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Narrative Mediation: What Is It?
Below is a summary of the key elements of narrative mediation pertaining to principles, techniques and goals.
Principles
- Narrative mediation views conflict as emerging within people's shared social and cultural fabric rather than emerging from within peoples' inner drives and interests.
- Narrative mediation proposes that people live their lives according to stories. It privileges stories and the meanings within stories over facts and causes.
- Narrative mediation views stories as socially and culturally constructed.
- Narrative mediation focuses on the stories individuals seek to establish coherence for themselves that produce lives, careers, relationships and communities. The mediation task is to assist people to overcome the divisiveness of a conflict by working with the stories in which the conflict is embedded rather than pursuing an objective reality.
- Narrative mediation considers how the impact of wider social forces shape the local and intimate nature of conflict between individuals and groups and proposes that mediation is a means to finding common ground within a conflict.
- Narrative mediation views stories that come to dominate over other stories as complicit in the creation of power in social relations. Working from a narrative perspective places the cultural world, and power relations within it, at the center of the process of mediation rather than as an afterthought on the outside.
- Narrative mediation focuses on the importance of building a story of relationship between disputing parties that is incompatible with the dominance of the conflict.
Techniques
- Narrative mediation employs techniques such as deconstructive questioning, externalizing conversations and restorying practices in order to build a relational context to generate stories of understanding and cooperation
- Narrative mediation uses a technique called deconstruction. The mediator asks questions that invite the participants out of the conflict story and into learning how they have been caught in the web of the dispute. Taken-for-granted aspects of 'how things are' can be viewed from a new perspective. Deconstructive conversation loosens the authority of a dominant way of thinking and opens the door for different ways of thinking.
- Narrative mediation uses externalizing conversations that reverse the common logic in psychology that focuses explanations for events inside the individual person. It emphasizes the relational domain and the world of discourse as an origin for experience. Narrative mediation approaches a conflict as if it were an external object exerting an influence on the parties but not identified solely with either party. Externalizing introduces a way of speaking about the conflict that interrupts blame and guilt and helps parties to dis-identify with the conflict itself. It promotes a clear separation between people and problems and then invites a re-evaluation of their relationship with problems.
Goals
- Narrative mediation addresses three goals: a) the creation of the relational conditions for the growth of an alternative story; b) building a story of relationship that is incompatible with the continuing dominance of the conflict; and c) opening space for people to make discursive shifts.
- Narrative mediation suggests that no story will ever be large enough to include all possible story elements. Any account of events has to be selective and therefore has to leave some things out. A conflict story will most likely omit elements that illustrate cooperation, mutual understanding or respect in favor of elements that spotlight the conflict.
- Narrative mediation focuses on an abundance of unstoried experience out of which can be drawn exceptions to the dominance of a conflict. These experiences are elicited from the parties to fight back against a conflict story. They exist in relational moments that are not predictable from the perspective of the conflict story; in shared understandings, or in small agreements about what has happened. They exist in moments of cooperation or partnership that lie neglected in the shadow of disagreement. They exist in sometimes unspoken desires to address the issues in a fair way or in a willingness to offer compromises or in small acts of generosity.
- Narrative mediation weaves non-conflictual moments into a viable story through connecting them with each other and the development of a counter-story of dialogue, cooperation and agreement. This counter-story can be assembled through finding unique outcomes, marshalling a series of plot elements, naming it as a project, inviting parties to step into its characterizations, and enhancing its significance through identifying its themes.
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