Practicing Narrative Mediation E-Book

John Winslade

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 544

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

Practicing Narrative Mediation provides mediation practitioners with practical narrative approaches that can be applied to a wide variety of conflict resolution situations. Written by John Winslade and Gerald Monk--leaders in the narrative therapy movement--the book contains suggestions and illustrative examples for applying the proven narrative technique when working with restorative conferencing and mediation in organizations, schools, health care, divorce cases, employer and employee problems, and civil and international conflicts. Practicing Narrative Mediation also explores the most recent research available on discursive positioning and exposes the influence of the moment-to-moment factors that are playing out in conflict situations. The authors include new concepts derived from narrative family work such as "absent but implicit," "double listening," and "outsider-witness practices."

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Chapter One - How to Work with Conflict Stories: Nine Hallmarks of Narrative Mediation

Hallmark 1: Assume That People Live Their Lives Through Stories (Stories Matter)

Hallmark 2: Avoid Essentialist Understandings (It’s Not All in the Natural Essence)

Hallmark 3: Engage in Double Listening (There’s Always More Than One Story)

Hallmark 4: Build an Externalizing Conversation (The Person Is Not the Problem; ...

Hallmark 5: View the Problem Story as a Restraint (How Is the Problem Holding ...

Hallmark 6: Listen for Discursive Positioning (Words Can Break Your Bones Too)

Hallmark 7: Identify Openings to an Alternative Story (What Would You Prefer?)

Hallmark 8: Re-Author the Relationship Story (Let’s Build a Story of Cooperation)

Hallmark 9: Document Progress (What’s Written Down Lasts Longer)

Chapter Two - Negotiating Discursive Positions

How Discursive Positioning Helps Make Sense of an Interaction

What Positioning Theory Is About

A Repositioning Exercise

Chapter Three - Tracing Discursive Positioning Through a Conversation

Mediation Conversation

Opening Exchanges

Initial Statements

Developing the Conflict Story: Theresa’s Perspective

Developing the Conflict Story: Alan’s Perspective

Opening Space for an Alternative Story

Constructing a Joint Story Around the New Opening

Persisting with the Story of Cooperation

Fashioning a Narrative of Joint Care for Rebecca

Summary of the Movement of Discursive Positioning

Entitlement

Shifts in Position

Taking Up Positions of Agency in Relation to Dominant Discourse

Chapter Four - Working with Cultural Narratives in Mediation

The Liberal-Humanist Vision

A Constructionist Vision

Understandings of Power in Conflict

The Mediator’s Stance from a Constructionist Perspective

Discourse and Mediation

Summary of Constructionist Principles

Practice Example

Chapter Five - Divorce Mediation and Collaborative Practice

The Dominant Discourses of Marriage and Divorce

Divorce Mediation

Collaborative Law

Collaborative Divorce

Narrative Strategies for Establishing Client Goals and a Vision

Reflections on Divorce Mediation and Collaborative Practice

Chapter Six - Outsider-Witness Practices in Organizational Disputes

Principles of Narrative Mediation in Organizations

Outsider-Witness Practices

Example of a Workshop Using Outsider-Witness Practices

Reflections on the Outsider-Witness Practice

Chapter Seven - Employment Mediation

Types of Employment Mediation

The Story of Ruby and Phoebe

The Story of Rosa and the School Board

Reflections on Employment Mediation

Chapter Eight - Restorative Conferencing in Schools

Restorative Justice

Principles of Restorative Conferencing

Principles of Narrative Restorative Conferencing

A Narrative Method for a Restorative Conference

Reflections on Restorative Conferencing in Schools

Chapter Nine - Conflict Resolution in Health Care

Culture and Conflict in Health Care

A Narrative Mediation Protocol for Use in a Health Care Setting

Epilogue

References

About the Authors

Index

Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

eISBN : 978-0-470-43769-8

1. Conflict management. 2. Mediation. 3. Storytelling. 4. Discourse analysis, Narrative. I. Monk, Gerald, date. II. Title. HM1126.W58 2008303.6’9—dc22 2008018496

For Michael White(1948-2008)In appreciation for his incalculable contributions to thedevelopment of narrative practice

Preface

In 2000, we published Narrative Mediation: A New Approach to Conflict Resolution. This new book began with the idea that we might update that text. However, as we discussed with Jossey-Bass the idea of a second edition containing a number of revisions and also new concepts growing out of our experience over the last seven years, it rapidly became clear that we were talking about more than a few changes and additions. The idea of preparing a completely new text was the logical result. This book is the result of that decision.

This book covers new ground in several directions. One direction has led us to examine the development that has been taking place in narrative practice in general in the last ten years. In particular, we have drawn from the wide field of practice of narrative family therapy and community work. In addition, a growing number of practitioners have taken up the practice of narrative mediation, and we have sought to represent that growth through inviting some of these practitioners to participate in writing this book. Finally, we have considered the development that has occurred in our own work through the teaching and practice we have undertaken in the last ten years.

When we wrote our 2000 book, we were both living in New Zealand and had been doing mediation primarily in family and organizational contexts. Since 2000, we have both, at different times, relocated to California and widened our familiar domains of practice. Many of the developments recorded here derive from the widening of our contexts of reference for the practices discussed.

We have also taught conflict resolution practice to students in a number of different universities: the University of Waikato in New Zealand; San Diego State University, California State University-San Bernardino, and California State University-Dominguez Hills in the United States; and the Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo in Canada. In addition to teaching these formal courses, between us we have taught workshops at many sites in many countries: New Zealand, the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Cyprus, Russia, and Israel. The more we teach about narrative mediation, the more we explore the ideas involved and learn from the responses of workshop participants, who ask questions, probe our assumptions, query cultural leanings, get excited about different aspects of this approach, and often apply concepts in different arenas of practice. All this is both gratifying and stimulating. It also works on us to develop our own understanding of what narrative mediation is about. In pursuit of constant improvement in the clarity of our teaching, we have designed new teaching tools and exercises, and the practice has changed in our own minds along the way. To us it has seemed to become simpler and clearer, and we hope that is the experience of workshop participants.

