not just more empathic, but more active?
There are no clean answers here. The field is still working them out. But the questions are the practice, and you don't need to wait for consensus to start asking them.
FAQ
Q: Does nonviolent communication address privilege and structural inequality?
A: NVC's core framework contains vocabulary for addressing privilege — particularly the power-over/power-with distinction and Rosenberg's analysis of domination structures. Most introductory NVC teaching focuses on the OFNR model as a communication tool and doesn't reach this structural layer. The tradition has these resources; they're not yet widely taught.
Q: What does "we all have the same needs" mean in NVC, and what's the limitation?
A: Universal human needs — safety, autonomy, connection, dignity — are NVC's foundation for empathy across difference. The limitation isn't that the premise is false. It's that universal needs don't mean equal access to getting those needs met. Applying the same empathy model to people with vastly unequal stakes ignores structural reality.
Q: What is the power over vs. power with distinction in NVC?
A: "Power over" is coercive influence through fear, hierarchy, or threat — NVC's term for how domination systems operate. "Power with" is influence that actively tries to meet everyone's needs, including those with less structural power. Moving from the first to the second is the harder NVC teaching on privilege.
Q: Why do some practitioners of color find mainstream NVC culture alienating?
A: Several dynamics converge: the equal-vulnerability model asks people with unequal stakes to show up the same way; mainstream NVC carries Western, individualist assumptions about verbal emotional disclosure; and the practice's specific vocabulary creates a fluency barrier. These are systemic patterns the field is actively working to address.
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