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.
Download Author: Wiseman, Janet Miller
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
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.
The Mediation Therapy Agreement
The mediation therapy approach indicates a different process: one in which the therapist is overtly in charge and in which she or he will balance the interaction between all participants.
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