In the general field of narrative practice, the work of Michael White and David Epston continues to be important, and there are many others who have thrown their lot in with the narrative movement and contributed to what is now a robust and growing literature. In this book Michael White’s notions of the absent but implicit (discussed in Chapter One), double listening (Chapter One), and outsider-witness practices (Chapter Six) are examples of concepts that we have drawn from new developments in narrative family therapy work.

From the work of Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré, among others, we have featured the notion of working with discursive positioning, which was mentioned in our 2000 book but not with the same degree of elaboration as here. John’s own work on a thesis for his PhD degree (completed in 2003) applied the idea of discursive positioning to mediation practice. Some of his thinking has been published in article form and now this book draws more extensively on his work. Our book is also indebted particularly to the collaboration of Wendy Drewery and her inspiration and theoretical groundwork. She was also the chief supervisor for John’s PhD degree study at the University of Waikato. John is also grateful to Terry Locke for his perceptive support and careful attention to John’s work on the PhD degree project.

In our earlier book we made particular use of the poststructuralist theorizing of Michel Foucault. Much more of Foucault’s work has been translated into English since then, particularly his later emphasis on the technologies of the self and the concept of governmentality, and this book has benefited as a result.

Now let us look at this book chapter by chapter. In Chapter One we have fashioned a restatement of the whole idea of narrative mediation. Chapters Two and Three then explore in some depth the leverage that can be gained from applying the concept of discursive positioning. In Chapter Four we focus on culture and mediation, taking a constructionist approach to thinking about culture. This chapter is influenced by the work we did in writing a textbook (published by Sage) on cultural issues in the counseling field. In the second half of the book we explore the penetration of these ideas into a range of practice contexts. The intention is to show how conflict resolution work in different contexts can take on a narrative spirit.

Since moving to the United States, one new domain of practice is collaborative divorce, which we discuss in Chapter Five. We have now taught several workshops on this subject in California and in Canada. We would especially like to thank Peggy Thompson for inviting us to introduce narrative mediation ideas into the collaborative divorce movement. Peggy has been a staunch supporter of narrative perspectives and has had the vision to see the strong connection between the underpinnings of narrative practice and collaborative divorce. Gerald, especially, has become connected with this movement and has worked as a coach in the collaborative divorce model. We are grateful for the enthusiasm with which those responsible for starting this invigorating new set of conflict resolution practices have welcomed the ideas we have been exploring. It was Gerald’s connection with Chip Rose that led to Chip’s contribution to Chapter Five. Chip is a highly experienced family law attorney, mediator, and trainer in collaborative divorce, and we were pleased to include his creative and helpful contributions. It is especially good to be able to add to our psychological perspective the perspective of a lawyer who appreciates the aims of narrative mediation.

For four years John has been a regular visitor to Denmark at the invitation of the DISPUK organization. The DISPUK community of psychologists and organizational consultants offers professional development programs in family therapy and organizational development and management, and teaching to DISPUK course participants working in a second language has given John a new appreciation for the clear articulation of ideas. DISPUK director Allan Holmgren has been a champion of narrative and social constructionist practice. His work with organizations and managers led John to ask him to join in coauthoring Chapter Six, on narrative practice in organizational conflicts. Allan is indebted to Australian therapist Michael White, whom he regards as his “close friend and ally” and without whom “the work presented here couldn’t be done.”

Alison Cotter was part of our original group at Waikato Mediation Services in the 1990s. In 1997, she and John coauthored a chapter in our Narrative Therapy in Practice: The Archaeology of Hope (also published by Jossey-Bass), one of our first ventures into print on the subject of narrative mediation. In 1999, Alison, Gerald, and John coauthored an article on narrative mediation in the Negotiation Journal. Alison then moved from private practice mediation to a position as a mediator with the mediation services of the New Zealand Department of Labour. Her work there has continued to develop the practice of narrative mediation in employment mediation. We honor that work in Chapter Seven, which discusses employment mediation and which Alison coauthored with us. (The accounts of actual mediations in this chapter have enough details changed to ensure the anonymity of the participants.)

The work on restorative conferencing described in Chapter Eight began while we were still in New Zealand and owes a great deal to our partnership with a team that at various times included Wendy Drewery, Donald McMenamin, Stephen Hooper, Timoti Harris, Angus Macfarlane, David Paré, Helen Adams, Brian Prestidge, and many others in the schools that were part of the two pilot projects for the New Zealand Ministry of Education with which we were involved. These ideas continue to be carried forward in New Zealand schools by Kathie Cronin-Lampe, Ron Cronin-Lampe, Kerry Jenner, Maria Kecscemeti, and many others. We all still owe a debt to Margaret Thorsborne in Queensland for her initiatives in restorative conferencing and to those who have made the New Zealand version of the family group conference such a potent tool. Alan MacRae deserves special mention in this regard, as do Judges Fred McElrea and David Carruthers.

In addition to becoming involved in introducing narrative mediation in the area of collaborative divorce, Gerald has been invited to work in the domain of conflict in health care organizations. He would like to thank Barbara Filner and Carole Houk for helping him to introduce narrative mediation into the health care field. Along with other members of the National Conflict Resolution Center in San Diego, Gerald has been involved for several years in training health care ombuds and managers in conflict resolution work. Again, these groups of people have taken enthusiastically to narrative mediation, and this work has led to the discussion of this field in Chapter Nine of this book.

