You get what you give. We can’t control how others treat us, but we can always choose how we treat them. Psychologist Carl Rogers identified three things that make therapists good at helping people heal and grow, and I believe they apply to all of us: mediators, doctors, lawyers, teachers, group facilitators, parents, plumbers, sales clerks: Everyone.
(1) Unconditional positive regard. Holding others with a deep conviction in the goodness at the heart of their being, even when their behavior is hard to accept.
(2) Genuineness. Showing up as our real selves, with no posturing and no mask, and giving our full, undivided attention to the cares, concerns and pains others are carrying.
(3) Empathy. Reflecting back what someone is telling us so they know we truly understand what they’re going through.You can practice these anywhere.
At a tense family meeting about a parent’s care. At the dinner table with a teenager who finally starts talking. With a stranger behind the counter who is clearly having a hard day. With a spouse whose hurt and frightened by what's been said in divorce mediation.
When we show up embodying these three qualities, we get our minds out of the way of our nature.
That helps others reconnect with their own nature, and then nature can do what it does: heal us and help us grow and flourish.
And here’s the part that makes “you get what you give” true: when we care for others this way, we open ourselves to healing and growth too.
Which of the three is hardest for you? Tell me in the comments on my instagram reel to the right.
🎯Save this this instragram reel for your next hard conversation. 🎯Share our reel with someone who shows up this way for you. 🎯And Follow @familytreemediation on instagram for more constructive communication and community-cultivating content. 🎯Last, contact me at 762-8733 to learn more how Family Tree Mediation helps families here on the Peninsula.
Attorney-Mediator Hank Edson is responsible for the information provided in this video and caption, which is for educational purposes only under California law and does not create an attorney-client relationship or mediator-client relationship and does not constitute legal advice.
Here's a cure for late-night doomscrolling that no app can offer: real conversation with real people.
You know the feeling. It's 11:30, the house is quiet, and we're still scrolling, waiting for something the feed never quite provides. Or we're at a party, deep in small talk, feeling lonelier than when we arrived.
We're not alone in feeling this way. In 2024, San Mateo County became the first county in the U.S. to declare loneliness a public health emergency. A year bofore, in 2023, the Surgeon General issued a report stating that loneliness was epidemic in America and as harmful to longevity as cigarette smoking. That same year, the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that “Only 10% of all adults have a great deal of confidence in organized religion, a percentage that has been in steady decline in recent years, with confidence now at half of what it was in 2016.”
And here's the point: Everyone needs not just community and human connection; we need community and human connection that feeds our desire for purpose, meaning, beauty, and truth, celebration, awe, laughter, and sometimes, a shoulder to cry on. Not shall interraction. Deep community. Community that is alive with what matters, with all that is truly valuable to our happiness and wellbeing.
That's why Family Tree Meidation is offering Deep Community Groups.
Join a Deep Community Group in the New Year!
For our Group on Tuesdays from 4 to 6 pm, January 5 to June 15 2027:
For our Group on Wednesdays from 4:30 to 6 pm, January 6 to June 16 2027:
Each group meets once a week for two hours over 24 weeks. Together we explore the adventure of life: what matters most, what moves us, what we're struggling with and celebrating. The conversations are face-to-face, varied, often funny, sometimes profound, and structured to empower us to discover all the ways our connections are alive and nourishing to the heart, soul, and health of everyone of us.
No posturing, no networking. Just a place to belong.
I've come to believe the phone isn't really the problem. Our challenge is meeting our human need to live a meaning-rich life of connection with others in exploration of our full potential, in celebration of our adventures, and in solidarity through our trials. When we make space to enjoy deep community with each other, week after week, the pull of the screen gets weaker. Join us, and I bet you'll find yourself putting that cell phone to bed earlier and earlier.
You can register simply by clicking one of the registration buttons to the right! We look forward to having you join us.
Share this with others you know who are looking to cultivate a more vibrant ecology of deep community in their lives.
Attorney-Mediator Hank Edson is responsible for the information provided in this video and caption, which is for educational purposes only under California law and does not create an attorney-client relationship or mediator-client relationship and does not constitute legal advice.
These are feel good songs, songs with good advice, and motivational songs that focus and heighten my energy and passion for life. The message and the vibe. Both are key! When you're going through change and clarifying what you want most out of the next stage in life, a celebratory sound track is essential. Family Tree Mediation put this together just for that purpose.
