“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”
Questions 6 and 7 of the questionnaire go to a common route cause of conflict, the feeling experienced when you believe that you have not been heard or understood.
Once again, question 6 tests your level of insight and awareness about the other persons’ feelings and needs and asks you to consider their perspectives, their feelings and their needs since an agreement in mediation is only likely to come about if enough mutual feelings are heard and understood (means values) and enough mutual needs and interests are ultimately met (end values).
This goes to the quality of the communication between you in mediation, how you approach reaching a successful outcome and the outcome itself.
As the quote to this section expresses, a successful life led depends on learning from our past experiences and not living in them.
The questions are these;
Q6.What would you like to hear from the other person AND
Q7.What do you think that the other person in mediation would like to hear from you?
We all know what it can feel like to be misunderstood and perhaps judged, based on a misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
We may experience similar feelings when we believe that we are being told what to do.
It can bring out the worst in us because again some key core values are being threatened or attacked, such as the value we place on our independence and independent thought, on being trusted and respected and our general overall sense of fairness or fair play.
This is often when we are at our most defensive, when we play out our learned defensive behaviours, ranging from feeling the need to confront to the need to avoid representing our learned ‘attachment behaviours’.
Most people have an inherent sense and need for fairness, or fair play, based on some common core human values.
Unfortunately, in conflict, these human values, such as kindness, often become lost or submerged in a torrent of emotional reaction and counter reaction, based on assumption and judgement. As a result, behaviour often becomes divorced from our true values and we behave in ways that cannot make us proud, sometimes leading to feels of shame or guilt.
This can trigger feelings of confusion, anger, embarrassment, resentment and isolation, to name a few.
It is very common to hear our clients say to us, ‘he just doesn’t understand me’ or, ‘I don’t feel she would listen so I have given up trying’ or, ‘if I could only make them understand’ or ‘ they are so controlling’ or ‘they always have to have the last word’ or ‘they have never apologised’ etc.
Feeling misunderstood often drives conflict on and on when, in fact, there is no need if people could just take a step back and take a little focused time to empathically listen to each other and be curious to understand how they each feel and why! What are these expressed feelings telling us about what we may each being needing for ourselves and from each other.
Mediation will offer you an opportunity to do this with the help of a skilled mediator and your answers to these two questions will give your mediator insight upon which to base their support interventions.
Mediation offers the opportunity to connect or, indeed, reconnect at an empathic level.
In the next section where we cover conflict narratives.