At the end of a movie, there is usually a long list of credits that honors all those who have had a hand in the production. Writing a book presents a similar requirement, although the number of people involved is much smaller. If you think of this as a list of credits, there are still some others who need to be credited for their contributions. Alan Rinzler at Jossey-Bass encouraged the project at its beginning and made a point of keeping us to our deadline. We would also like to mention Seth Schwartz, who works as an assistant editor at Jossey-Bass, Carol Hartland, who managed the production process for us, and Elspeth MacHattie, who provided careful copyedits.

In Chapters One and Two we have used some excerpts from conversations that were role-played and recorded for that purpose. Lucy Vail was responsible for recording these conversations, and we are also indebted to the following current and former students who volunteered to take part: Lisa Lopez, Michelle Myers, Gina Portillo, and Brenda Forsse. Thanks are also due to Sara Chavez for generously allowing us to use her writing on border identity oppression in Chapter Four. John taught an online course for California State University-Dominguez Hills in the summer of 2007, and several students in that course have allowed us to use pieces of their work as examples of narrative practice. Amanda Bowers and Paul Shantic contributed a conversation that appears in Chapter One, and Laurie Frazier contributed the narrative letter used as an example at the end of Chapter One.

In addition we are grateful to Pete Roussos for his generous sharing of his creative materials developed for the San Diego Family Law Group. We are grateful too to Linda Solomon for her contributions on the neutral coach model, developed with her colleagues in Texas. We would also like to thank Louise Aguilar and Leny Ambruso for generously sharing their conflict prevention chart, developed during their work as health care ombuds and mediators.

Finally, Gerald owes a great deal of thanks to his dear wife and loving partner of nine years, Stacey Sinclair, for all her assistance with reading and editing drafts and offering helpful suggestions. John’s wife, Lorraine Hedtke, has also been a solid supporter of this book and has made helpful suggestions at many points. Writing is a personally demanding task, and it requires lots of encouragement and backup. Giving loving attention to words cannot happen easily without a context of loving support in many tangible ways. John is deeply grateful to Lorraine for offering this loving support, and fortunate to be able to say so publicly in these lines.

June 2008

JOHN WINSLADE Redlands, CaliforniaGERALD MONK San Diego, California

Chapter One

How to Work with Conflict Stories: Nine Hallmarks of Narrative Mediation

This book is about taking stories seriously in the practice of mediation. Taking stories seriously, to us, means treating them as having the power to shape experiences, influence mind-sets, and construct relationships. It also means seeing them as having something of a life of their own, as embarking on a mission that sometimes seems to drag people along behind. It means inquiring into the work being done by such stories in conflict situations, particularly into whether the protagonists in a conflict are happy with the direction that a story is taking them and whether they would prefer to go somewhere else.

Even in these few words, we have departed from some other common ways in which people understand stories. From time to time you may hear people say, “Oh, that’s just a story,” in a way that disparages the truth value of what has been said. The implication is that the account given is not fully accurate or that it is a deliberate distortion or that it is not very objective and therefore not worth much. In some forms of professional practice, stories are regarded as suspect versions of the truth of what has happened, and the job of the professional is conceived of as penetrating beneath the surface to the underlying truth. From this perspective, mediators might hear the different versions of what disputants tell them as layers of camouflage that cover over the facts. If mediators can only see through the stories to those hidden facts then they will be in a better position to help the parties deal with the substantive issues that divide them and move toward resolution.

It is not really surprising that this suspicious perspective is commonplace among professionals. It is, after all, the standard approach in most of social science to search for underlying patterns, foundational facts, or solid, verifiable, or even generalizable truths. Jerome Bruner (1986) refers to this as the paradigmatic approach. So when mediators undertake this search, they are doing what many others in many other branches of the human sciences have done.

Our concern is with the opportunity that might be missed in the process of quickly dismissing stories as unreliable. What might be missed is the work done by stories to construct realities, not just to report on them, apparently inaccurately. Rather than moving as quickly as one can away from stories and toward an emphasis on what is factual, objective, and patterned, we believe there is much to be gained by staying with the stories themselves, inquiring into the work that they do, and experimenting with how these stories might be reshaped in order to transform relationships.

In this first chapter we explain how we have been going about doing this kind of exploration. And we summarize what we see as the hallmarks of a narrative practice of mediation. We have written about narrative mediation before, and this book is intended to develop what we published eight years ago (Winslade & Monk, 2000). Since then we have tried out many ways of describing the practice of narrative mediation, seeking the way that will make it easier for practitioners to entertain embracing this practice. This chapter is in many ways a distillation of that experience.

Some years ago we read an article by Joseph P. Folger and Robert A. Baruch Bush (2001) on the hallmarks of a transformative perspective in mediation. We found this article helpful because it specified some ethical and theoretical commitments and also clearly pointed to some particular practices. Although we have many sympathies with what the transformative mediators are endeavoring to do, we also have some different emphases in our own work. This article sharpened our understanding of a transformative approach and made us notice places of difference in how we think about doing mediation. It also prompted us to identify the hallmarks of a narrative approach to mediation and to consider how we might state these hallmarks in succinct and accessible ways. We are grateful to Folger and Bush for cuing us to follow this line of inquiry.

This chapter results from that inquiry. For those who have not read our previous book, this chapter will introduce you to a narrative perspective relatively quickly. For those who have read our previous book, this chapter distills that work into a briefer statement.

Here then are nine hallmarks of a narrative practice in mediation. We shall list them all together and then expand on each one in turn.

