7 Moving clients towards new views of a situation
In the next activity you’ll shift attention from the manipulation of interpersonal meaning to the question of how different ways of viewing the world are represented. In mediation, the ‘world’ in question is made up of the past and present relationships between the parties, their perceptions of the other and the stories that both have to tell about the other. One of the tasks of the mediator is to encourage the parties to slightly change their view of the situation and of the other person. In the next activity you’ll look at how different utterances may act to provide for different ways of looking at, and thinking about, a particular area of human activity.
Activity 5 Establishing meanings
Compare in more detail the following pairs of utterances, which are contrasted by Katherine Graham in the interview. The first represents two alternative wordings that a mediator could use. The second represents a client’s wording and a suggested reformulation by the mediator. What do you notice about the types of words used and the differences between the two utterances in each case?
- Pair 1
- A ‘You seem distracted.’
- B ‘I notice that you’re rocking on your chair and looking out of the window.’
- Pair 2
- A ‘He’s an absolute bully, if he moves the papers on my desk one more time I’m going to make a complaint.’
- B ‘It sounds as though your desk is a very private space for you and you have a really strong reaction when Barry goes up, touches things on your desk and for you, [you know] you feel that that’s bullying.’
Discussion
Pair 1: It’s clear that in her alternative phrasing in utterance B, Katherine is using present tense verbs which describe what the client is doing at the time (‘are rocking, [are] looking’). These choices reflect Katherine’s desire to work with ‘what’s happening in the room at the time’. This concern with the ‘here and now’ is also reflected in the use of description which refers to the physical space, ‘on your chair, out of the window’. The mediator also therefore avoids appearing to make judgements or to attribute qualities to others in the room (as in utterance A), helping to maintain a stance of neutrality – what Katherine calls ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘evaluative’ language. Another thing she does in her reformulation is to use ‘I notice’ at the start of the utterance to clearly represent her construction of the situation as a personal impression (perhaps even more than the use of ‘seem’ in the first example).
Pair 2: Here utterance B makes a similar use of a mental process (‘sounds as though’) to present what follows as a subjective impression, and so contributing to an open stance on the part of the mediator, inviting a response. Another interesting feature to note here is the repetition of the phrase ‘for you’. This arguably emphasises the subjective nature of the client’s reaction to Barry’s behaviour. At the same time the wording ‘when Barry goes up, touches things on your desk’ represents Barry’s behaviour in very concrete terms, thus lending credibility to the person’s experience. This contrasts with the bare assertion about Barry’s attributes: ‘He’s an absolute bully.’