Last time, I talked about all the ways sharing feelings feels unsafe and why it’s actually more risky to keep feelings out of a difficult conversation than it is to put them in it. I also explained that this “feelings layer” of the conversation was only part of the anatomy of any difficult conversation, there also being a “what happened layer” and an “identity layer.” Finally, I noted that the directors of the Harvard Negotiation Project whose book, Difficult Conversation, presents this anatomy, recommend a three-step process for including feelings in any difficult conversation in a manner that is both wise and self-possessed. These steps are:
1.) Sort out your feelings for yourself;
2.) Negotiate with your feelings; and
3.) Share your feelings without judgment or attribution.
Last time, I also offered my thoughts on how to sort out your feelings for yourself in a meaningful way. Today, I’d like to offer some insight into the process of negotiating with your feelings and also how to share your feelings without judgment or attribution.
Negotiating with Your Feelings
The idea that you can negotiate with your feelings at first seems a little ridiculous. It sounds a little bit like playing a game of chess by yourself – playing the black knight, pretending you don’t know the white queen’s countermove. The suggestion seems to be that you should be the instigator of your own psychological manipulation. But in fact, it’s not as bad or crazy as it seems.
When we experience difficult conflicts, part of the reason they are difficult is that we are not just confronting someone else; we are also confronting ourselves. One common form of conflict involves us receiving feedback that is painful to us. We find ourselves objecting to whatever it is, unwilling to accept delivery of the message being sent to us, in conflict with it.
What we are so often unable to understand is that there is a reason for our strong reaction to such feedback: the feedback challenges a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, about the way we show up as a human being in the world. We all need confirmation that we are competent, good and lovable people. This sense of ourselves is our identity. Over time, we develop identity stories that explain why and to what extent we are competent, good and loveable beings. But at times, we are confronted with feedback that is difficult to face because it suggests we are not who we thought we were, we are not who we have claimed to be to ourselves. Confronting ourselves in this way is no picnic.
Figuring out how to cope with such identity confrontations is one of the great offerings contained in one of my favorite books, Difficult Conversations.
They are all too common, those difficult conversations we would do almost anything to avoid. And though we do try our best to avoid them, that never seems to work. Sooner or later, we get cornered by a situation grown intolerable for at least one of the parties in the mix. If no one musters up the courage to dive into the situation, someone eventually “breaks” and the vectors of the conflict fly across the room from every angle. Chaos ensues. The perils of avoiding a difficult conversation are many and complex and they merit separate attention. Today, however, I want to think about why we are tempted to embrace avoidance in the first place.
I would like to venture the hypothesis that the temptation to embrace avoidance arises not just because conversations about painful conflicts are hard. Even if such conflicts are hard, if they were reliably successful in achieving a constructive outcome, no one would choose the inevitable failure of avoidance over the promise of eventually getting what we want in exchange for facing sooner rather than later the challenges ahead.
Instead, I think the reason we are tempted to embrace avoidance is that we have so much experience messing things up worse whenever we try to talk about triggering and difficult issues. Based on this experience, we cannot help but feel doomed either way, and therefore we are less inclined to speed our unhappy fate along by opening up the dangerous subject. You may end up catching me, we say to the situation, but I’m certainly not going to help you do it!
Well, let's see if we can find a more hopeful approach to our plight.
In “The What Happened Conversation, Part 1,” I suggested that our lack of experience skillfully navigating difficult conversations all too often leads us to conclude that we are damned if we do (pardon my French), and damned if we don’t. For this reason we are prone to adopt a strategy of avoidance, choosing to let the perceived doom of a looming conflict come and get us, rather than to actively assist that doom along by seeking it out and opening it up for discussion.
But, as I discussed, the flaw in this approach is that our history of making a bad situation worse by rolling head-long into it does not mean that the problem lies in choosing to engage rather than to avoid. What it means, actually, is that we have to engage the conflict in a skillful way. Avoidance will eventually blow up in our face. Yet picking up the ticking conflict bomb without preparation for disarming it, also means it will blow up in our face. Fortunately, disarmament skills can be acquired.
Last time, we looked at the skill of holding the “And-Stance” posture when initiating a difficult conversation at the What Happened layer, the surface layer of three layers present in every difficult conversation, the surface where the facts of who, what, where, when, how, and why are discussed.
The "And-Stance" is a skill that can help you avoid the truth assumption pitfall—the pitfall wherein you approach the conflict with an either/or mindset that assigns exclusive right to the truth to one of you or the other. Since you can plainly see the errors of the other, that means you must be the one who's right, right?