1. Assume that people live their lives through stories.

2. Avoid essentialist assumptions.

3. Engage in double listening.

4. Build an externalizing conversation.

5. View the problem story as a restraint.

6. Listen for discursive positioning.

7. Identify openings to an alternative story.

8. Re-author the relationship story.

9. Document progress.

The first two hallmarks are about the assumptions that a mediator brings with him or her into the room. They therefore involve some preparatory work, reading about the background to these ideas and thinking through the implications of these assumptions. The other seven hallmarks are practices built on the foundation of these assumptions. They involve practice and rehearsal to develop facility with their use.

Hallmark 1: Assume That People Live Their Lives Through Stories (Stories Matter)

This hallmark is about the adoption of the narrative perspective in mediation. Some people who have not come across narrative mediation before respond to the concept by assuming that its focus is on fostering the telling of stories, or on the analysis of stories or on the autobiographical impulse. There is nothing wrong with these focal interests, but they are not what we mean by a narrative perspective. We are referring to the idea that narratives serve a shaping or constitutive purpose in people’s lives.

What do we mean by a narrative, or story? In the first place, we are speaking about the stories that people tell themselves or tell each other. In many social interactions people respond to the presence of the other(s) by telling a story. “How was your day?” is usually followed by the telling of a story. “What have you been doing lately?” produces a different response but still a story. When a lawyer in a courtroom asks, “What did you see happen?” the witness tells a story in response. When a police officer says, “Is there any reason why I should not give you a speeding ticket?” the driver might construct a justificatory story. When a spouse asks, “Why are you so late?” the husband or wife so questioned is less likely to respond with a list of rationally enumerated reasons than with an explanatory story. As people tell stories they establish for themselves, as well as for others, a sense of continuity in life. Stories give people the reassuring sense that life is not just a series of events happening one after the other without rhyme or reason. In terms of individuals’ sense of themselves, stories enable people to have a sense of coherence about who they are. However, as Sara Cobb (1993) has pointed out, some stories are more coherent accounts than others. Some retellings are more rehearsed than others. These differences can influence what happens to the stories that people tell in the context of mediation.

We are also using the word story to refer to the background stories with which each person’s cultural world is redolent. People do not just make up from nothing the stories they tell each other. From the cultural world around them, they draw on a range of resources and borrow ready-made narrative elements, and then they fashion these elements into a format intended to meet a communicative purpose. These narrative elements include plot devices (such as a beginning in medias res; a sudden turn of events; an act of God, or deus ex machina; a complicating action; a related subplot; or an expected or unexpected denouement); story genres (such as comedy, tragedy, melodrama, soap opera, or slice-of-life story); characterizations (such as victim, villain, rescuer, saintly hero, objectified target, flawed genius, powerful controller, or disempowered recipient); contextual settings, each with its typical conflict format (such as the workplace dispute, domestic dispute, community or neighborhood dispute, organizational dispute, commercial dispute, school conflict, or landlord-tenant dispute); and thematic driving forces (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, disability, power, recognition, authenticity, or employee rights).

As narrative mediators observe these narrative elements at work, they often hear the playing out of background cultural scripts of which the protagonists are not the original authors. Seyla Benhabib (2002) recommends, in fact, thinking of culture primarily in narrative terms. For example, if a person refers to a character such as the schoolyard bully, the controlling husband, the punitive boss, or the noisy neighbor, there are a number of stock story lines that will come easily to his or her mind. It is much easier for disputants to attempt to fit themselves and their fellow disputants into one of these well-known story lines than it is for them to make up a completely new plot. Apart from any other consideration, using stock narrative elements makes it easier to garner the recognition and support of third parties (friends, relatives, and even mediators).

Along with these background scripts come built-in assumptions about how the world is, how people should be, and how people should respond when the “rules” are broken. It is for these assumptions that we find it most useful to employ the terminology of discourse theory. The word discourse can be used in a variety of ways. We are using it to refer primarily to the conceptualizations of Michel Foucault (1972, 1978, 1980, 2000), who emphasized the function of discourse as repetitive practice out of which people form their understandings of the world they live in. These understandings then work in turn to inform the practices (both linguistic and behavioral) that people engage in. The motion of discourse is thus circular and works to seal off the possibility of thinking otherwise. Discourse is a function of the way that people use recursive patterns of language to embody social norms and to establish taken-for-granted understandings about how things are in the world. Discourses can be represented as statements of meaning about the ordinary and everyday aspects of life: eating fruit is good for you; it is polite to say thank you when offered something; family loyalty is of primary importance; it is important to stand up for yourself when attacked; hard work brings rewards; infidelity ends a marriage; and so on. Behind each of these statements lies a story that people have heard repeated many times or that they can slot into when it applies to their life circumstances. Many of these pieces of discourse are not at all contentious, but some are strongly disputed: for example, a man should be the head of the household; white privilege is based on natural superiority; homosexuality is not natural; disabled persons should be grateful for the charity they receive. Each of these meanings serves an organizing function in a power relation. It sets up exchanges between people as individuals and as social groups. Notice how the word natural is used in some of these statements. This illustrates the way in which discourses work to make some assumptions appear to have such undisputed ordinariness that they can scarcely be questioned. They appear to be, and come to be treated as, part of the natural order of the universe.

Hallmark 2: Avoid Essentialist Understandings (It’s Not All in the Natural Essence)

Essentialism is the habit of thought that invites people to always look for explanations in the intrinsic essence of things or of persons rather than in cultural influences like narratives. This has been a tradition of thought in Western culture since the time of the ancient Greeks. In recent times, however, it has come under constant critique, and alternative perspectives that are more dialogical, more relational, and more constructionist are being promoted.

