How Mediation Helps Heal Relationships by Addressing the Root Cause of Conflict: The Power of Listening and Being Heard
Mediation offers us the chance to listen and be listened to.
This might not sound like a huge thing in many ways, but if we have a look at what tends to lie under the surface of most relationship breakdowns, we will usually find that not feeling listened to was where it all started.
Feeling that the other person in a significant relationship is unaware, or worse, indifferent to us, can hurt us deeply. There is nothing crueller one human being can do to another than to make them feel irrelevant and invisible. Once we reach that desperate state in a relationship, because we have lost the capacity to communicate and therefore to see the humanity in each other, we start to see our conflicts as character driven, i.e. ‘we’re in conflict because he’s a narcissist’, or ‘she’s only interested in the money’. Once the four horsemen of the apocalypse have ridden into a relationship (criticism, defensiveness, stone-walling and contempt), then the likelihood of being able to listen, or to be listened to, is next to none.
Yet the longing to be heard and have our genuinely heartfelt perspectives understood and appreciated never goes away. That’s why we keep repeating our stories, even though we’re sick of saying them, because we think that if we tell the other person just one more time, that they will finally understand what they have done to us and how they have made us feel. Unfortunately, the nature of conflict means that whenever we have tried this in the past, our worst fears about the other person have always proven to be correct.
Mediation can make this important conversation possible, where finally both people can say something they’ve been trying to say for years, but on this occasion, to finally feel listened to. Mediation can bring about a sense of acknowledgement of our experiences by helping the other person to listen to us, and in turn, for us to be able to listen to them, this can lead to a sense of acknowledgement, which can allow us to let go of what may have been years of pent up unexpressed anger and frustration.
Recent research on the brain suggests that we are less personally responsible for the conflicts in our lives than was previously believed. This underscores the importance of mediation, which humanises the conflict resolution process, in contrast to court proceedings that emphasise assigning blame for the breakdown of a relationship.
When our relationships break down it appears that we routinely perceive ‘other’ people to have deliberately, wantonly and intentionally indulged themselves at our expense and that of our relationship with them, in other words we blame them for their character traits and we are particularly incensed by what we perceive to be concrete evidence of their constant intention to always prioritise their needs over ours. As our relationships have declined, we will have consistently been seeing evidence of their selfishness and ego-centeredness, but actually what we have been witnessing is evidence of them reacting with lightning speed to the anticipations of danger set up by their childhoods. In other words, they have been miscuing us and we have been witnessing them innocently and unknowingly playing out the consequences of their childhood experiences with their caregivers.
It seems now that actually most of our conflict with other people is driven by unconscious forces that drive us to behave in ways that are not what we would actually choose to be doing at all, in other words we’re not actually, really, in charge of how we behave and how we react to other people. It seems that our childhood experiences directly intercede (without invitation and without declaring themselves) to inform us about how we should respond when someone treats us in a particular way. For example, if you had a childhood that resulted sometimes in you feeling that your feelings didn’t matter, your unconscious mind will make an instant assessment in your current day to day interactions with other people in accordance with that childhood experience, i.e. you will expect to be ignored. You will quite possibly react aggressively or defensively to this perceived danger and respond disproportionately to what could actually be a harmless and benign situation, because in some undeclared way, your implicit memory perceives you to be at risk.
Really, if we want to blame anyone for the breakdown of a relationship, then we should be looking to our ancestors and the ancestors of the other parent, because that’s when the first stressful memory originally occurred (war, famine, natural disasters, who could possibly know?) and consequent generations of offspring have been unknowingly and undeservingly experiencing the consequences of these events, and blaming each other for something over which in reality, they had very little control.
Mediation offers a process that is wise enough, patient enough and kind enough to take into account these unconscious factors that have contributed to the conflict with no real desire on anyone’s part to bring it about. Mediation can facilitate listening and being listened to and this will help both parents to see that they have been equally undone by forces outside of their control, this brings about a forgiveness that means discussion about their newly separated lives will be amicable and definitely in their child’s bests interests.
If you’d like to discuss exploring how we can help you resolve your separation out of court, get in touch for a free consultation.