By Joyce Strong | DomesticAssault.com
When Did Ordinary Human Decency Become Extraordinary?
Something disturbing has happened to the way Americans communicate.
A politician listens to a difficult question. He acknowledges the concern behind it. He answers without humiliating the person who asked. He makes his point without shouting, threatening, ridiculing, or reducing another human being to an enemy.
And people are astonished.
We call it brilliant. Remarkable. Incredible.
But what, exactly, is incredible about treating another person with dignity?
Perhaps the truly incredible thing is how far we’ve drifted from the expectation that human beings should be able to disagree without trying to destroy one another.
We’ve normalized verbal aggression so thoroughly that ordinary human decency has become noteworthy. We’ve watched political leaders transform contempt into entertainment, bullying into leadership, and intimidation into a demonstration of strength.
And somewhere along the way, we’ve allowed the distinction between communicating with another person and exercising power over another person to become dangerously blurred.
This is not simply a political problem.
It’s a problem intimately familiar to survivors of domestic abuse, particularly those who have experienced coercive control, psychological manipulation, gaslighting, intimidation, and the slow destruction of their ability to speak without fear.
There is a connection between the language of domination inside a home and the language of domination in public life.
The underlying questions about power, fear, humiliation, and control deserve serious examination in our government.
Because the opposite of violent communication isn’t silence. It is communication that recognizes human dignity without surrendering truth, boundaries, or accountability.
And there is an established framework for understanding it.
It’s called Nonviolent Communication.
A Psychologist Who Asked a Different Question
In the 1960s, American clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg began developing what became known as Nonviolent Communication, or NVC.
Rosenberg, who lived from 1934 to 2015, was concerned with a fundamental human problem: Why do people who are capable of compassion so frequently resort to blame, judgment, punishment, and aggression when faced with conflict?
His early work included school integration projects during the civil rights era, where racial hostility, institutional inequality, and deeply entrenched social divisions demanded more than polite conversation.
In 1984, Rosenberg founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication, an organization devoted to teaching methods of connection and conflict resolution.
His central insight was that human behavior is connected to underlying needs, and that much of what we describe as conflict becomes destructive when people communicate through accusations, moral judgments, demands, and threats rather than acknowledging those needs.
Rosenberg did not invent empathy. He didn’t invent compassion. And he certainly didn’t invent the idea of resolving disagreement peacefully.
What he developed was a structured way to practice those principles, particularly when emotions are running high.
And he challenged the assumption that punishment, humiliation, and coercion are necessary tools for obtaining cooperation.
Consider the implications.
How much of modern political discourse depends on convincing us that someone must be defeated, humiliated, excluded, or punished before our own needs can be met?
How often are Americans encouraged to see their neighbors not as people confronting many of the same economic and social pressures, but as enemies responsible for their suffering?
And who benefits when those divisions become permanent?
Four Simple Steps That Change the Nature of Conflict
At the heart of Rosenberg’s model are four components: observations, feelings, needs, and requests.
The framework is straightforward. Practicing it consistently, particularly in conflict, is easy, if you try.
1. Observation without judgment.
Describe what actually happened instead of immediately assigning motives or attacking someone’s character.
There is a difference between saying, “You interrupted me three times while I was explaining my concern,” and saying, “You’re an arrogant bully who never listens.”
The first identifies behavior that can be examined. The second attacks identity and invites defensiveness.
That doesn’t mean we’re forbidden from recognizing bullying when it occurs. It means that observations and character judgments serve different purposes, and confusing the two often prevents productive communication.
2. Identifying feelings.
Recognize the emotions generated by an experience.
Fear. Anger. Frustration. Sadness. Disappointment. Anxiety.
Emotions are information. They help us understand what matters to us.
But experiencing anger does not automatically justify directing aggression toward another person.
3. Recognizing underlying needs.
Behind many arguments are concerns about safety, security, belonging, independence, dignity, fairness, or being heard.
Two people may disagree profoundly about how to meet those needs while sharing more fundamental human concerns than either initially recognizes.
This does not mean all political positions are equally supported by evidence or equally respectful of human rights.
