FAMILY TREE MEDIATION'S INSTAGRAM CONTENT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, DOES NOT CONSTITUTE LEGAL ADVICE, AND DOES NOT CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT OR MEDIATOR-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP.
The relationships within the family tree are always changing --
-- and this fact can cause enormous emotional strain and pain within the family. However, a well developed communication process can make every member of the family tree strong enough to withstand the pain such strain can involve so that they can make thoroughly explored, smart decisions about their future. In this way, each participant is helped to move ahead toward health, happiness and a world of new possibilities. Whatever you are feeling, whatever you are going through within your family tree, help is here...in mediation.
In exploring what mediation offers, you are opening the door to new patterns of communication that are more empowering to you and to everyone in your family tree. All these familial relationships that will remain in some form or another a part of your story, your path, no matter what happens next will benefit when the family practices more effective communication.
Obviously making yourself stronger, healthier and happier is a good thing. But when embroiled in emotional conflict with members of your own family tree, it might not always be so obvious that it is in your own best interest to make stronger, healthier and happier the very people with whom you are in conflict. As challenging as this idea might be, Family Tree Mediation strongly believes it to be true--so long as the means to this end involves improved patterns of communication.
Improving the skill with which any person communicates helps everyone else in that person's family to avoid the trap of becoming so preoccupied by reactive and inadequately informed judgments that they have no time to understand their own most important priorities and contributions, much less those of the people with whom they are in conflict.
Through mediation you can craft agreements that meet each other's deeper interests and needs, those that sometimes take time to uncover, own and assert. When we work to create an agreement in this way, the available options that can be agreed upon are usually more numerous so there is often more opportunity to find ways to be fair, to make more out of limited resources, and find ways out of, what seems on the surface to be, an irresolvable conflict. Also an agreement that respects each person's deeper interests and needs will generally be stronger, more durable and more beneficial for all concerned.
If you are experiencing conflict in your life you need help navigating, such as divorce or a dispute with your siblings about caring for your parents or handling their estate or differences with your young adult children, the thing that makes all the difference is shifting from a mindset in which each person reacts from a place of feeling vulnerable and alone to a mindset where each person has confidence that “we’re all in it together.”
When we're all in it together, we buy-in to the principle that everyone’s needs, experience, and contributions matter equally. We let go of the mindset that identifies with isolation and separateness, we let go of the compulsion to control. We recognize that there is an ecological genius at work in the whole of our family, community, society...whatever group we're a part of, that is greater than that of any one individual, that is greater than the sum of its parts. When we appreciate the greater genius of the whole to which we belong, each person's contributions, experience, and needs suddenly becomes vested with an irreplacable value to everyone else. We need each person's input and happiness to fulfill the formula that nature invests for the wellbeing of all us who are "in it together." This is the magic of collaboration.
When we need to control things out of a feeling that our isolated, separateness needs to be protected, we miss out on experiencing the profound ways in which our separate needs are better protected by the genius of the whole than by our efforts as people who feel ourselves to be separate and alone. Why is this so? It is so because a word of separate individuals who are not "all in it together" is a world in conflict and a world populated by people operating from fear and the limitations of their own experience, which is unavoidably distorted in all kinds of ways. In such a climate, our individual needs are far more vulnerable than when we give up control in favor of a "We're all in it together" mindset that is confident in our collective, collaborative ability to take care of everyone in fair and beautiful and profoundly satisfying ways.
Making this shift and keeping the right mindset takes practice, which is where mediation can be so helpful. Mediators are people who coach people trying to practice having difficult conversations with a “We’re all in it together” mindset. No matter what the context you find yourself in, if you are having a difficult convesation that is going from bad to worse, odds are that the reason is the participants need help practicing a "We're all in it together" mindset, which is exactly what Family Tree Mediation is here to offer: help. Give us a call. We can help.
Hank Edson, J.D.
Proprietor of Family Tree Mediation Serving Redwood City, Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos and the wider Peninsula & San Francisco Bay Area.
Hank Edson, J.D.