Essentialist, or inside-out, approaches to conflict ascribe people’s behavior to their nature, whether this nature is thought of as personality or as an internal state involving emotion, attitude, and mood. “He’s an aggressive person!” “She’s manipulative by nature”; “He’s a victim type”; “Those two have a personality conflict”; “She is disturbed”; “He is ADHD.” Rather than understanding people as motivated by internal states, instinctual drives, forces immanent in the core self, or personality, we prefer to start from a different psychology, one that is built on an outside-in approach. From this perspective, we can see people’s interests, their emotions, their behaviors, and their interpretations as produced within a cultural or discursive world of relations and then internalized.

Thinking this way leads to a study of how power operates through discourse to produce expectations of people’s places in the world. It also leads to an understanding of narratives as setting up positions in a conflict, as constructing relations, as producing the feelings and emotions in these relations. This approach to emotional experience does not make a person’s feelings any the less real or any the less painful, but it might alter how others conceptualize their responses. Rather than assuming that a person’s feelings or thoughts are essential to who he or she is, one might think of them as essential to a narrative in which the person is situated and, therefore, when the story shifts, or the person’s position within the story shifts, the emotions will follow.

There is a delicate distinction here that needs to be stated with care. We are not suggesting that people’s strongly held feelings should be ignored. We agree with the emphasis in other approaches to mediation on empathetically acknowledging feelings and on encouraging disputing parties to recognize each other’s perspectives. But at the same time we want to be careful in how we think about just what is being recognized or empathized with. It is a position in a narrative rather than an essence of who the person is. It is constructed more than natural. It is real in its effects but it may be subject to change. Any one individual may be part of more than one narrative, may shift tracks to another line, may become something other than “who he is” or “who she is.” This leads us into the next hallmark, which is built on the rejection of the assumptions of essentialism. It is the beginning of a narrative practice in mediation.

Hallmark 3: Engage in Double Listening (There’s Always More Than One Story)

Double listening starts from the assumption that people are always situated within multiple story lines. It is a recognition of the complexity of life. We do not have a bias in favor of integrating a person’s multiple story lines into a singular or congruent whole, as some psychologies would argue one should. We do not believe that the integration of disparate narratives is a worthwhile goal for social practice. It is sometimes assumed that integration is necessary to combat confusion. In practice, however, people are well used to shifting seamlessly from one narrative to another, as they go from home to school, from home to work, from the peer group to the family, or from one relationship to another. Far from being confusing, multiple narratives often give people a range of narrative options within which to situate themselves and from which to respond. They are a resource to be treasured, rather than a complication to be integrated away.

In mediation we are, on the one hand, particularly interested in the conflict-saturated relationship narrative in which people are often stuck. And we are, on the other hand, also interested in the alternative relationship story out of which people would prefer to relate to each other, if they could. We do not assume that the conflict story will lead us and the disputants through the narrow ravine of negotiation to arrive eventually at the peaceful plain of resolution and agreement. Rather, we assume that the two stories may continue to run parallel to some degree. In narrative mediation, we are first interested in inviting people to switch tracks to the path of the alternative story. This story might feature their preferred ways of interacting about their differences, their unexpressed hopes that brought them to mediation, themes of cooperation or understanding or respect. They may also involve actions that shift the power relations onto a more just footing, or intentions to make things better, even when one is unable to carry through on these intentions.

Double listening hears both of these stories. It does not acknowledge just the pain of the conflict story but also the hope of the other story that sits alongside. It allows mediators to acknowledge and recognize, at the same time, feelings of anger and pride, hope and despair, hurt and recognition. As we engage in double listening we hear certain aspects of what people say more richly. We listen for the pieces of information that are commonly glossed over, and we hear them as indications of the existence of another story, one that is currently lying subjugated. We hear the word but in the middle of a sentence as a hinge around which two stories are swinging. Take this utterance for example: “I was really angry at the time but I calmed down later.” The remark is made up of two statements that may refer to two different positions in two different stories of events: one in which outrage and strong feeling shape the response and one in which considered reflection takes the response in a different direction.

Double listening may also cue us to notice the contradictions between people’s words and their nonverbal expressions. Think of the person who says yes to a proposal but the voice is hesitant and the expression on the face is strained. The nonverbals say no while the verbalization says yes. Which is correct? If we are double listening, they may both be correct and consistent responses, but each may have meaning within a different narrative.

Deconstruction

Once essentialism is eschewed then the meaning of what people say in a mediation does not have to be assumed to be obvious or single-storied. Following the deconstructive method of linguistic philosopher Jacques Derrida (1976), in narrative mediation we are often seeking to open up new meanings in the parties’ utterances, in the hope that they can provide openings to new story lines. Derrida approaches deconstruction by identifying the negative as well as the positive meaning of any word or concept. A word is treated not as having intrinsic meaning in itself but as having meaning in the context of its relationship with other words, especially with its binary opposite. Each side of the binary relies to some extent on the other side to support its meaning. There is, for example, a binary relationship between concepts like aggression and passivity, love and hate, problem and solution, grievance and redress, remorse and forgiveness, employer and employee, landlord and tenant, and victim and villain. Derrida’s deconstructive inquiry aims to release meanings from the rigidity of binary opposition and to search out surplus meanings that might give rise to new forms of living.

This idea is of importance to mediation because the practice of mediation has been built on a setup that assumes the two parties in a dispute are in some form of binary opposition. The very purpose of negotiation might be considered to be the development of surplus meaning, beyond the parties’ encapsulated stories about the conflict. In the hustle and bustle of practice, however, mediators do not have the luxury of engaging in the detailed philosophical inquiries that someone like Derrida develops. What they can do, though, is to maintain a stance of naïve inquiry that treats meanings as curios to be respectfully turned over and examined, rather than accepted at face value.

