I’ve just come back from some time away from the mediation seat. I often find when things slow down a little I am able to be more reflective. My first week back has been busy as expected but it’s also felt heavy. Interestingly and paradoxically I’ve felt lighter from a break but perhaps as a result of this, I’ve noticed more acutely the pain my clients have been feeling. After a particularly difficult day, I came across a song I’d never heard of. The song was called ‘About today’ by The National.
The song delivers a lot of emotional impact but it was the lyrics that struck me.
‘You were far away.
And I.
Didn’t ask you ‘Why?’
What could I say?
I was far away.
You just walked away. And I just watched you.
What could I say?
How close am I to losing you?’
The separating couples I have been privileged to help over my 27 years rarely make a decision to end their relationship in haste. At the end, there is often not one particular reason why they decide that the time has come to separate. It’s a decision made as a result of years of unresolved conflict and communication breaking down. It’s the person who has stopped talking about their day or the other who has stopped asking.
At one point, they decide they want something different rather than accepting a relationship that no longer fulfils them and one does often ‘walk away.’
Couples come and see me for mediation often at a place where they cannot see eye to eye. They are hurt, angry, bitter but sometimes its also a soft pain that sits underneath the surface of the more obvious and louder emotions that strikes me. The regret that things couldn’t be different and guilt for the impact separation has on the family as a whole.
I’ve since learnt a little more about the song which was featured in a film called ‘Warrior.’ I haven’t watched the film but from what I understand it’s a powerful film about breakdown, then reconciliation. No wonder it hit me when I heard it as my day to day work focuses on this in a sense. Not a reconciliation in the sense of couples getting back together (although sometimes they do) but more a reconciliation of feelings and finding something mutually acceptable to be able to reconcile where they are in their lives and find hope for a future, which looks different from what they hoped it might be.
‘Many conflicts with people you love go unresolved and fade into a quiet, bitter bit of stone and grow over with moss.’ The film ‘Warrior’ shares its own brutal take on the pain of years of hardened conflict, without resolution. In the film two brothers step into a cage to ‘fight.’ Metaphorically, my client step into their own cage in a brave attempt to resolve their conflict. There isn’t a fight but emotionally there is an internal battle which needs to be resolved. Past hurt comes to the surface, conversations which were never resolved over the years and differing perspectives (legal, emotional and moral) all come to the table and we sit together and work through this.
For me as a mediator, I know I cannot change anything that has already happened but I step into every mediation with hope that I can help couples navigate a way forward in the present. Wherever you are at with your journey, maybe you can also find some sense of hope that there is a way forward. Hardened, unresolved conflict causes pain and that affects you physically and emotionally in all aspects of your life. We cannot always resolve every aspect of conflict but we air it and in doing so at the very least it gives space to reconcile how you feel about that conflict and find the ability to let go what doesn’t serve you and focus on what does.
Mediation provides a safe space for this, with a mediator who is emotionally in tune to the devastation when life does not go as planned with experience of the legal aspects of the journey too.
Please do get in touch with me if you would like to find out more about how mediation can help.