It means that understanding the concern beneath a position can create an opportunity for communication that attacking the speaker may destroy.
4. Making requests rather than demands.
A request creates an opportunity for cooperation.
A demand makes disagreement punishable.
This distinction is particularly important.
If refusing someone’s request results in threats, retaliation, humiliation, or punishment, we are no longer dealing with a free exchange between equals.
We are entering the territory of coercion.
And that brings us directly to the subject at the center of this publication.
Domestic Abuse Is Not a Communication Problem
Survivors of coercive control know something that many discussions of communication fail to acknowledge.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that two people don’t know how to communicate.
The problem is that one person is using communication as a weapon to control the other.
A survivor may explain a concern carefully, calmly, compassionately, and repeatedly.
The abusive partner may understand perfectly well.
Understanding, however, does not guarantee a willingness to relinquish control.
The survivor’s words may be twisted, mocked, denied, or used as evidence of disloyalty.
An attempt to establish a boundary may be treated as an attack.
A request for respect may be met with punishment.
An effort to describe harmful behavior may provoke retaliation.
And the person experiencing abuse may eventually conclude that if only they could find exactly the right words, the conflict would finally stop.
But there may be no combination of words capable of persuading someone to stop a pattern of behavior they are committed to maintaining.
That is why the National Domestic Violence Hotline cautions against couples counseling in abusive relationships. When one person controls or intimidates the other, treating abuse as an ordinary relationship disagreement can increase danger and reinforce the unequal power dynamic.
Nonviolent communication should never become another obligation imposed upon someone who is already being abused.
A survivor does not owe an abuser endless empathy.
A survivor does not have to calmly explain why threats are unacceptable.
A survivor does not have to negotiate the right to personal safety.
And nobody should mistake a victim’s refusal to continue a dangerous conversation for a failure of compassion.
Sometimes the most important boundary is the end of the conversation.
Sometimes safety requires distance, protection, outside intervention, or escape.
Nonviolent communication can be valuable, but it is not a substitute for safety, accountability, or protection from abuse.
Gaslighting, DARVO, and the Language of Control
One reason psychological abuse can be so difficult to recognize is that it frequently disguises itself as ordinary disagreement.
The abusive person denies something that happened. The survivor provides evidence. The abusive person attacks the survivor for bringing it up. Suddenly, the conversation is no longer about the original conduct.
It is about the survivor’s alleged cruelty, instability, disloyalty, or unfairness.
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd identified a pattern known as DARVO:
Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender.
The person confronted about harmful conduct denies responsibility, attacks the person raising the concern, and presents themselves as the injured party.
Research has associated exposure to DARVO with increased self-blame among people confronting wrongdoing. Experiments have also found that DARVO can influence observers to perceive the person accused of misconduct as less responsible and the person confronting them as less credible.
The consequences are profound.
The conversation becomes a contest over who is entitled to be believed, who controls the narrative, and whose suffering counts.
The original question of accountability gets buried beneath accusations.
Now consider what happens when similar rhetorical patterns appear in political discourse.
A public official is asked about a documented failure. Instead of addressing the evidence, the official attacks the journalist, questions the motives of investigators, portrays the inquiry as persecution, or characterizes oversight itself as an assault.
And sometimes the people helping perpetuate that reversal are the very people now claiming to have seen the light.
Consider Tucker Carlson.
In a July 22, 2026 interview with Stephen A. Smith, Carlson discussed his changing assessment of Donald Trump. He suggested that something fundamentally changed in Trump after the July 13, 2024 so-called assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
But what caught my attention was his explanation of why he had supported Trump in the first place.
Describing his interpretation of efforts to put Trump in jail, Carlson declared:
“See, it’s totally real. You know, it’s not a fake thing.”
Then he added:
“That’s what I thought. And I still kind of think that.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
Carlson was emphatic. He characterized the persecution narrative as real, not some imaginary grievance. And even while describing his disillusionment with Trump, he acknowledged that he had not entirely abandoned that interpretation.
But let’s examine what Carlson was actually calling persecution.
Trump was not simply being persecuted because prosecutors investigated him, grand juries indicted him, or courts exercised their authority. He was facing criminal allegations that demanded examination under the law.
