The Mindset Matters!
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.
