Mediation For Family Disputes: How To Navigate Difficult Conversations And Reach A Resolution
Whenever you are facing a family dispute, you have to decide between choosing the middle path or getting divorced. It is one of the most significant decisions you will ever make in your life, and it will have when everlasting impact, especially if you both have children.
Since it is never really over for couples with children, they should avoid going into litigation by hiring lawyers, and should instead focus on conflict resolution through a peaceful method like mediation.
However, since many couples go right into litigation without considering mediation, they ultimately end up wasting a lot of their precious time, and resources. The delayed litigation process also makes them frustrated, and they might even become desperate as time passes.
Even if you are getting divorced, you do not deserve to entangle yourself in the endless loop of court hearings and useless trials. That is because you have alternative dispute resolution methods in your hands. These methods can save you a lot of time and money, and can also result in a peaceful resolution of conflicts with your loved ones.
Family Mediation
Family mediation is a part of alternative dispute resolution. In this process, our neutral third party, or mediator helps start discussions between the disputed family members and helps them find a peaceful solution to their family conflicts.
Even if a couple is getting divorced, they can still go into mediation as it will help them determine how to divide their assets, what to do about child support, and discuss other important matters like child custody.
With the help of a mediator, family members can start discussing their issues with one another, and understand each other’s point of view before making any life-changing decisions. With the help of mediation, family members can discuss the areas in which they are ready to compromise.
At the end of the family mediation session, the mediator helps the family members find dispute resolution points that are mutually beneficial to everyone, and are effective towards ending the dispute forever.
The Role Of The Mediator
A mediator does not work as a lawyer, and never supports a single party in a conflict. Their role is just like a judge but involves much more flexibility, and the mediator does not have the same power as a judge either. The mediator can never dictate the outcome of a conflict, but rather help the disputed parties settle their dispute by highlighting the important points and potential compromise areas. In the case of mediation, the power of making a decision lies with the disputed parties rather than with the mediator.
The main role of a mediator in the mediation process is to help the parties find a common middle ground and remove any obstacles which might hinder the progress of the mediation process.
To help them, the mediator will highlight the concerns of both parties to one another. They do this to promote communication and build some understanding between the disputed parties.
Before a final solution can be deducted, the mediator provides both parties with a fair chance to express their concerns. This helps make the negotiation two-sided and ensures that a mutually beneficial solution is reached between the parties.
Why Choose Mediation In Family Disputes?
The Couple Makes The Decisions
In litigation and arbitration, the couple has to give away their decision-making power to a judge or arbitrator. On the other hand, the mediation process gives you the complete power of making the final decision, and the mediator is just a neutral third party involved in the process to ensure that the rights of both parties are saved.
Since the decision-making power in mediation lies with the disputed parties and not with the third party, they have the power to make the most important decisions of their life rather than trusting a third party to make the decisions for them.
Cost-Effective
Whenever the couple goes into litigation, they have to pay the lawyer fees, and court fees, and go through a long process of pursuing their case. This causes them to waste a lot of money, and the decision might be delayed by months or even years.
This is why couples should always choose mediation, as this helps them save a lot of money. According to careful consideration, mediation is around 50% cheaper as compared to litigation.
Peace Of Mind
Mediation is used to promote understanding and corporation between the disputed couple. This does not necessarily mean that mediation tries to keep the couple in their toxic relationship. But rather, mediation tries to fix most of the damages caused by that relationship and helps the disputed couple keep the doors of communication open in the future.
On the other hand, litigation pushes the couple to prove each other wrong, and this makes constructive communication almost impossible.
Fast Process
Even in the most complex of family disputes, mediation only takes a few months to fix the problem and end the dispute. This is way faster than litigation, which takes years to conclude a single case.
Choosing Between Mediation And Settlement Meetings
While mediation provides great help for many people, some lawyers think that settlement meetings are better than mediation, as settlement is the ultimate goal of mediation. So, for them, settlement meetings make the mediation process useless and ineffective.
However, this concept does not apply to family mediation. That is because family mediation is a very different form of mediation, and differs from settlement meetings by a huge margin.
In settlement meetings, the lawyers act as a shuttle between the parties, and the disputed parties never sit in front of one another in the same room. The parties do not make any form of direct contact.
On the other hand, family mediation sessions include the participation of both parties, usually a couple in the presence of a mediator. They face each other and discuss the
important points of their disputes. So, family mediation is way better than settlement meetings.
