What do “Shutter Island” and non violent communication have in common?
June 6, 2011 by Linda
Filed under Parenting From Balance©
What do “Shutter Island” and non violent communication have in common?
My husband (my best buddy and also nemesis, at times) and I went out to see Shutter Island last fall. Oh my gosh it was shocking. I was not up for it. But very well done. If you love superbly fine actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Kingsley, and you crave the psychological thrill of Alfred Hitchcock, the cinematography of Stanley Kubric, and the drama of Martin Scorsese, then this is for you.
Ben Kingsley, always amazing, played a sinister-looking yet surprisingly humanitarian head psychologist in a cutting edge psychological institute for criminally insane people.
And this brings me to why I would be writing about a movie on this blog: I was surprised to find that his character was an advocate for something resembling non violent communication! He said in one place in the movie (to paraphrase) ‘All these people need is someone to listen to them. They just need to be heard. And through being heard, they will hopefully arrive at a place of taking responsibility of their actions. They will do away with the blame. And thus they can live life fully, here, and in the now. In the present. In reality.’
And if you haven’t heard of non violent communication, then maybe you’ve heard of The Four Agreements. It is basically just another way to express non violent communication. There are many ways to describe that way of being in the world.
At Riviera PlaySchool, we have all of our teachers read “The Four Agreements” to read, and we let them know that this is how we want to operate within our community. We also send them downtown (Los Angeles) to train with Ruth Beaglehole at the Echo Center (formerly the Center for Non Violent Education and Parenting.)
If we could all just try to come from that place, then the world would instantly shift to a much more peaceful and welcoming place to be.