He was also convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York.
That conviction was not an assassination attempt, a political insult, or an act of persecution. It was the result of a criminal trial.
And the federal criminal proceedings that ended after Trump’s return to the presidency did not produce verdicts resolving the underlying allegations. Those dismissals were not findings of innocence, just as the original indictments were not findings of guilt.
Accountability is not persecution merely because the person being held accountable is powerful.
Carlson’s supposed political transformation deserves considerably more scrutiny.
He now criticizes Trump while continuing to embrace, at least in part, the narrative that attempts to hold him criminally accountable amounted to persecution.
He’s talking out of both sides of his mouth.
He acknowledges that he was wrong about Trump while preserving the very narrative that helped justify his earlier support.
What exactly has changed?
And why should Americans accept a revised assessment of Trump’s character that still treats efforts to hold him legally accountable as evidence that he was the victim?
In my view, Carlson’s remarks reinforce the reversal at the heart of DARVO.
The alleged or established misconduct recedes into the background. Investigators and prosecutors become the supposed aggressors. The person facing accountability becomes the injured party.
And the public is invited to sympathize with the powerful person being investigated rather than examine the evidence against him.
Carlson is not himself the defendant in those criminal proceedings. Nor does his commentary, standing alone, demonstrate every element of DARVO. But it illustrates how the reversal of victim and offender can be repeated and reinforced by influential third parties, even those who now profess disillusionment with the person they once defended.
And that distinction matters enormously.
It is incredibly insidious.
Because a narrative that excuses abusive conduct does not necessarily disappear when someone’s loyalties change. It can survive the political relationship that helped create it.
You cannot meaningfully confront an abuse of power while continuing to portray legitimate attempts to hold that power accountable as victimization.
This is precisely why understanding DARVO matters beyond intimate relationships.
When every demand for accountability can be reframed as an attack, accountability itself becomes increasingly difficult to enforce.
The accused becomes the victim. The investigator becomes the persecutor. The evidence becomes secondary to the grievance.
And the original question—what actually happened, who was harmed, and who should be held accountable—gets lost.
That is not simply a communication breakdown.
It can become a powerful means of escaping responsibility.
The Political Economy of Humiliation
Trump did not invent cruel political rhetoric. American history contains far too many examples of racism, religious persecution, political intimidation, and public dehumanization to make that claim.
But his political career has made personal insult, public ridicule, threatening language, and the creation of internal enemies unusually prominent features of presidential communication.
This is not merely a subjective impression.
Political scientists Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman examined Trump’s public addresses from 2015 through 2024 and compared his language with that of other political leaders.
Their research found that his use of violent vocabulary intensified over time, becoming among the most extreme of the democratic politicians studied by late 2024.
The researchers also identified a pattern of exclusionary populism that emphasized the vilification of opponents and marginalized groups.
Consider what happens when such language becomes part of the daily political environment.
Disagreement becomes betrayal. Opposition becomes an enemy. Criticism becomes persecution. Questions become attacks. Accountability becomes revenge.
And the audience is repeatedly invited to participate in the humiliation.
An insult receives applause. A mocking nickname becomes a slogan. A threat becomes a headline.
The most outrageous exchange travels across television, social media, podcasts, and news feeds.
Outrage attracts attention, attention creates engagement, and engagement can be converted into money, influence, and political power.
The incentive is not always to communicate more clearly.
Sometimes it is to provoke more intensely.
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
And when that becomes the prevailing standard, a calm, substantive answer can suddenly appear almost revolutionary.
Words, Threats, and the Escalation of Political Hostility
The consequences of violent rhetoric are not confined to wounded feelings.
A February 2026 analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that violent online rhetoric directed at prominent American public officials increased more than threefold between 2021 and 2025.
The threats crossed party lines, with Republicans receiving more violent threats in that particular dataset and Trump himself accounting for a substantial share of the threatening content.
This matters because violence and intimidation should not become acceptable merely because we dislike the intended victim.
At the same time, researchers continue to debate precisely when inflammatory language increases real-world support for violence. Some studies identify dangerous associations and effects; others find more limited causal effects.
