Mending Fences
Mending Fences
GUEST: Dr. Susan Boardman on Strengthening Relationships with Couples Mediation
In this episode, Jen and Patrice explore couples' mediation with Dr. Susan Boardman. Unlike divorce mediation, couples' mediation is intended to strengthen relationship dynamics for couples who wish to remain married. Susan's wisdom, drawn from years of experience, highlights mediation as an invaluable tool as a proactive strategy for enhancing dialogue and understanding between partners. The talk delves into the psychology behind written agreements and how they lay the groundwork for positive behavioral shifts. If you're interested in the subtleties of how mediation can fortify a bond, you won't want to miss these insights.
Learn more at: https://couplesmediation.org
Welcome to Mending Fences, a podcast about effective ways to communicate and live with differences. I'm Patrice Bremner.
Speaker 2:And I'm Jen Hawthorne. We're both family law mediators and collaborative law attorneys, but our conversations go well beyond family law. We explore the personal, interpersonal, legal and cultural impacts of conflict. We explore the personal, interpersonal, legal and cultural impact of conflict. Hi, and welcome back to Mending Fences. I'm Jen Hawthorne, kelsey, and I'm joined today by Patrice Brimner, as always. Hi, patrice, hi Jen, and today we have a special guest joining us. We're joined by Dr Susan Boardman, who's here to talk about couples mediation, which we'll get into this in a lot more depth once we start talking. But it's an option for using mediation to preserve an ongoing relationship instead of just using it at the end of a relationship. So welcome, susan, thanks, thanks for having me Great. Would you like to tell people a little bit about what you do and how you got into this field of couples mediation?
Speaker 3:Sure, I've been a mediator for many years. I'm a social psychologist and an academic who's kind of retired from this at that point, but I've been doing mediation for six years. I did divorce mediation with an attorney colleague and I found it interesting that many people were saying if only we'd been able to talk like this before, we might not be here. And it got me very interested in communication per se and mediation and perhaps trying to reach people in their relationships a little bit earlier, before they get to that fork in the road. And so I started looking at doing what's now called couples mediation used to be called marital mediation, and so that's what I specialize in right now.
Speaker 2:I think that's fantastic. Patrice and I do often talk about how we have clients who say things like maybe if we had tried this earlier it would have saved our marriage and we wouldn't be talking about divorce anymore, and things of that nature. So I think this is a wonderful field to develop. Susan, do you want to explain to our listeners a little bit more about how couples mediation kind of works and who can benefit from this?
Speaker 3:Sure, Couples mediation is really a series of guided negotiations with a neutral third-party mediator who helps the couple try and construct immediate solutions to problems or areas of friction in their relationship and it frequently results in a written kind of what's called memorandum of understanding or agreement.
Speaker 3:I mean in my case it's not a legally binding thing at all I'm not an attorney but it is very powerful psychologically to have things written down. People find it very helpful and I think it really benefits people to have them in a kind of protected space through mediation where they can be helped to communicate with their partner in a more constructive way and really try and come to some agreement, that is, a mediated agreement of what they want to see going forward. I think it's different from couples therapy in the sense that couples therapy frequently looks at established patterns of behavior and often looks in the past, to what happened and how people have been interacting. Couples mediation goes from where we are now to where do you want to be. It gives couples a chance to try and say and how do we want this to look going?
Speaker 1:forward. I really like that. I mean, and it sounds like even in divorce mediation, I think a lot of us use that idea of you know moving forward, what will this look like? But you're working with folks before they've reached that point of needing to end a relationship. So how would people know if they're good candidates for this?
Speaker 3:Well, I think you're a good candidate if you would like to at least try to work on the relationship for a period of time, If you could come to an agreement with your partner. We're going to take six months, say, to just work on the relationship or not. Take yourself out of the headspace of separating and, oh my God, we're going this way and that way but just to really focus on, okay, what do we want to see happen? How can we behaviorally change things to reduce areas of friction and see how that feels. Going forward and giving yourselves a little time to live with what you've come to an agreement about, and oftentimes that changes.
Speaker 3:You might have follow-up sessions, but it's really powerful in the sense most people are in a relationship with someone and just through kind of osmosis, they learn the behavioral rules of their relationship. And you do this and I do that, and this is your job and this is my job. But it's very rare for people to sit down and directly negotiate with another person. This is how I think this would work best and that's what couples mediation gives the couple a chance to do.
Speaker 2:So when people end up with this MOU or some sort of written agreement coming out of couples mediation, does it have, like in my head because of what I do for work and I'm so focused on, when people are splitting apart and creating these legal documents around? Things like parenting document usually have like rules for communication and also sort of actual you know? You just said you know, sort of you know, what are you going to do. What am I going to do? Like in my head, what came to mind is are you talking about like who's taking out the trash? Where is mail going in the house? How are they organizing things? From a really practical perspective, how granular do you get in helping them sort through what is causing an issue in their marriage or in their relationship?
Speaker 3:That is very client-driven and, yes, the devil's in the details. So it depends on whether X behavior is causing friction and anger and anxiety in the couple that's the source of conflict. So we want to get at that level, that concrete level, so that it gives people a template that they follow, these rules of behavior that they've agreed on, maybe to change or in some way to help accommodate each other. And, yes, so, like I said, the more detailed the better in the agreement.
Speaker 1:And it's the participants themselves who are developing all of the solutions.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean as a mediator, I obviously can help, maybe make they want a suggestion I can give it. But I don't like to do that. I think the couples know their problems, their issues, their concerns, their frustrations. They know the other party much better than I could ever know them and so they can get very creative in if you've given them a space to come up with their own solutions and you know, test drive it and ask how does this work? Do you think that's going to work? It's not something that's engraved in stone, it's a. I like to think of it as creating a living document, a living thing that they like. As I said, oftentimes I have people come back just to say, well, this didn't work, well, let's try that, or just little tweaks to it, because people grow and change. That's why people end up at the fork in the road, because they grow and change and they typically do not directly address the fact that people grow and change.
