POSTPONED Portland, OR Overcome Challenging Situations in Mediation and Collaborative Law Cases with the Insight Approach

Tenth Annual Conference & Training of the Oregon Association of Collaborative Professionals (OACP)

What is Insight Mediation?

Insight mediation describes conflict as created through the discernment of threat, the decision to defend, and the interactive pattern of decision-making that characterizes it. The role of an Insight mediator is to help parties gain insights into how they are using their minds when they are locked in conflict. This stimulates a reflexivity that can transform conflicts and support parties as they move toward less threatening possibilities for engaging with one another. Insight mediators resolve conflict through the process of learning more about ones self in relation to others; learning is what releases conflicting parties from threat. 

As Cheryl Picard, one of the co-founders of Insight Mediation, states, 

“Conflict emerges when individuals or groups experience threats to their desires and needs, expected patterns of cooperation, or deeply held judgments about social order that lead them to respond defensively. Defend responses feel like threats to what matters to others and they, too, respond defensively thus creating the defend patterns of interaction that sustain the conflict. Through deepening conversations that focus on knowing and valuing, Insight mediators assist the parties to gain insights that produce new understandings and alter defend patterns of interaction so learning and change can occur.”