We should be careful not to pretend every insult produces an act of violence.
But we should be equally careful not to dismiss threats as harmless theater.
On October 14, 2026, Trump told an Arizona rally that people who leak military plans should be shot.
Consider the difference between advocating prosecution for unlawful disclosures of classified information and declaring that people should be shot.
One invokes legal process, evidence, and proportional punishment.
The other introduces lethal violence into political speech without those distinctions.
Words matter not because every ugly statement becomes a violent act, but because words help establish what a society learns to tolerate, excuse, and eventually expect.
The Question Behind the Question: Abdul El-Sayed
An exchange involving Michigan physician and Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed offers an interesting counterexample.
Asked about what it means to be pro-life, El-Sayed answered that the most pro-life decision America could make would be Medicare for All.
Whatever one’s position on Medicare for All, the communication itself deserves examination.
He took a morally charged phrase, one frequently associated with deeply entrenched partisan disagreement, and shifted the discussion toward a shared concern: protecting human life.
Instead of beginning by questioning the moral character of those who disagreed with him, he offered a different way of understanding the underlying value.
The issue became the human consequences of access to healthcare.
A child who needs treatment.
A parent facing medical bills.
An older American deciding whether an appointment is affordable.
A family confronting illness without financial security.
The policy remains open to vigorous debate. People can disagree about costs, implementation, government responsibility, and alternative approaches to healthcare.
But the response illustrates an important communication principle.
You can challenge someone’s political framing without humiliating the person who raised the question.
That is not surrender.
It is a way of moving disagreement from competing identities toward substantive human needs.
There is an additional irony.
On October 9, Reuters reported that Trump had characterized El-Sayed using inflammatory labels including allegations of extremism and sympathy for terrorism.
Those are not ordinary policy disagreements.
They illustrate how quickly political discourse can move away from a discussion of healthcare, security, and public responsibility into attacks on a person’s identity and presumed loyalties.
James Talarico: Disagreement Without Requiring Humiliation
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico provides another revealing example.
At his October 14 CNN town hall, Talarico faced pointed questions on abortion, religion, gender, and other contentious issues.
A Catholic voter challenged his understanding of abortion and religious teaching.
The disagreement was real.
Neither side simply abandoned its convictions.
But the exchange included efforts to identify overlapping concerns, particularly the desire to reduce unintended pregnancies and protect human welfare, even though the participants disagreed sharply about what government policy should allow.
That distinction matters.
Nonviolent communication does not require agreement.
It does not erase moral differences.
It does not require a woman who believes reproductive autonomy is fundamental to concede her rights. Nor does it require someone with religious objections to pretend those convictions do not exist.
It asks a more difficult question:
Can we understand what another person is expressing without immediately turning that person into an object of contempt?
A disagreement can remain unresolved without becoming a campaign of personal destruction.
And when politicians demonstrate that possibility in public, audiences are given a different example of how political conflict can be conducted.
Jon Ossoff: Strength Without Intimidation
Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff offers another important example of how forceful political communication need not depend on aggression, intimidation, or personal humiliation.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Ossoff’s public communication is his measured, deliberate delivery. He can challenge an opponent, press an uncomfortable question, and express serious disagreement while maintaining control of his voice, his words, and his body language.
He does not need to shout to be heard. He does not need to threaten to demonstrate strength. And he does not need to abandon his composure to demand accountability.
During his October 2026 debates with Republican challenger Mike Collins, Ossoff brought economic and healthcare policy into the discussion, raising questions about household expenses, the pressures facing Georgia farmers, and the consequences of Medicaid cuts for rural hospitals.
These are not abstract political arguments. They concern whether families can afford medical care, whether rural communities can maintain essential services, and whether people can meet their most basic needs.
That connection is central to Marshall Rosenberg’s work.
Nonviolent Communication asks us to look beneath political positions and arguments to recognize the human needs involved. Security. Health. Stability. Safety. Dignity. The ability to provide for one’s family.
Ossoff states verifiable facts, over and over.
