Insight Mediation Working Paper #4: What is the Insight Mediator Looking For?
The Insight Mediators have “something specific” in mind when they are being curious about the parties in a conflict, but they don’t know what it is, so they keep themselves open to a wide range of data and a wide range of options. Yet the “something specific” provides the criteria that will tell them when they have found what they’re looking for. Mediators frequently ask questions in order to gain insights for themselves. At other times, they ask questions in order to evoke insights in the speaker. In the example described here ,the Insight Mediator focuses on the listener, and seeks an insight that results in a change in that party’s pattern of listening to the speaker. The “something specific” is an as yet unknown insight that invites a change in one or both of the parties.
Insight Mediation Working Paper #3:
What is distinct about Insight mediation is the recognition of the truncating impact of threat on people’s ability to listen and learn as well as the connection between a person’s sense of threat and their defend-conflict behaviours. The impact of threat on cognitive functioning is to truncate curiosity and focus attention on defending and protecting in ways that are often habitual or rash. Insight mediation is a way for parties to change their conflict behaviours. By attending to process and broadening understanding of possible futures, a mediator facilitates learning conversations by helping the parties become curious.
Insight Mediation Working Paper #2: Exploring Expected Futures
Insight Mediation offers mediators novel tools and strategies for helping parties transform conflicts by gaining and verifying insights about themselves and others. Exploring Expected Futures is used in situations where the mediator notices parties are remaining locked in their defense-attack behaviours leading to an awareness of the need to shift the pattern of the parties’ conversation. What the mediator does not do is stay in the problem-saturated narrative, as this will sustain parties defend patterns of interacting. Nor does the mediator simply ask what parties care about right now. Instead he directs attention to future expectations because this is where the deeper, most pressing cares and threats generating the conflict are to be discovered.
Insight Mediation Working Paper #1: Four Distinguishing Features
Four features distinguish Insight mediation from other approaches:
1. conflict is understood as arising from threats-to-cares;
2. conflicts evoke feelings and narratives that block parties from innovating solutions on their own;
3. conflict is resolved through the transformative learning of insights; and
4. insight mediators help parties by deepening on threats-to-cares.
Counseling: Philosophical Foundations in Brief
The type of change, growth, learning, self-improvement, etc. that counseling aims at results from some transformative experience. The kind of transformation I have in mind is not like adding new items to my inner treasury of information or adding a new skills to my repertoire or improving upon a skill I already have. These may be transformative in their way, but what I have in mind is learning about learning. It is understanding myself as a person who has been making improvements and then first identifying then committing to work with that process. This is growth at a different level because it means taking control of my own development.
Values in Compassionate Communication
Dr. Paul LaChance, a therapist and counsellor, addresses in a very straight-forward fashion the issue of outrage in social communication in the media. He invites us to reflect on the timeless wisdom of distinguishing what we say and how we say it, the “art” of good communication back and forth between speaker and listener. - Msgr John Zenz
From Self-Doubt to Self-Love: Objectivity of Self-Presence
Knowing oneself is difficult and made more so at a psychological level by emotional wounds sustained in the course of growing up and at an intellectual level by philosophical wounds sustained in the course of one’s education.
Flight from Experience 3: Gnosticism
Gnosticism refers to a theory of human happiness and salvation that are achieved by means of the integration of conscious and unconscious drives or habits or the creation of a social order which provides a human solution to the problem of evil. In either case, human beings are themselves the sources of their own healing and happiness. However, to insist that happiness results either from the integration of unconscious drives or in the creation of social orders alone is to reject human experience in favor of some mythic version of experience.
Flight from Experience 2: Challenges to Self-Awareness
Psychologists have found that people are generally not great observers of their own experience. Consequently, mindful self-presence is an increasingly important tool in contemporary psychotherapy. But we should be cautious not to assume that mindfulness alone will lead to happiness. Rather, it is a vital first step that points beyond itself.
Flight from Experience 1: Observation Biases
The orientation of contemporary psychology is primarily to experience. However, biases exist that tempt us to be poor observers of our own experience. Here good observation means heightening conscious awareness of inner experience. In part, this means managing thoughts and expectations about what I should be feeling or what other people might feel or what I am expected to feel.
Fellow-passengers to the grave: Reframing our society
“I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
From ‘Work Mode’ to ‘Home Mode’: Patterns in Conscious Living 2
Striking a happy work-life balance is more that setting a schedule to preserve family time or me time. While this is important it does not go far enough. The bigger challenge is to develop the habits and skills necessary to inhabit two, or perhaps more, different worlds. Understanding each world’s distinct purpose, or what those worlds exist for, can be tremendously helpful.
From ‘Work Mode’ to ‘Home Mode’: Patterns in Conscious Living 1
A healthy work-life balance means being able to move, not simply between two different environments, but two different frames of mind and heart. Discovering the difference in ourselves between work-mode and home-mode makes that shift easier and more peaceful for everyone.