Speaker 1:And I think it's also people grow and change and also circumstances change, like life comes at a couple and they maybe haven't foreseen some of the things that they're suddenly could suddenly be dealing with as a couple and they may not have known. You know, we have really different ideas about how this or that should go and so, but it sounds like what you offer can be very empowering and so that a couple could feel more empowered in their partnership. Do you see that?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I've heard it over and over again about how, in fact, one couple I was working with it was the dynamic was very destructive between the husband and the wife, and once we had some discussions about the issues that were going on and came up with that these behaviors that you were engaged in before and they kind of feed off of each other, that's, we're not doing that anymore and they agree with ways that they would handle that conflict more constructively. It felt really freed up. It's very empowering to people and that's part of the reason I love doing this work.
Speaker 1:And as you do, this have you found in your work, so it sounds like there's some people who'd be really good candidates. Are there things that you know might be barriers to being successful in this?
Speaker 3:Yes, From experience, couples mediation does not work well when there is not much intact communication left between the couple so that they have difficulty talking to each other. If there is some kind of psychological or physical abuse, substance abuse, kind of cognitive disorder that might prevent rational decision-making after we've worked through emotions, then it typically doesn't work well.
Speaker 1:And do people often or sometimes maybe also have access to individual therapists while they're doing this work, to kind of support them as individuals?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I mean, I do not want to imply that couples mediation is something in place of couples therapy. Both interventions are aimed at helping relationships, but they come at it from very different angles, using different methodologies. Did suggest that one of the couple work with an individual therapist. I don't usually recommend couples therapy on top of couples mediation, but as support as you're saying, patrice, for something. They work well in conjunction.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think this sounds fantastic and it's not something I've been really aware of or knowledgeable about. So I'm really just so happy to have you on today because I know, jen, you must get the same kind of calls that I do People who start exploring divorce and they don't really want to. They want to know what their other options are. But maybe for them they've tried some couples counseling and it hasn't produced the result they were looking for. And we've talked in the past we had a guest on who was a discernment counselor that would help people in a limited way, make a kind of binary decision divorce or not. But this is yet another option that we can offer people to explore before making that decision.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're completely correct. We both get those calls all the time I think all divorce practitioners do of folks who just know that they're not happy but haven't quite figured out that next step yet. And I agree that marital mediation might be a great place to start, and I think it is sort of my hope that more of us who do divorce mediation end up trained in marital mediation so that we can help folks navigate that edge of like well, what do they want to do? From my perspective and Susan, please correct me if I'm not thinking of this correctly but one of the first things we're talking about in divorce mediation is well, what are your goals, what are your interests, what are you hoping to accomplish? And I feel like, if one of them is like I'm not sure, but I want a pathway forward, if you have a skillset in both, you can sort of say, okay, well, let's talk about this more and figure out what the best fit, or send them to discernment counselors first and then figure out the right path.
Speaker 3:Yes, right, I mean, I think it is. It does provide another, more focused potential intervention or help. I mean, I think that's one of the things I mentioned. I do research and the research was showing that 80 to 100% of people I spoke with who were practitioners doing couples mediation said that their people came to them from couples therapy. So there's clearly not they weren't in those instances getting something that they needed and I think many of us talk about it's the difference with mediation as opposed to therapy.
Speaker 3:Mediation is much more concrete and again ending up in this written document that gives people sort of direction and guidance and when you're kind of living in ambivalence and a kind of threatening ambivalence at that, it is incredibly helpful and centering to have someone help you craft some sense of guidance or a path forward that at least you can try. I'm not making this sound or don't want to make it sound like it's the end of everything or that it's going to be a solution to everything, but I'm finding that it can be incredibly powerful help to a number of people and so I'm very excited to be able to talk about it and try and get it more well known.
Speaker 1:Well, I was just wondering, like, if people are interested upon hearing this about learning more about you or how to work with you, I'm curious do you do this work in person? Do you do this work online? So where are you and how do people, how do people work with you?
Speaker 3:The answer to Patrice is yes to both. I used to do it in person, obviously, as many of us did before COVID, and now I do a lot of work online, as many of us do, so that's helpful geographically that it's opening up to a bigger group, redone, my website, which is now working. It's couplesmediationorg all run together, so that is a website that will explain sort of more about my background, my approach, a lot of frequently asked questions about what it is and what it isn't and what you can expect and people can contact me. I'm happy to talk with anyone who's interested in trying to pursue this or just get more information about it.
Speaker 2:I feel sort of obliged to add this for any of the professionals listening If you're interested in helping to develop this field of couples mediation, feel free to join the APFM Academy of Family Professional Mediators and Academy of Professional Family Mediators. I said that backwards those acronyms always get me when Susan is co-chairing a group that is really a group, a large group of about 60 people who are interested in developing couples mediation at a more detailed level and working on all different aspects of it, and we'd love to have you there as well. So I think I'm going to hold my question that I was going to ask before when Patrice and I asked at the same time for another conversation. Susan, because this was great. We'd love to have you back if you're interested in coming back again sometime.
Speaker 3:Oh, I'd be delighted. I really enjoyed it and I could talk about this stuff all day.
Speaker 2:So could we.
Speaker 3:Thank you Thanks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for joining us, and we're going to keep talking.
Speaker 3:Okay, I look forward to it. Thanks for having me again.