Abstract
This workshop explores the idea that therapeutic Nonviolent Resistance has less in common with the legacies of Martin Luther King and Gandhi than is usually assumed. A new ethical foundation for therapeutic NVR is proposed, as distinct from that of political NVR, even if somewhat related.

Haim Omer often described NVR’s founding moment as the discovery that nonviolence and the upholding of parental presence are essentially two sides of the same coin. If NVR has a theoretical core, it is that. What remains to be questioned is whether political and therapeutic nonviolence can be said to derive from the same principle.

Most presentations of NVR assume the answer to this question to be yes, introducing NVR as the application of the principles of political nonviolent struggle to parenting and other care-giving domains. Those presentations are based on Haim Omer’s suggestion, in the beginning of his seminal book Non-Violent Resistance (Omer 2004), that oppressed caregivers are analogous to disenfranchised social groups. The assumption that Gahndian NVR is applicable to therapeutic Nonviolence was little revisited since. Ghandi and (to a lesser extent) Martin Luther King became NVR’s unquestioned “patron saints”.  

In our workshop we will explore questions such as: what could be the structural dissimilarities between social oppression and parent-oppression? What differences could exist between nonviolence as an instrument of social change compared to an instrument of family healing? Is the Ghandian ethic an ethic of care (May, 2023)? Can and should therapeutic NVR finally establish its own identity, liberating itself from the compelling and ethically challenging legacy of non-violent political mass-movements?

Our proposed differentiation between relational and sociopolitical NVR is by no means a dichotomy. We propose to view nonviolent practices along a continuum ranging between ‘grand’ nonviolent sociopolitical struggles that maintain dignity and equity, on one extreme, and nonviolent parental struggles, based on a politic and ethic of care, which strives to restore a benevolent hierarchy.

Our workshop will offer a 45 minute presentation of these ideas, followed by an invitation to open discussion.