Integrative Mediation
Kelly Reiter is a seasoned mediation professional who recognizes that all legal disputes are human problems as well as legal one. Ms. Reiter is specifically trained to practice integrative mediation, a holistic, creative, and affordable approach to dispute resolution that attends to people's psychological and emotional as well as their legal and financial concerns.
The Integrative Team Approach
We use the "integrative team" model, which means that event though each professional has his or her own area of expertise, each is familiar with the domain of the other other, and all are trained to work together in a seamless, integrated way. By making sure the professionals are "on the same page," this approach maximizes team efficiency and harmony, and helps ensure a smooth, efficient, and cost-effective mediation. the attorney-mediator tends to take primary responsibility for providing legal information, ensuring that all necessary legal issues are addressed, describing possible outcomes if the parties were in court, and keeping the process focused and on-track.
The mediator tend to take primary responsibility for facilitating communication between the parties, providing emotional support, surfacing hidden emotional issues and helping the parties to resolve them, and furnishing useful psychological information (e.g., research regarding child development or the effects of divorce on children). Where the parties believe it would be helpful, they can invite a financial analyst to participate in the mediation. In such cases he or she take primary responsibility for explaining different financial scenarios. In divorce or custody disputes where difficult questions arise regarding children, the parties may elect to bring in a child specialist to the mediation. He or she takes primary responsibility for providing relevant information for assisting in the decision-making process, including interviewing the children.
|
|
What is Integrative Mediation?
Integrative Mediation is a progressive approach to conflict resolution that addresses all aspects of a dispute - legal, financial, psychological, and emotional - maximizing the odds of a more efficient, cost-effective process and the achievement of a deeper, more comprehensive resolution. Our approach typically pairs a lawyer-medator and a mental health professional-mediator who jointly attend to all the needs of the parties in helping them to reach a mutually satisfactory and holistic resolution to their dispute. Other professionals, such as financial experts or child specialists, can be brought into the mediation on an as-needed basis.
How does Integrative Mediation differ from Traditional Mediation and Other Forms of Dispute Resolution?
Unlike the single mediator model, our approach pairs two mediators - one a lawyer, the other a mental health professional - both of whom attend to the emotional, psychological, legal, and financial aspects of a case. Integrative mediation recognizes the synergistic value of the therapist-mediator and the lawyer-mediator working together to co-equally through every phase of the case, addressing all levels of the dispute.
What distinguishes Integrative Mediation from other forms of conflict resolution is its recognition of the central role emotions play in human conflicts, and its holistic approach to disentangling emotional and psychological issues from the legal and financial aspects of a case. Most disputes are a tangled mess of hurt feelings, unconscious motivations, legal positions, and financial concerns. The failure to sort out and address these various components is the chief cause of difficulty and impasse in attempts at resolution. Integrated Mediation takes the position that all legal disputes are human problems as well as legal ones, and recognizes that the best way to resolve disputes is to disentangle their psychological and emotional as well as their legal and financial facets, and to address each on its own terms.
Why Choose Integrative Mediation?
Integrative Mediation has the following advantages over other modalities:
- By Disentangling the emotional from the legal issues, the parties are usually able to reach an overall resolution in a much more efficient, and therefore more cost-effective, manner than completing approaches
- Integrative Mediation encourages a respectful, collaborative, transparent, and mutually-supportive approach to dispute resolution
- With both legal and emotional arenas addressed, the parties can make more fully informed decisions.
- With both legal and emotional dimensions addressed, the parties tend to have a more buy-in, resulting in more comprehensive and more durable agreements
- Parties often report feeling more positive about each other, able to communicate better, better able to handle their conflicts going forward
- In divorce, child custody, and other cases, Integrative Mediation can lay the seeds of emotional closure and forgiveness, and enhance the establishment of new, more respectiful relationships going forward
- Parties can participate in Integrative Mediation by themselves, or with their attorneys present
Choose Integrative Mediation When:
- You want your agreement to be comprehensive and enduring
- You want to resolve your dispute respectfully
- You recognize that emotional issues are inseparable from legal and financial issues
- Where the parties are more interested in more than simply termination of the dispute, or where more than just money is at stake
- Where the parties recognize that strong feelins are involved, where mental illness is present, or where the parties want to use the conflict as an opportunity for deepening their understanding or maintaining and improving future relationships
|
|
|
|