When you are in despair, do you ever wake up in the morning and look out the window and ask, Where does my help come from?  In my work with divorcing couples, despair is a common theme.  Divorce seems crueler than losing a spouse to death.  In death, the surviving spouse is comforted by the community, there is a ceremony celebrating the life of the lost loved one, stories are told, friends and family gather around and often stay very close to the widow or widower in the months that follow.  In contrast, the newly divorced single man or woman is sometimes shunned by congregations, community members, and previously close married friends.  Sympathy is greatly reduced in divorce situations when compared to the sympathies expressed in death, possibly caused by an underlying belief that equal fault lies on both sides,  and possibly an assumption that the decision to separate was mutual.

Six years ago, a close family member decided to clean house in her relationships.  I was one of the discards.  She resigned from a charitable board of directors, rejected my mother who was in ill-health, hacked the intimate friendship with me that had been previously very close for all of our adult years.  I have grieved for six years.  No effort on my part yields the prized conversation that I crave.  I have been stonewalled against her resistance.  My reaction has cycled through all of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief minus one:  denial, anger, bargaining, and depression.  I have stopped short of acceptance - I cannot accept her rejection of our friendship.  While she is most certainly going through her own processing, I cannot accept that she left me in addition to all of the others.

About ten years ago, a friend sent a greeting card to me that said, “Friends are the family we create for ourselves.”  I had never thought about creating a new family - one of my choosing - although I had built strong and deep friendships over the years.  This new identification of my inner circle of friends as “family” changed the way I viewed their role in my life. 

Conflict behaviors take on many forms in interpersonal relationships: patterns emerge and develop over time from a lifelong curriculum involving experience and discipline that results in character.  The earliest lessons often begin at the most tender ages of early childhood as we perceive low or high levels of personal power.  As a result, people seem to trade in either pity or respect.

One of my favorite professors at University of Denver, Bob Melvin, gave his conflict theory students an excellent reading list.  I immediately purchased all of his recommendations, but only recently began to read one of them:  Henry Fairlie’s The Seven Deadly Sins Today.  My interest was piqued by my son who, over dinner, rattled off all seven without a blink.  I was unfamiliar with the list.  I went home and immediately plunged in to the book.  Here is a little trivia:  Can you name the seven deadly sins? 

A large percentage of people come to mediation pro se (representing themselves).  Lacking an attorney advocate, pro se parties will sometimes attempt to cultivate a bias in the mediator against their opponent, possibly hoping that the mediator will champion their cause.  However, moving from a position of neutrality into a position of advocacy goes against the professional standards a mediator is required to uphold.  If neutrality is breached, the mediator cannot be equidistant, and negotiations become ineffective.

If you are struggling with a conflict of your own, think about the following:

1. Don’t take another’s behavior personally.   It may seem very personal when another comes at you from an uncomfortable angle or attack pattern.  Most people, however, have a habit of conflict behavior that has little to do with you or the problem that exists between the two of you.  Most likely, your “opponent” (for lack of a better word) behaves similarly regardless of whom he or she is in conflict with.

Common Conflict Behaviors

It is a privilege and an honor to be selected to work with people struggling through some of life’s most difficult situations.  As a mediator, I enter into many types of disputes and work with parties who take a variety of approaches to the problem(s) at hand.  Some are respectful toward those they are in dispute with, while others take hostile positions.  My work provides unique opportunities to observe conflict theory in motion. 

Mediation is not a magic bullet.  However, it yields voluntary agreement more times than not, when facilitated by a skilled practitioner in an appropriate setting. The hardest part of mediation is getting people to the table, as any mediator or mediation organization will attest. Why the resistance?