I find that listening to music is most often a solitary experience for me these days. That is far from all bad. I am quite content to take in most of my music alone. When it does occur to me to share a song with someone, particularly if I’ve given it another listen or two thinking of this person, I’ve had the experience of the song changing for me during those listens. By hearing it through their ears, I guess I’m opening up to aspects of the song that hadn’t clicked for me before. Most often, this serves to enrich my appreciation of the song. However, there are certainly instances when I am disappointed or my appreciation wanes after hearing it through someone else’s ears. In every case, it is enlightening.
In conflict, especially longstanding disputes, we tell ourselves, our friends and loved ones, supervisors, police , judges etc.. the STORY that has developed over time. Just like we have our STORY so do the other parties to our conflict. While the facts of the given situation have some place in the STORY, in most cases, what drives the narrative is our emotional experience and ideas like fairness, respect, justice, our identity etc.. These very STORIES that lie at the fulcrum of our conflicts both serve to inhibit and enable resolution to the dispute. We want to be heard and made whole. Yet, our shared STORIES’ arc doesn’t allow for that sort of alignment.
Okay, so here is where we tie up my two little paragraphs together in a cute little bow that reinforces the benefits of what I do as a mediator. In mediation, we bring our STORIES to the table and often hope to convince the other party to adopt our STORY and, if not, bend them to our will or exhaust them or.. or…or…. The trick here is that it is often hard to hear the other party’s STORY as they’d like it to be heard because their STORY comes with all of the baggage and assumptions that accompany most disputes with any significant history. In most cases, this renders the conflict chasm uncrossable. When a person new to the story and absent the baggage (Mediator) hears the STORIES and, in those moments, reflects and highlights those crucial STORY elements and orients the conversation around those elements for everyone in the room, they are sometimes able to hear the STORY anew. And, not unlike hearing the song through someone else’s ears, we better understand both our needs and our fellow disputant’s needs and can begin building a bridge over that chasm and maybe move forward with our lives.