We all know what it’s like to NOT want to share our feelings. We know the vulnerability, imbalance, unpredictability, and wild nature the feelings by themselves often embody. We know their subjectivity, and the ease with which they may be ridiculed and judged. We know how challenging they make maintaining strategic control when other important things are also at stake. And we know that in many cultural contexts, feelings are also taboo as either unprofessional, effeminate , or simply bad taste. The cards are basically stacked against us putting our feelings on the table.
But it turns out, keeping our feelings out of a difficult conversation is actually more risky, not less, than putting them in it.
Consider the following points:
~ Unexpressed feelings can leak into the conversation through one’s affect, tone of voice, body language, facial expression, withdrawal, distance, sarcasm, impatience, defensiveness, and unpredictability.
~ Unexpressed feelings can burst uncontrolled into conversation once they have built up such intensity that we are unable to contain them any longer.
~ Unexpressed feelings make it difficult to listen because all our psychic energy is consumed in simultaneously keeping them in check and seeking their relief.
~ Unexpressed feelings take a toll on our self-esteem and relationships as you judge yourself for not sticking up for yourself and deny others the opportunity to step up in response to your sharing.
All of these aspects of unexpressed feelings can seriously hurt our chances of achieving a resolution to a conflict that serves our best interests.
Holiday traditions are great, but only when they serve their purpose, which is to celebrate and nurture a healthy family culture. The hitch is that, traditions aside, the holidays can be very stressful times, particularly if the family is already dealing with significant challenges. And there seems to be no end to the different kinds of challenges families face.
For example, you may be a newly single parent trying to meet the emotional needs of your children at the same time you are dealing with the financial challenges of re-entering the job market. You may be a recent graduate who does not want to spend the holiday season being judged by the family because your professional or romantic life is struggling. Or you may be in the political or cultural minority within your family and you are just tired of having to either hold your tongue at family gatherings or land in a big fight with Uncle Bob.
Whatever the flavor of the challenges your family faces, a creative way to cope is to challenge the status quo. The holidays seem to beg for rituals and traditions that can be either heart-warming or uncomfortably stifling. The longer they have been going on, the more mandatory they feel. All the good memories they have created make suggestions of change feel wrong, even hurtful. But if the tradition is actually aggravating pain you are already experiencing, change is not wrong; it is good medicine, like fresh air and rest. In some situations, such change can be an essential part of taking responsible care of yourself.
So if you are approaching this holiday season with anxiety about the pain you are going to suffer, why not give the old routines a rest? Why not breathe some fresh air into the spirit of the season?
Let me give you an example from my family. My parents were divorced when I was four. From that time on and for nearly 40 years, Christmas Eve was spent with my mother and eventually my step father and his kids, and Christmas Day was spent with my father and eventually my step-mother’s family.
I recently came across a video of the 1999 induction celebration of Mr. Rogers’ into the television hall of fame. I stand in awe of Mr. Rogers because like no other human being I can recall, he achieved an outlier level of greatness – a game changing achievement – through absolute gentleness. When we think of rebels and revolutionaries, people who bucked trends, spurned conventions, and refused to conform to social pressures of all kinds, particularly when we think of men, we think of James Dean types, punk rockers, or even the rising momentum of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s oratory. But, of course, in some sense these types are conforming in their nonconformity to the gender stereotype of what a man is supposed to be. And, the problem with that stereotype (which is not necessarily the problem of the leaders who fall into it) is that it does not look deeper into what a human being is supposed to be.
Mr. Rogers did not simply repeat the structures of gender stereotypes in demonstrating his value as a human being. Instead, he understood that human beings needed to risk developing their capacity for gentleness in order to achieve our fullest capacity for greatness.
There has been a fair amount of coverage in the news of the growing numbers of college graduates who find it necessary to move back in with their parents. Many factors contribute to this new pattern. There is the skyrocketing cost of tuition and the unprecedented debt with which recent graduates are now often burdened. There is the unhealthy economic climate that has gripped our country for several years now. Jobs are hard to get. Salaries are falling. Economic disparities are increasing. Home ownership is more of a challenge than ever, putting increased pressure on the rental market. Questions about the adequacy of college preparation for the changing demands of the American workplace also loom. One may even step back and regard the environmental threats, wars, and cultural trends shaping the society into which enter our newly minted college graduates as factors contributing to their need or decision to move back home.
No doubt for many parents and many young adult children, this new living dynamic is stressful and even painful. There are two thoughts, however, that can be of help to families trying to find a way to adjust to these new circumstances.
Hank Edson, J.D. 
