Our knowledge about the impact of trauma and abuse has brought the notion of defining “safety” to the foreground and we have come to embrace that notion not just as a clinical, but also as a political idea, and we actively connect the two realms with our patients.

Nonviolence: Building Social Immunity

• The Sanctuary Model concept of safety encompasses physical, psychological, social, and moral safety and then insist that everyone in the environment – from leader to newest client – must adhere to the policy of nonviolence if they want to participate in our community.

Defining Nonviolence

• Nonviolence: Either, (1) The behavior of people who in a conflict refrain from violent acts. Or, (2) Any of several belief systems that reject violence on principle, not just as impractical.
• Otherwise, the term is best not used, since it often contributes to ambiguity and confusion. To describe specific actions or movements, the recommended terms are: "nonviolent action," "nonviolent resistance," or "nonviolent struggle."
• Nonviolent action: A technique of action in conflicts in which participants conduct the struggle by doing -- or refusing to do -- certain acts without using physical violence. It is an alternative to both passive submission and violence. The technique includes many specific methods, which are grouped into three main classes: nonviolent protest and persuasion, non-cooperation, and nonviolent intervention.
• The technique's variables include the motives for using it, the objectives, the intended way success is to be accomplished (mechanism), and the relation between nonviolent action and other forms of action.
• Nonviolent discipline: Orderly adherence to the planned strategy and tactics of an action and to nonviolent behavior even in face of repression. This is a major factor contributing to the success of a nonviolent struggle movement.
• Nonviolent resistance: Nonviolent struggle, conducted largely by non-cooperation, in reaction to a disapproved act, policy, or government. The broader terms "nonviolent action: and "nonviolent struggle" are therefore preferred to refer to the overall nonviolent technique of action and to action in which the nonviolent group also takes the initiative or intervenes, as in a sit-in.
• Nonviolent sanctions: The methods of the technique of nonviolent action. The term is used especially when one wishes to make clear that these methods are not merely expressive behavior but are ways to wield power, exercise influence, inflict punishments, and impose costs.
• Nonviolent struggle: A synonym for "nonviolent action." This term may be used also to indicate that the nonviolent action in a conflict is particularly purposeful or aggressive. "Nonviolent struggle" is especially useful to describe nonviolent action against determined and resourceful opponents who use repressive measures and countermeasures.

from A JOURNALIST'S BRIEF GLOSSARY OF NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE  a publication of The Albert Einstein Institution, 50 Church Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: (617)876 0311, Fax: (617)876 0837, Email: einstein@igc.apc.org
 

Nonviolence:  Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky 

• There is no proactive word for nonviolence
• Nations that build military forces as deterrents will eventually use them
• Practitioners of nonviolence are seen as enemies of the state
• Once a state takes over a religion, the religion loses its nonviolent teachings
• A rebel can be defanged and co-opted by making him a saint after he is dead
• Somewhere behind every war there are always a few founding lies.
• A propaganda machine promoting hatred always has a war waiting in the wings.
• People who go to war start to resemble their enemy.
• A conflict between a violent and nonviolent force is a moral argument. If the violent side can provoke the nonviolent side into violence, the violent side has won.
• The problem lies not in the nature of man but in the nature of power.
• The longer a war lasts, the less popular it becomes.
• The state imagines it is impotent without a military because it cannot conceive of power without force.
• It is often not the largest but the best organized and most articulate group that prevails.
• All debate momentarily ends with an “enforced silence” once the first shots are fired.
• A shooting war is not necessary to overthrown an established power but is used to consolidate the revolution itself.
• Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
• Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.
• People motivated be fear do not act well.
• While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attach on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance.
• Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military.
• Once you start the business of killing, you just get “deeper and deeper” without limits.
• Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons
• Violence always comes with a supposedly rational explanation – which is only dismissed as irrational if the violence fails.
• Violence is a virus that infects and takes over.
• The miracle is that despite all of society’s promotion of warfare, most soldiers find warfare to be a wrenching departure from their own moral values.
• The hard work of beginning a movement to end war has already been done.

	Mental Models
	Sanctuary Model of Organizational Change
	Components of the Sanctuary Model
	Social Legacy of Trauma
	Trauma Theory
	Seven Commitments of Sanctuary