Michael White has developed Derrida’s idea into a further version of double listening. This version attends to an “absent but implicit” story (2000, p. 153) and enables the mediator to hear the story that lies hidden or masked in the background of a conflict story. Every expression about an event can be seen to be built on a contrast with its opposite. If mediators engage in doubly listening to an expression of strong anger at being wronged, they can also hear in the background a statement of what the speaker values, believes in, hopes for, cherishes, or desires to protect. Double listening enables them to do more than acknowledge the experience of being angry and feeling wronged; it also opens up the possibility that they can listen to the story of what the speaker values and holds important.

Let us illustrate this idea with an example. Suppose someone says in a mediation, “I am upset about being spoken to in that way. It is offensive and wrong, and I am not going to sit and listen to it.” We can hear the anger and outrage and can acknowledge it, as many mediators are taught to do, through reflection and paraphrase. But we can also hear something else. What is absent from the words but implicit in them is that this person is expressing a preference for the opposite to what has been happening. It may be a preference for more inclusive conversation, for an ethic of speaking that is not offensive, or for a valuing of relationship in a certain respectful mode. Double listening enables us to inquire into this implicit, preferred story of relationship, rather than stopping at acknowledging the anger and pain. We are often struck in mediations by the fact that on the one hand, people are sitting there talking about things they are upset and angry about, that they find really painful, and yet on the other hand, they are sitting there with some implicit hope that this will make a difference. The hope may not be expressed openly but it is implicit in their presence in the room. Mediators can give this story of hope for something better a chance if they first of all hear this absent but implicit hope and then begin to inquire into the story that it is a part of. This story may often be subordinate to the story of the outrage and pain, but it perhaps speaks to the person’s better intentions in relation to the other party. If given the chance for expression, these better intentions can give rise to a different story in the future.

Ury’s Positive No as an Example of Double Listening

William Ury (2007) has recently pointed to a form of double listening. In his account of “the power of a positive no” in the process of negotiation, he advocates that when people want to say no, they should also identify the underlying principle of what they are saying yes to and couch the no in the context of that yes. As he puts it, “Saying No means, first of all, saying Yes! to yourself and protecting what is important to you” (p. 16). The resulting no is more respectful and less provocative than a no that does not contain an indication of what the negotiator is saying yes to. Not everyone, however, will be in the position to make such a positive no without some assistance. That is where mediators who engage in double listening can help. When they hear a person saying no, they can ask questions to bring forward the implicit yes statement that explains the value positions that are being protected.

Double listening, then, is a practice that consistently hears not just one story but at least two, and often more. It opens up complexity rather than closing it down. When mediators use it to draw out the differences between different stories, then they are in a position to invite people to make choices about which story they want to live from in this context. Making this choice is an exercise in agency and goes a long way toward forgoing positions of helplessness in mediation.

Here is a small example of double listening in action. It comes from a role-played mediation that addressed a conflict between two coworkers in a residential facility for adults with intellectual disabilities.

Lisa: I don’t want to come off as overprotective or overbearing. I guess that’s just my personality. I don’t mean to be like that.

Mediator: So it’s important to you not to come across as overprotective . . .

Lisa: Overprotective or overbearing to the residents, because they are over the age of eighteen and I do want them to develop life skills. It’s just the way we do it.

Mediator: So am I right in understanding that one thing this conflict is doing is that it has you concerned about how you are coming across to Michelle and to the residents. Lisa: Mmhmm, exactly.

Mediator: And maybe it’s distorting, would that be fair, it’s distorting how you come across.

Lisa: I think it is. It is distorting. I don’t want her to think that.

The mediator’s responses here do not hear just Lisa’s sense of displeasure at how she is being represented as overprotective and overbearing by Michelle, her coworker, in the conflict. Nor do they discredit Michelle’s experience of Lisa in those terms. Instead, Lisa’s negative response to how she is represented is also heard in positive terms. The flip side of her rejection of being thought of as overprotective is that she cares about how she comes across in her relationship with Michelle. This is a positive concern, not just a negative expression of anger at what another disputant is saying. Such double listening also opens up grounds for an inquiry into what might be “distorted” by the conflict story, which might be a desire for a working relationship that embodies concern for the other rather than just anger at what the other has said. It is also noticeable that Lisa embraces this version of events with some enthusiasm. Double listening, in our view, often produces an experience of being heard to have and be respected for quite complex nuances of thought and emotion.

Hallmark 4: Build an Externalizing Conversation (The Person Is Not the Problem; The Problem Is the Problem)

In the stress of conflict situations, it is not uncommon for one party to develop a conviction that the other party is in fact the problem, that this person is by nature a bad person in some way. In private moments this first party might also harbor musings about himself. “Am I just too stubborn?” he might wonder.

Or he may feel a degree of ongoing guilt about things he has said or done in the heat of the conflict. The thought that therefore “I am a bad person” may persist. Such convictions are built on essentialist assumptions about the origins of conflict. These assumptions often establish a position from which it is not easy to negotiate in good faith. How can you do a deal with the devil? Or how can you trust your own devilish nature to do such a deal? As people tell conflict stories, they often reinforce their internalized convictions and sink further into them.

Externalizing conversations provide an antidote (White, 2007, p. 9) to these convictions by attributing the pain and suffering to the conflict itself, rather than to the nature of either of the parties. Building externalizing conversations is central to narrative practice. Externalizing is a mode of language use that shifts the relational ground between a person and a conflict. It invites people to see the conflict as a third party (one that has a life of its own) and as leading them along a path (willingly or unwillingly) that may or may not suit them. Externalizing creates a linguistic space in which people can notice the effects of the conflict itself, rather than its causes, and assess whether they like those effects or not. It assists people to step out of positions of blame or shame and enables them to save face by ascribing problems to the conflict itself, rather than to themselves or to the other party. Therefore externalizing language helps people separate from the conflict story and makes room for alternative stories to emerge. Here are some examples of externalizing questions that mediators might ask:

Examples of Questions Using Externalizing Language

• What might we call this thing that we’re up against? Is it an argument? A dispute? A disagreement? A situation? Or what? What would you call it?

