“Dilip in cooperation with Alexia Georgakopoulos, Ph.D….written for the ICRC Blog”
Family dispute mediators may find the application of Jayne Docherty’s concept defined in her book, Strategic Negotiation: Negotiating During Turbulent Times (2005) beneficial in helping couples negotiating post-divorce relationships for caring for their children. In this book, she illustrates the application of her concept in helping a couple that has decided to divorce after 24 years of marriage. This couple, instead of using a litigious approach involving attorneys, is negotiating their process on their own for cooperatively making parental decisions for caring for their 16 year old daughter. Mediators may find the following highlights of Docherty’s concepts useful in assisting their clients to use their self-determination to make collaborative partnership decisions and commitments focused on the future of their children.
Negotiations in the Environment of Context Change – From Stable to Unstable
The decision to divorce changes the context of the couple’s relationship from a stable to an unstable setting. This change of the relationship requires the couple to negotiate with unclear negotiating rules and experience a negotiating context with disputed rules of behavior, competing norms of fairness, and uncertainty about their shared future as it relates to their children.
Assistance to Couples for Negotiating During the Unstable Conditions Caused by Divorce
By managing the turmoil in the context and the negotiating interactions, Mediators can use Docherty’s concept of negotiations in an unstable context to assist parties to focus on both immediate problems and long-term relationships, working towards creating and sustaining the will to support the negotiating process and the agreement reached by mutual self-determination. As divorce reflects conditions of an unstable relationship, the mediator would need to help the couple accept the reality that each party would have to recognize the other party as a legitimate negotiating partner. The mediator would need to help the parties to direct their energy toward creating conditions for cooperative negotiations of their issues and to develop a sense of a shared world and some agreement regarding the understanding of the reality of life. The mediator can assist parties to agree on the negotiating context that is most relevant to their primary issues, their tacit rules, norms and expectations. The mediator needs to acknowledge that the divorcing couples will find that “reality is not negotiated rationally, and they will not want to bargain their sense of their lives”.
Assisting Couples to Self-Evaluate Their Preparedness for Negotiating a Shared Vision
For assisting divorcing couples negotiating co-parenting issues, the mediator can help parties to check their preparedness for negotiating a shared vision and the context of their shared realties and meanings by self-evaluating themselves against the following checklist:
1) Do they agree that negotiation facilitated through mediation is the best way to resolve their conflict?
2) Do they recognize and accept each other as a legitimate negotiating partner?
3) Are they committed to working together towards a shared vision of their future relationship as co-parents of their children?
4) Can they agree to standards of fairness to resolve their disagreements?
5) Can they agree on the meaning-making realties they see for the future of their children?
Mediator’s Support to Couples’ Strategic Negotiations during Turbulent Times of Divorce
The mediator can help the parties to realize that the reality of the changing nature of their relationship is what has brought them to the negotiating table. Within the framework of the changing relationship, the mediator can help the couples to recognize that as their relationship is in transition, they need to reshape the story of their marriage to work toward a shared vision of their future relationship as co-parents, and understand that unhooking of their identities from their marriage may create instability and disagreements over the following areas:
1) Issue Identification – What is being negotiated and what is negotiable?
2) Acceptable Behavior – What norms of behavior will govern the negotiation process?
3) Standards of Fairness – What standards of fairness will be used to resolve disagreements over issues?
4) Use of Outside Parties – What outside parties will be used to assist in resolution of any impasse in the negotiation?
In addition to helping the couple with the above areas, the mediator needs to help the couple avoid the possibility of blaming each other as being unreasonable, inaccurate or overly emotional by assisting the couple to get unstuck from their previous identities and the retelling of their stories. The mediator can facilitate the couple’s use of both instrumental language (the language of logic) and relational language (the language to express connection) for retelling their stories to provide a context for the meaning-making realties of their lives and for creating and sustaining a relationship to agree on the co-parenting issues and problems. The mediator can use narrative mediation techniques to assist the couple in telling the stories about who they are and who they would be in relation to each other as co-parents of their children.
Assisting Parties to Negotiate Strategically
The mediator can help each party to self-determine the scope and the limitation of negotiations in the context of the changed environment and the instability of their relationship and self-identify, using the following considerations:
1) What personal relationships and co-parenting issues are they working out through some legal issues of their divorce?
2) Do they prefer face-to face communication to address the redefining of their personal lives after their divorce?
3) How will they manage negotiations of the legal, financial, and emotional/relational issues of co-parenting?
In this manner the mediator can transform the divorcing couple from being stuck in negotiating the co-parenting issues from the perspectives of the past relationship to negotiating on the basis of their shared vision for the future of their children.
Reference
Docherty, J. S. (2005). The little book of strategic negotiations: Negotiating during turbulent times. Intercourse, PA: Good Books
