From Abstinence to Assault: Consensual Nasty Communication (CNC)

How to practice safe conflict

In the Authentic Relating community I emotionally grew up in, there were Good kinds of communication and Bad ones. Good communication was consensually negotiated, kind, curious, and slow. Bad communication was whatever our parents had done: usually fast, intense, and scary. Good communication was Safe; bad communication was Violent.

Over time I’ve gotten the opportunity to explore all sorts of communication, and realized that this right/wrong division is incomplete. Slow, Nonviolent communication can be used violently. Fast, messy communication can create safety. It all depends on style match and intent.

I’ve also gotten to explore many sorts of sexuality, and seen the ways that many things I judged as similarly improper show up in kink. It seems to me that conflict styles can map quite well to sex. So, of course, that is what I’ve done.

On to the sex - I mean, conflict styles:

I like the idea of comparing conflict to sex because just as many of us have sexual trauma, many of us also have trauma with conflict. We just don’t go to a therapist as often for the second one. (Maybe I should call our Art of Difficult Conversations course “conflict therapy” from now on?)

I believe most people have a center of preference on this conflict style spectrum, but each relationship has its own fingerprint. With your boss you may err towards vanilla, while with your partner you feel comfortable in kink.

In a conflict, both/all parties may be around the same space in the spectrum, or they may be at different spots. You’re vanilla with your boss, but he’s a switch with you (hehe); you’re kink with your partner but he sometimes edges into the realm of assault. Conflict styles may be asserted by one party or negotiated by both. More on this later.

When both parties are far towards one end of this spectrum, or at far opposite ends, by deliberate or tacit agreement, I call it “CNC: Consensual Nasty Communication”.

It’s easier to think of scales like this in terms of some fixed quality, like temperature, so I’ll be describing the left-hand side (towards Abstinence) as “cooler” and the right-hand side (towards Assault) as “hotter”. This roughly corresponds to the energy that each brings to an argument.

I should start by…

Defining Terms

Throughout this article, I will use romantic partnerships as my main example, just for ease of description and the fact that this is where most 1:1 communication occurs. However, the same dynamics are present in all relationships, whether it be employee/boss or parent/child.

Abstinence

means not having conflict, when conflict is present in the space. For instance:

Jen and Jeremy are dating each other. Jen begins to suspect that Jeremy is sleeping with someone else. However, she doesn’t want to bring up the issue, in case she might be wrong or - worse yet - in case Jeremy gets defensive or angry at her. She never talks to him about it.

Some couples have very little conflict, and can keep their relationship going even when practicing abstinence. Others end up barely talking at all over the years - what’s unsaid between them is so loud that no other words can enter the space.

If one partner is in abstinence communication and the other is at a hotter spot on the spectrum, the abstinent partner will show up as stonewalling or unwilling to talk about problems.

Vanilla

is one I had a hard time naming, so if you have a better word leave it in comments. Vanilla is deliberate communication. Authentic Relating, Nonviolent Communication, and most “processing” as “conscious” folks use the term, all fall into this space. If Vanilla can’t avoid the conflict, they want to slow things down and be careful about it. For instance: