I was exploring a project with someone whose views differed significantly from mine. We also had a complicated history, including disagreements that had previously seemed irreconcilable. We began cautiously, aware that our history was never far beneath the surface.
After missing a meeting, I asked for an update. I was disappointed by what I heard, including his decision to step away. In my effort to understand what had happened, I became too direct and made assumptions I should not have made.
He pointed me toward Nonviolent Communication, a practice developed by Marshall Rosenberg that was meaningful to him. Instead of receiving that suggestion with curiosity, I experienced it as a judgment of how I had communicated. I became defensive, the exchange escalated, and we became estranged again.
The experience left me saddened, but it also gave me a question worth taking seriously:
How do I want to communicate, especially when relationships are strained—and how do I hope others will communicate with me?
PRC grew from that question. These principles draw on my faith, recovery experience, study, reflection, and years of learning through relationships. They do not settle what happened or determine who was right. They express the kind of communicator I hope to become and the conditions that help me participate honestly and respectfully with others.
I offer them in the hope that they may also help someone else reflect on communication, disagreement, dignity, and healthy boundaries.
Principles for Respectful Communication
Healing Journey Practices
A personal practice for communication grounded in dignity and healthy boundaries
Principles for Respectful Communication, or PRC, offers seven practices for honest conversation. They help us listen with curiosity, take responsibility for our responses, maintain healthy boundaries, and honor one another’s dignity through disagreement and difficulty.
Purpose and Intent
My aspiration is to communicate in a Christ-like manner, with love, humility, compassion, truthfulness, and respect for every person’s dignity. I connect this aspiration with shalom: right relationship, peace, justice, and human flourishing.
This language reflects my faith, while the practice is open to people of any faith or none. PRC supports attentive listening, honest expression, constructive disagreement, mutual respect, and healthy boundaries.
What Respectful Communication Seeks
- Dignity and acceptance. Each person is valued as a person. Acceptance does not mean agreement, approval, or accepting harmful behavior.
- Being heard and understood. People have a meaningful opportunity to express their perspective and know it has been considered. Understanding does not require agreement.
- Safety and inclusion. Participants seek to make room for questions and disagreement without intimidation, humiliation, manipulation, or personal attack. No one person can guarantee another person’s sense of safety.
- Personal and emotional wellbeing. People can participate honestly while maintaining responsibility for their own emotional responses, choices, and boundaries.
When harm occurs, acknowledgment and repair may be appropriate. Reconciliation, however, is not always possible or healthy. Agreement, reconciliation, and continuation of a relationship are not required outcomes of respectful communication.
The Seven Principles
1 Mutual Dignity and Respect
Treat each person as an equal, regardless of differences in knowledge, experience, beliefs, identity, or values.
Knowledge and expertise can shape a conversation, but they do not diminish anyone’s dignity or give one person authority to define another person’s inner experience.
2 Personal Experience Without Personal Judgment
Speak from your own experience. Describe what you observed, understood, felt, or needed rather than presuming to know another person’s thoughts, feelings, intentions, or motives.
When addressing a difficulty, name specific words or actions and their effects. Avoid turning an observation into a judgment about someone’s character, identity, or worth.
3 Permission Before Personal Feedback or Advice
Ask permission before offering personal observations, interpretations, feedback, or advice about another person. Personal feedback may be meaningful, but the recipient should be free to decide whether and when to receive it.
Permission is not required to question ideas, express disagreement, describe how someone’s behavior affects you, decline a request, or establish a boundary. These are ordinary parts of honest communication.
4 Curiosity and Mutual Understanding
Listen to understand before evaluating, correcting, or persuading. Ask questions that help you understand the other person’s perspective, especially when it differs from your own.
Ideas, assumptions, evidence, and conclusions may be challenged directly. The aim is to understand what is being said and respond to it fairly, not to win or diminish the person speaking. Agreement is not required.
5 Personal Boundaries and Voluntary Disclosure
Each person may set boundaries around participation, time, physical and emotional capacity, and personal information. No one owes disclosure simply because another person asks a question or wants greater closeness.
Express your own boundaries clearly and respect the boundaries of others. A boundary governs your participation and conduct; it is not a tool for controlling another person’s choices.
6 Personal Responsibility and Self Awareness
Take responsibility for your feelings, reactions, words, and behavior. Other people’s actions may affect you, but your emotions remain yours to notice, understand, and respond to with care.
Recognize triggers and seek to respond intentionally rather than defensively. Acknowledge mistakes, misunderstandings, and your contribution to conflict. When you cause harm, accept responsibility and seek repair where appropriate, without demanding forgiveness or reconciliation.
7 Compassion Without Assumptions or Fixing
People bring histories, needs, and vulnerabilities into conversations that may not be visible. Meet what you do not understand with curiosity and compassion rather than diagnosis or certainty.
Compassion does not require agreement, excusing harmful behavior, taking responsibility for another person’s emotions, or trying to fix them. It can remain present alongside truthfulness, accountability, and firm boundaries.
Origins and Influences
These principles developed through personal learning, reflection, recovery experience, Christian faith, and participation in guided or facilitated settings where ideas could be practiced and examined. PRC is a personal synthesis rather than a formal methodology or a reproduction of any single approach.
- Faith and shalom. Following Jesus provides the personal aspiration toward love, humility, truthfulness, justice, right relationship, and human flourishing.
- Virginia Satir and family systems. This work contributes attention to self-worth, family dynamics, congruent communication, and respect for oneself and others.
- Recovery practices. These practices emphasize becoming trustworthy, taking personal responsibility, speaking from experience, respecting boundaries, and avoiding unsolicited advice or attempts to control others.
- Internal Family Systems and attachment theory. These perspectives support curiosity about protective responses and awareness of how patterns of trust, connection, conflict, and withdrawal may develop.
- Trauma informed practice. This perspective recognizes that past experiences can affect emotional responses, autonomy, boundaries, and a person’s sense of safety.
- Mark Laaser’s recovery work. This work informs reflection on shame, emotional wounds, intimacy, relational patterns, and healing.
- Principled negotiation. The work of Roger Fisher and William Ury contributes the practice of separating people from problems, understanding underlying interests, and approaching disagreement constructively.
An Invitation to Practice
PRC is an invitation to notice how we speak, listen, disagree, and care for our own boundaries. You may find some principles immediately familiar and others more challenging. Consider beginning with the one that speaks most clearly to a relationship or conversation in your life.
The purpose is not flawless communication. It is a continuing practice of honoring dignity, telling the truth with care, staying curious, and taking responsibility for the way we participate. Others do not need to adopt PRC for these principles to shape how we choose to show up.
