Which Way Are You Facing?

One of the hardest and most important tasks in working with a couple is to get them to turn around.  They almost always come in, facing each other, arguing.   They see the other person in front of them, and often they are furious.  All they can see is what that person has done to them, all they can feel is the loss and rage inside that that person has caused.   

And then there are the logistics to work out.

And part of my job, like a ship captain, is to turn them around to face another direction.  Suddenly, the three of us (in mediation), or the four of us (in a collaborative process), are looking at something together.  We've got a problem to solve. How are we going to solve this problem?  Instead of facing each other, with blame and despair, we are working together as a team.

Because now the focus is on something logistical.  Something solvable.  And the couple is no longer each other's enemy.  Often this is the aha! moment - the moment when the insolvable seems suddenly manageable.

Obama and Mediation

"In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper... Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well." -- Barack Obama, Philadelphia, PA, March 18, 2008.

Mediation is built upon a notion that people in conflict can work to solve a problem together. But to do that, we must allow ourselves to see what the Quakers would call "that of God" in the other person. We must disengage, if only for a few moments, from sparring with the other, and hear what that person is saying. It is at that moment that they will hear us. Light and air come in the room.

I am tremendously excited about Obama's campaign, because he is fundamentally inclusive. He understands, perhaps intuitively, perhaps by working at it, the very core of mediation. What would it mean if we had, as president, someone who was a mediator at his center?