• How long has it been around? How has it grown in importance?

• What effect is it having on you?

• How does it get you to feel? To speak? To behave?

• How does it persuade you to think about the other person?

• What is it costing you?

• Does it follow you into all the domains of your life? Work, home, finances, friendships, customer relations, staff morale?

• If it was to keep on getting worse, where might it end up taking you?

• How much power does it have over you?

• Does it interfere with your best intentions? Your hopes for something else? Your preferences for how things could be different?

People often report that externalizing conversations open up new spaces in their thinking. Some report the effect as almost physically tangible. They can feel the weight of something experienced internally as oppressive and painful shifting as they respond. Others talk about the advantages of taking a different perspective from which the conflict itself does not feel so intense and that affords them some reflective space to consider anew what is important to them.

Mapping the Effects of a Conflict

As mediators learn to use externalizing conversations, they often feel awkward for a while, as if the words do not fit easily in their mouths. Some start to get the hang of it and enjoy the first few exhilarating moments of externalizing and then quickly run dry and wonder where to go next. One externalizing utterance does not, of course, make for a conversation. We therefore advise that it is useful to build on an initial foray into externalizing language by moving directly to the process of mapping the effects of the externalized problem. The parties may be invited to give the conflict a name, or a name may arise spontaneously out of the conversation. Or if no name seems to emerge, the conflict can be referred to simply as “it.” Then the mediator can ask, “So what effect is it having on you and on your relationship?” The mediator needs to persist with this inquiry, so that enough of the effects of the conflict are mapped out and noticed.

The effects of the conflict story on the persons embroiled in it can be mapped across a range of domains. There will clearly be emotional effects, which most people can easily talk about, but it is a mistake in narrative mediation to stop with the emotional effects. To do so risks isolating people in their individual emotional responses. There will also be relational effects, which will take different forms according to the context in which the conflict takes place. In family mediation the relational effects influence the communication patterns and trust displayed between family members or in the care of children. In organizations, relational effects may be manifest in the formation of cliques, in dysfunctional meetings that achieve little, in declining membership participation, in complaints from the general public, and so on. In businesses, relational effects may be experienced in problems between departments, in expressions of lowered employee morale, in increased customer dissatisfaction, or in decreased income through sales, and so on. In schools, relational effects may affect student learning opportunities. In hospitals, relational effects may affect the quality of patient care. Mapping the effects of a conflict benefits from being extended beyond the mind of the individual to what is happening in the context of the dispute. As a result, disputants get to experience their own feelings about the dispute as embedded in a wider context. People are commonly surprised by what emerges from this inquiry into a conflict story’s effects and are galvanized into a determination to change things.

Example of an Externalizing Conversation

Here is an example of the development of an externalizing conversation; it also includes some mapping of the effects of the problem.

Mediator: I’m wondering if we can take your problem here and give it a name if that’s OK. Can we call it something like “procedural situation”? Just to give it a name so that we all know what it’s about. If you don’t like that or have a better name then we can think of something else, is that OK?

Participant: “Registration problem” would work with me.

Mediator: OK, great. How has this registration problem made you feel and think in relation to yourself, home, and the university?

Participant: Well, it has made me think about how I approach issues that I have a problem with. I don’t want to appear combative.

Mediator: So that’s important to you and how you want people to see you at work?

Participant: Yes. I am not someone who goes out of her way to get into conflict and this thing makes me appear that way. Or at least I am concerned that it does. But I do also think I have a right to ask those questions and have them answered.

Mediator: Any other effects the registration problem is having, on you or on anyone else?

Participant: My husband is probably tired of me complaining about it at home and I think that within the university it creates a lot of tension between our Enrollment & Financial Aid Department and the program administrators.

Mediator: So, a lot of people are affected by this problem, in your mind. Where do you think this will lead? In other words, if nothing changes and the registration problem persists, what do you think this will do to you and the university and your family?

Participant: I don’t think it will have a very big impact on my family but I think the university could have a lawsuit filed against it for breaching the law. It’s not like we’re some Joe Schmo university, it’s a very reputable university and if people knew the practices that go on, they wouldn’t see it as very reputable anymore.

Mediator: So this registration problem has affected your relationship with your coworkers, your boss, and at home in terms of your husband who has listened to you vent.

Hallmark 5: View the Problem Story as a Restraint (How Is the Problem Holding You Back?)

This hallmark is built on the idea that what people talk about and the way they talk about it construct the world that they live in. This is a basic assumption of social constructionism. In this sense all talk is constructive. It sets the ground for people’s experience. If people talk differently or talk about something different from their usual subjects, they will experience the world differently. It therefore matters very much what people say and how they speak.

If this is true, then consider the first thing that people in mediation often spend their energy talking about. Many approaches to mediation stipulate that the first task of mediation is to define the problem. In response many mediators spend due time asking the parties to define the problem and to expand upon their different perspectives on it. By the time this task has been completed the problem has not only been defined but has grown in proportion in people’s minds. A pile of problem talk has been built up in the middle of the room, and for the rest of the conversation, it dominates what can be talked about. The more people focus on it, the more it grows in significance. In order to deal with the problem people have to climb the mountain of the problem to reach the downhill slope on the other side. The first part of the mediation conversation has, moreover, added height to the mountain that they have to climb.

