Escaping the Narrative Trap

As a mediator, I am brought into people’s lives when they have reached some sort of impasse.  The relationship between these parties has completely broken down, and they find themselves on the brink of some sort of formal legal or administrative proceeding, if not already in the midst of one.  While there is still a very real opportunity for a resolution to bring them back together, or at least allow the parties to move forward without the threat of further intervention by the legal system, one of the biggest challenges that face me as a mediator is recognizing what has brought these parties to their current brink.

When parties have reached an impasse, it is often because they have become wedded to their personal narrative of what has happened.  They have doubled down on their singular understanding, and become deeply invested in their particular storyline.  Somewhere along the way, they have lost their ability to accept that reality can be interpreted in multiple ways, and that maybe what they understand happened looks very different to the person across the table from them.  By the time they are dealing with me, they have convinced themselves that only their story matters.

The truth is that resolution of a dispute requires flexibility.  Any kind of problem solving requires some sort of compromise. In order to fix what is broken, we have to be able to step away from these limiting narratives.  By holding on to our idea of what has happened, we are actually preventing ourselves from thinking of what is still possible.  As a mediator, it is my job to gently challenge those tightly held narratives, and encourage people to think more broadly about what they understand their conflicts to be.  It is only then they can start to think of what solutions are actually possible, and we can begin to work towards an understanding of reality that allows people to put their disputes behind them.