Love Letter Exercise
A love letter to your “enemy”*
The idea is simple, but not easy: to write a love letter to someone — or, more often, something — you find hard to love. It's a quiet exercise, just for you: a chance to look for the good, the connection and the struggle you'd normally rush straight past.
The exercise
- Write a love letter to someone, or something, that you have negative feelings toward. For example, a group, industry, company or public figure is easiest to start with.
- Thank them, notice how you're connected, and look for the struggle behind what they do — without excusing the harm.
- Your letter is completely private — nothing is saved or sent. When you're done, simply download it to keep.
A few things you might reflect on
Only if they feel true for you. There are no right answers, and you can ignore any that don't fit.
- What good has come into your life, even indirectly, because of them? What do you use, enjoy, or take for granted that they helped make possible?
- Where are your lives quietly interconnected — where do you, in some way, depend on one another?
- What might they be struggling with? What fears, pressures, or wounds might sit beneath the way they act?
- What might they never have been given — the care, safety, or understanding that could have led them somewhere kinder?
- Can you wish them well, even where their actions clash with what you care about most? Compassion and honesty can sit side by side.
- Underneath the conflict, is there something you both, in the end, actually want?
Any words we use that imply evil or bad or wrongness on the other person's part is the kind of thinking that creates violence on our planet. Nonviolent Communication shows us a way of being even more honest — but honest from the heart.
Consider the principles of Nonviolent Communication
- 01
Observation
Notice simply what is, separate from your judgement of it.
- 02
Feeling
Name how it makes you feel — honestly, and without blame.
- 03
Need
Look beneath the feeling for the universal human need it points to.
- 04
Request
Ask for something clear and doable — a request, never a demand.
New to Nonviolent Communication? Learn more at cnvc.org
Now write your love letter
Private by design — nothing you write is stored or sent. It never leaves your browser.
Why write to someone you can't stand?
It's easy to love the people who already love us back. Extending even a little warmth to those we've written off is harder — and it's exactly where our thinking tends to be most stuck.
Contempt narrows us. It flattens whole groups of people into cartoons and hardens the line between “us” and “them”. Trying, just for a few minutes, to see the good and the struggle in someone on the other side of a divide doesn't mean dropping your values or looking away from harm. It loosens the grip that resentment has on you — and that turns out to be one of the more quietly radical things a person can practise.