Download Author: Wiseman, Janet Miller

11 eBooks available.

The Beneficent Overall Structure of Mediation

Permeating the entire mediation therapy process are values, attitudes, and strategies that provide abeneficent structure for couples and families in crisis. This overarching beneficent structure provides a strong, caring, neutral holding environment for two people who are at serious odds with one another.

The Rational Structures

Rational structures in mediation therapy are designed to assist clients to see more clearly. Seeing more clearly, understanding themselves and their relationship more fully are the goals of the rational structures.

Sensory and Instructional Structures

As a mediation therapist, I take the view that sensory information is highly valuable. Adding sensory information to what the mind knows may be a decisive factor enabling a person to round a corner from confusion to inner knowledge.

Conflict Negotiation Skills

If the central problem in a negotiation is the way in which each partner sees the conflict, then helping the partners see the other’s point of view is the solution. Because how individuals see the issues is critical for couples, many strategies in mediation therapy are perceptual/visual/seeing techniques, designed to assist individuals in finding and defining their own points of view. The techniques obviously must also help individuals see how their partner views a myriad of situations.

Decision Making

Often each side of the conflict, if chosen, represents choices individuals don’t seem willing to live with. What is frequently needed, instead of an external choice, is an internal shift in understanding in the conflicted party. Decision making is best described as a back and forth look between choices.

Children’s Needs

Helping parents be in touch with their biases about children’s adjustments and living arrangements liberates them to listen to what you have to say about research findings and your own experience. Once they know they have biases and what they are, they are more apt to listen to you talk about your observations, experience, and research findings, rather than screening out what you are saying because it disagrees with what they believe.

Selection of Clients

Mediation therapy is a very highly structured, time-limited intervention, the sole goal of which is to make a decision, often about the future direction of a relationship. Rather than lumping all couple clients into mediation therapy, I believe I am more acutely aware of empowering prospective clients to think with me about what their needs are and how those needs will be served by a particular therapeutic intervention.

Appendices: Mediation Therapy

Appendix A Distribution of Structures in Mediation Therapy
Appendix B The Twenty Rational Structures
Appendix C Bias Sorters
Appendix D Stages of a Couple Relationship

Mediation Therapy: Short-Term Decision Making for Relationships in Conflict

Reaching decisions about whether to marry, divorce, or separate, to live with someone, or to institutionalize an aging parent or a special needs child can be extremely painful. Couples and their families facing such critical choices often reach a stalemate. By the time many couples seek professional help they are often so angry and in such conflict that even the most experienced clinician or counselor can feel overwhelmed.

Blending a therapeutic approach with skills drawn from mediation, conflict resolution, and decision making theory, this practical sourcebook shows mental health professionals how to help couples and their families reach a decision about their future through sensitive, structured intervention. Mediation Therapy details proven techniques and strategies to help clients understand their own needs and to increase their abilities to see other points of view. Miller Wiseman’s approach is uniquely designed to facilitate the process through which couples and families can come to a conclusion–one that is fully explored, completely understood, and responsibly made.

This thoughtfully written, accessible guide:

  • provides questions for therapists to reflect upon which will help them discover their own values and biases that may affect their therapeutic work
  • describes the latest research on the effects of separation and divorce on children and adolescents and how to use this information in the mediation therapy process

The mediation therapy process can be adapted for use in a myriad of settings: for recovering alcoholics and their co-dependent spouses, by evaluation teams for special needs children, in prisons, in inpatient psychiatric units, in nursing homes. This valuable guide shows clinicians how to facilitate the process of decision making, how to maintain a neutral stance, and, perhaps most importantly, when it is appropriate to “let go” of the process and allow couples and families to guide themselves to appropriate resolutions.(407 pp.)

Why Mediation Therapy?

At its most successful, mediation therapy helps people let go of denial and distortions about the self and about the relationship. It helps couples see clearly what they want and need personally and in a good long-term relationship; and it helps individuals see clearly what is actually available and what is potentially available in their relationship.