Nonviolent Resistance (NVR)
What is NVR and how does it work?
Parents who have become disheartened and disaffected against the background of their child’s harmful, aggressive or self-destructive behaviour rightly wonder: “How can I gain strength to deal with these difficulties? How will I matter to my child, to myself, once again? How can we find a way back to each other when my child rejects me in virtually anything I try to do for them?”.
An NVR practitioner – a therapist, psychologist or other kind of professional – coaches the parents in the use of certain peaceful methods of resistance, supports them in developing greater self-control and emotional self-regulation, helps them find the courage to act in ways that are consistent with their values in spite of their anxiety and, importantly, guides them in the use of relational gestures and acts of reconciliation which can promote re-connection between parent and child.
Parents tell us that “NVR isn’t easy”, but that “It feels right and it works”. Parents cannot change their child – but they can change how they respond, and this becomes a powerful invitation to the young person to change their own position, as well. (The effectiveness of NVR has been demonstrated in numerous so-called “randomised controlled trials”, studies in which a group of families receiving NVR support is compared to another group receiving a different form of treatment or no treatment.)
How I Work
As a therapist, I find working collaboratively with people more effective than ‘treatment’. While drawing from a large ‘toolbox’ of methods, I aim to help clients recognise and use their own strengths, resources and knowledge. Over the years, it has been my task to create space for discovering new possibilities when people have felt extremely helpless at the outset.
The hope and self-confidence they gain then becomes the vehicle for change, which can often be much more rapid and profound than previously expected. I do not believe that personalities are set in stone. Childhood is short, and as adults we begin to realise that life is finite. This creates a responsibility for me: to be acutely aware of my clients’ right to therapy which promotes rapid change, and in which their own knowledge is respected – even, or especially, when they have had an abusive or traumatising past.
Why NVR?
Parents, whose children behave in ways which are harmful to others or destructive to themselves, often feel helpless and very concerned about their child, their child’s siblings and the way in which the family has come to interact. Feeling disempowered in the face of difficulties such as child to parent violence and aggression, verbal abuse, problems in school, self-harm or the young person’s social withdrawal and self-isolation, they may find themselves responding in ways they are unhappy with. Some parents find they give in to inappropriate demands, avoid the young person physically or mentally, or lose control and escalate along with the young person.
We see parents escalating when they attempt to control their uncontrollable child, shouting, threatening consequences or even getting into physical altercations, only to end up feeling remorseful about their own response and giving in to demanding behaviour once again. They may feel tense, anxious, frightened, angry or, as one parent put it, “on alert all the time”.
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Some parents tell us “I have become the parent I never wanted to be”, and feel a deep sense of loss for the kind of family life they once had or were hoping to create. Rarely do others around the family realize the seriousness of the difficulties the family faces, and many parents feel shame at the thought of other adults learning about the depth of their problems, or struggle with the idea of confiding in other adults for fear of creating a negative view of their child. Often, tensions arise between parents, while single parents can feel completely on their own and overwhelmed in their struggle with the child’s problematic behaviour. Parents may become more and more isolated in regard to their predicament and lack the support they need to bring about change.
The family may even be at risk of breaking apart. Often, individual therapy with the child fails to bring about any result, either because the young person will not engage in therapy in a meaningful way, or because their behaviour is not a problem to them – it is a problem for others around them.
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In response to a growing number of complaints of this nature, the psychology professor Haim Omer and his team developed an approach for working with parents which he called “NVR”. NVR stands for “nonviolent resistance”. Nonviolence here means responding in ways in which parents (or other caregivers, such as foster carers) seek to raise their presence with their child, rather than trying to control their offspring who has become uncontrollable any longer.
Working with presence means making oneself felt without escalating, giving in or submitting – no longer “walking on eggshells”, refusing to accommodate demanding behaviour and taking back the role of giving guidance to the child, while at the same time becoming more self-regulated as the “adult in the room” and re-emerging as the person who can address their child’s psychological needs.
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Can NVR be effective where there has been trauma in the child’s or family’s life?
Because a large proportion of young people showing harmful or self-destructive behaviour have had high levels of so-called “adverse childhood experiences” (about 40%), Peter Jakob in the UK has developed a trauma-informed and child-focused way of working with NVR. It utilizes NVR methods in a manner that is sensitive to difficulties stemming from histories of abuse or neglect in the child and parent, while also helping to “process” trauma. Sometimes, he integrates other trauma-informed methods into NVR therapy, such as “trauma-focused CBT”, “EMDR” or an approach called “ReAttach”.
Trauma tends to drive a wedge between family members and can increasingly isolate them from one another. Working with NVR in a trauma-informed and child-focused way can help to reconnect – parents want to become able to meet their child’s psychological needs again, and to feel close to them. One way of facilitating this is the use of “relational gestures”, which are sometimes also called reconciliation gestures: small, unconditional acts of kindness which are carefully planned and go over and above what the parents ordinarily do, demonstrate indirectly that the parent cares.
Delivering these gestures again and again over time and in ways that address the child’s psychological needs, enables the parents to become “caregivers” in the true sense of the word again.
Over the years, many families and groups of people where there has been trauma, such as adoptive families, foster families, residential homes or families that face multiple challenges, have benefitted from NVR. (Adoptive families and kinship care families can receive funding for NVR through the Adoption and Specialist Guardian Support Fund, ASGSF)
My child is neurodivergent. Can NVR make a difference with a disability such as autism or ADHD?
Disability is not inability. Pressures on neurodivergent young people, such as constant social anxiety, negative reactions in mainstream education or bullying by other young people can lead to high levels of tension between child and parent, child and siblings and at school.
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The child-focused ways of working I have developed in NVR can also be helpful where there are difficulties pertaining to neurodivergence: child-focused relational gestures address areas of unmet psychological need. Importantly, where aggressive, controlling or avoidant child behaviour disempowers parents, they often become unable to provide the extra support their child needs.
As one parent put it: “My daughter has never been easy to comfort anyway, but then it became impossible to comfort a child that was screaming at me all the time!” Resisting harmful behaviour opens up possibilities for providing the care the child has been refusing to accept. NVR is routinely used for a wide array of young people who are neurodivergent, ranging from autism and ADHD to foetal alcohol syndrome.
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My adult child does not leave the house, does not work or engage in education
In NVR, this difficulty is referred to as “adult entrenched dependency”. Struggling with this problem can be especially taxing for parents, as many of the young adults self-harm, threaten suicide or withdraw further into self-isolation when their dependent lifestyle is challenged.
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Adult entrenched dependency often begins in adolescence. Increasingly, we see more and more teenagers begin to develop entrenched social self-isolation and school refusal. This trend has increased dramatically since the Covid 19 crisis.
The psychologist Dan Dulberger has developed specific ways of working with NVR to support parents in resisting their adult child’s dependent behaviour and helping the younger adult emerge more fully into adulthood. Similar ways of working with NVR are proving helpful with adolescent self-isolation, as well.
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