Ossoff’s questioning about a rural hospital losing its labor and delivery services illustrates why these needs matter. A debate about Medicaid funding becomes something considerably more immediate when we consider what happens to a pregnant woman who must travel farther to deliver her baby.
The policy disagreement remains. So does the obligation to examine the evidence and hold elected officials accountable for their decisions.
But the conversation is no longer simply about which political party prevails.
It is about the people who must live with the consequences.
And just as importantly, Ossoff demonstrates how a political argument can be delivered with composure and control.
His measured approach does not eliminate disagreement or prevent him from challenging an opponent sharply. But it offers an example of how public officials can focus attention on evidence, consequences, and the responsibilities of government without relying on threats or dehumanization.
Ossoff naturally aligns with the qualities associated with nonviolent communication—self-control, attention to human needs, and the ability to confront difficult issues without intimidation.
Being measured is not being weak. Being controlled is not being passive. And refusing to communicate violently does not mean refusing to fight for what matters.
A democracy needs leaders who can challenge one another, defend their convictions, and demand answers.
It does not require those leaders to make cruelty a demonstration of strength.
The ability to remain composed while confronting difficult truths is not the absence of strength. It is one way strength can be exercised without violence.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Anger Is Not Violence
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complicate the assumption that nonviolent communication must sound soft, quiet, or conciliatory.
Their Fighting Oligarchy events have centered on concentrated wealth, political influence, healthcare, economic insecurity, and the relationship between ordinary Americans and powerful institutions.
They raise their voices.
They express anger.
They criticize powerful people and systems.
And that brings us to one of the most misunderstood aspects of Rosenberg’s work.
Anger is not the same thing as violence.
Anger may arise from witnessing suffering, exploitation, inequality, betrayal, or injustice.
It can signal that something important is being threatened.
The crucial distinction is how anger is expressed and what purpose it serves.
Does it clarify the harm?
Does it identify unmet needs?
Does it demand an accountable response?
Or does it become an excuse to dehumanize, threaten, and punish?
Their focus on material needs such as healthcare, wages, housing, and economic security offers an opportunity to examine how forceful political rhetoric can be organized around human welfare rather than personal submission.
That is an important distinction.
Because the goal of nonviolent communication is not to eliminate moral urgency.
It is to prevent that urgency from becoming a justification for denying another person’s humanity.
Why Coercive Power Depends on More Than Force
This brings us to the larger political question.
Why might communication grounded in dignity, empathy, and independent judgment pose a challenge to political movements organized around loyalty, fear, and punishment?
The answer lies partly in the relationship between power and consent.
Coercive power seeks compliance.
It may employ explicit threats, economic pressure, punishment, humiliation, exclusion, or the suggestion that resistance will carry unacceptable consequences.
Healthy communication, by contrast, leaves room for refusal.
It recognizes that understanding another person’s needs does not give us ownership over that person’s decisions.
In an intimate relationship, the distinction is fundamental.
A partner who respects your autonomy can be disappointed by your decision without treating your independence as an offense.
A coercive partner may regard the very existence of independent judgment as a threat.
Political relationships are not intimate partnerships, but democratic government is also built upon limits to power.
Citizens are not supposed to owe personal loyalty to an officeholder.
Public officials are supposed to answer questions, accept oversight, obey the law, and recognize that disagreement is a legitimate exercise of citizenship.
The First Amendment protects speech, including criticism of government officials.
Elections exist so the public can withhold or withdraw political authority.
The courts exist, in part, to ensure that power remains subject to law.
These arrangements are not obstacles to democratic legitimacy.
They are among its essential conditions.
A political leader who treats independent journalism, lawful protest, judicial review, or electoral opposition as intolerable disloyalty challenges those principles.
The Difference Between Peace and Submission
One of the most dangerous ideas survivors of abuse encounter is that peace means the absence of disagreement.
Don’t upset him.
Don’t ask questions.
Don’t challenge the story.
Don’t bring up the past.
Don’t make things worse.
Keep the peace.
But whose peace is being preserved?
If one person is required to surrender independence, silence legitimate concerns, and endure mistreatment so another person will remain calm, that is not mutual peace.
It is enforced submission.
The same distinction matters in public life.
A society is not necessarily peaceful because dissent has become quiet.
Silence can reflect satisfaction. It can also reflect fear, exhaustion, resignation, or the belief that speaking will only invite retaliation.
Nonviolent communication is not a demand that injured people become more accommodating to those who harm them.
It cannot require marginalized people to politely negotiate whether they deserve equal rights.
It cannot replace criminal accountability with a discussion about feelings.
And it cannot be used to distribute responsibility for abuse equally between the person exercising coercive control and the person trying to survive it.
There is nothing nonviolent about demanding that someone surrender their safety or dignity so the person controlling them can feel more comfortable.
That is why the distinction between communication and coercion must remain central to this discussion.
What Happens When We Begin Recognizing the Pattern?
Imagine what might change if more Americans learned to distinguish between a genuine request and a disguised threat.
Between an observation and an accusation.
Between emotional honesty and emotional manipulation.
Between accountability and humiliation.
Between disagreement and dehumanization.
Imagine a political interview in which a journalist asks a specific question and the audience recognizes immediately when the politician responds by attacking the journalist instead of answering.
Imagine a family conversation in which someone recognizes that a boundary is not an act of aggression.
Imagine a workplace in which intimidation is no longer celebrated as strong leadership.
Imagine an election campaign in which voters examine not only what candidates promise, but how they respond when confronted with disagreement.
None of these changes requires us to become less passionate.
They require us to become more discerning.
And perhaps that is what makes the study of nonviolent communication so relevant to the current moment.
Rosenberg’s work offers a framework for understanding how words can either create human connection or contribute to cycles of hostility.
Research on coercive control and DARVO helps explain what happens when communication is deliberately used to distort reality and evade accountability.
Research on political rhetoric warns us about the normalization of violent language, even as scholars continue to study the precise relationship between rhetoric and real-world violence.
Together, these fields offer a powerful lesson.
Before we can resist manipulation effectively, we must learn to recognize it.
Before we can insist upon accountability, we must understand how language can be used to evade it.
And before we can recover a political culture that respects human dignity, we must stop mistaking intimidation for strength.
The Most Dangerous Lie About Strength
There is a particular kind of power that demands submission while calling itself strength.
It mistakes fear for respect.
It mistakes obedience for loyalty.
It mistakes humiliation for victory.
And it mistakes the ability to silence someone for the ability to lead.
Survivors of coercive control know the difference.
They know that someone can dominate a room without earning the respect of a single person inside it.
They know that a threat can produce compliance without producing agreement.
They know that silence can be purchased through fear, and that a person who appears powerful may be profoundly dependent upon keeping everyone else afraid.
But democratic citizenship demands something different.
It demands the freedom to question, disagree, refuse, criticize, and hold power accountable.
It demands that we recognize the humanity of people with whom we disagree without surrendering the obligation to confront falsehoods or injustice.
And it demands that we stop treating cruelty as evidence of courage.
Nonviolent communication will not, by itself, repair American democracy.
It cannot replace legislation, constitutional protections, independent courts, honest journalism, effective public institutions, or criminal accountability.
It is not a cure for abuse or authoritarianism.
But understanding it can help us recognize a fundamental distinction upon which healthy relationships and democratic institutions both depend.
The difference between communicating with another human being and trying to control one.
Maybe that is why a politician who answers a difficult question with respect can seem so extraordinary today.
Not because respectful communication is a remarkable human achievement.
But because we’ve allowed something profoundly ordinary to become painfully rare.
And perhaps the beginning of change is recognizing that we never should have accepted that decline as normal.
Cruelty is not strength. Intimidation is not leadership. Silence is not consent. And submission is not peace.
The measure of power is not how thoroughly it can silence another human being.
It is whether it can tolerate that human being speaking freely.
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Domestic abuse does not begin and end with physical violence. It can involve coercive control, intimidation, psychological manipulation, economic dependence, gaslighting, and the destruction of personal autonomy.
At Domestic Assault, we examine how power is exercised, how abuse is concealed, why institutions sometimes fail survivors, and what meaningful accountability requires.
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