Accessing a Story of Hope

An alternative approach is to resist the temptation to start by defining the problem. We have experimented sometimes with starting by inviting people to talk about the counterstory to the problem. Later we seek to build on and grow this counterstory into a fully fledged account of clients might go forward in life without the conflict being so dominant. At the start of the conversation, parties have already made a small commitment, however tentative, to this counterstory. They are in the room. They have come along to participate. To do so they must have some hope in mind for something useful to come of the mediation. We can therefore invite them to speak to this hope early on. “What is your hope for what might come from this meeting?” we might ask. Or, “How do you hope we might talk about things here today?” These questions invite people to speak from their most noble selves. Many will respond by speaking about a desire for respectful conversation or for an outcome that honors both parties or some variation on such themes. Some will hear the question as asking them to speak about what Fisher and Ury (1981) have called their own positions with regard to outcome. That is, they will respond not so much from a position of inclusive hope as from a position of “what I want.” In this case we might need to repeat the questions in slightly different words.

The effect of asking about people’s hopes as the first topic of conversation in mediation is that people’s best intentions, their noblest desires, and their ideal values (and not the most painful parts of the conflict) are placed in the forefront of attention. The intention is not to be Pollyannaish about the problem, to focus only on positive thinking or to avoid facing the conflict story, but simply to frame it differently. From this opening we can then move on to ask about the problems that seem to be standing in the way of people’s hopes. The problem story then gets constructed as an obstacle to the forward movement of their most hopeful story, rather than as the mountain to be climbed before they even get to that cherished story. The forward momentum of a hopeful story is established early on, and the conflict story is constructed as a restraint that holds it back. Thinking of a conflict as a restraint is different from thinking of it as a mountain to climb. It orients the conversation differently, and we believe it opens up a different quality of talk that leads in different directions.

Example of Accessing a Story of Hope

Here is an example of a piece of conversation from early in a mediation built on the assumption that it is worth bringing out stories of hope before focusing on the problem story.

Mediator: As you came long here today, I’m imagining that you both had some hopes for the kind of conversation you might have. Do you have anything that you would like to put out about the kind of conversation that might be useful?

Michelle: I was hoping that I would be heard and I’d be given a chance and that Lisa would listen to the ideas that I’m trying to share.

Mediator: [Noting down what she says] So you’d be given a chance and you’d feel listened to.

Michelle: Mmhmm. Lisa: I just hope that she understands that this is the way it’s always been. I’m not picking on her. This is just the way I have always done it. I’ve been here twelve years and this is the way I like to work and I just want her to realize that I’m not picking on her. This is just the way that it has always been.

Mediator: OK. So for you what you would hope for would be that the conversation that we could have here would be one that increased that understanding. So what you’re both expressing here is a desire for a conversation that involves hearing, listening, and understanding.

Lisa and Michelle: [Together] Right.

Mediator: Anything else that you would hope for?

Lisa: Maybe that we would come to some type of agreement.

Mediator: [Noting this down] Come to agreement.

Michelle: I was hoping that we would come to some agreement too.

Mediator: So we’ve got that as another hope for this conversation, that it would bring us to some kind of agreement. And in a minute I’ll ask you, “About what?” But first is there anything else that you hope this conversation will feature?

Lisa: I’d like to resolve this issue and move on.

Mediator: [Noting this down] That you would resolve this issue and move on.

Lisa: Mmm.

Mediator: [To Michelle] Does that fit for you too?

Michelle: Yeah, I just want to have a pleasant work environment.

Mediator: [Noting this down too] A pleasant work environment. That’s what you are hoping for. [To Lisa] How’s that sound to you?

Lisa: It sounds OK.

Mediator: So you’ve got these ideas about what a good conversation would be about. That it would be about hearing, listening, understanding, reaching agreement, resolving issues, and establishing a pleasant working environment. But my understanding is that there have been some problems that have been getting in the way of these things. And I guess it would be a good time now to tell me and to tell each other just what have been the issues that have been getting in the way of the pleasant working environment.

In this exchange, hints of what the problem story is about are slipped into the participants’ responses. But there is also remarkable agreement about what the participants want from the mediation. This is by no means a universal occurrence, but it is also not uncommon. If people come into a mediation feeling a degree of apprehension and tension, the positive emphasis of such an exchange can often help to ease this tension and to free up the conversation that follows. Having noted carefully the words that the participants have used in this exchange, the mediator is also able to return later to elements of this incipient alternative story and to revisit them as contrasting themes to the themes of the conflict story. For example: “You said earlier that you wanted to feel listened to and understood. Does what Michelle is saying now sound a bit more like that?” Or, “You said earlier that you were hoping for the reestablishment of a pleasant working environment from this conversation. Do you think that what Lisa is proposing now would help create that?”

Hallmark 6: Listen for Discursive Positioning (Words Can Break Your Bones Too)

The proverbial saying “Sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you” does not take account of the concept of discourse. Discourse theory demonstrates powerfully how the words people employ, or more accurately the discourses in which they engage, have very powerful material effects on their own and others’ lives. Words do participate in the breaking of bones.

The alternative to an essentialist position is to think in terms of discourse. If conflicts do not originate out of persons’ intrinsic nature, then they must come from what has been internalized into people through the course of living. In other words, they come from the cultural world, or the world inhabited by discourse. As people use discourse they construct utterances that draw on particular discourse patterns. The web of discourse usages that they draw on, even as they engage in conversations that perform a conflict, make up a worldview. This view of the world is a building block for the construction of personal identity and of relationships with others. Sometimes a single sentence, or even a single word, can call into being, if one slices all the way through the discourse in which it is situated, a world complete with story lines, identities, and relationships.

Discursive Positioning