Mediation to Stay Married – A Technique with Promise

There is a veil of silence that surrounds every married couple. Spouses express loyalty by not complaining about their partner or their marriage. People feel ashamed if other people know there are problems in their marriage. People often feel that they are the only ones with an imperfect marriage. The truth is that every marriage is complex and every marriage is a blend of the imperfect, the perfect, and everything in between.

Often people want to bail out when there are painful problems in a marriage. People in long-term marriages know that if people ended marriages each time the going gets tough, there would be no one left standing in long-term marriages. What should one do during those times of discomfort in a marriage?

Learn to Make Your Marriage Work

People use books and take classes to learn everything – how to kayak, how to use a computer program, how to paint with oils – the list is endless. A marriage is one of the most important aspects of one’s life. And yet when a marriage is suffering and needs to be fixed, people do not tend to seek the knowledge and education that would help put the marriage back on the right track.

Many married couples actively address problems in their marriage by seeking individual and/or marital counseling at strategic times. This is a very good thing and provides tools for communication and change. Books can also help. I highly recommend George Pransky’s The Relationship Handbook for spousal reading, chapter by chapter, in bed before going to sleep. Pransky, a PhD psychologist, describes a positive and workable approach to addressing marital problems.

How Mediation to Stay Married Began

I have worked for many years as a divorce lawyer and divorce mediator, seeing couples who had assumed and decided that their marriages were irreparably broken. Many of these people had taken irrevocable steps towards divorce – moving in with other partners, expressing words of bitterness or taking negative actions that could not be taken back. In many cases I helped the couple resolve their divorce through divorce mediation. I diligently worked to make the divorce as fair and dignified as possible, often enabling the divorcing couple the chance to build a positive, post-divorce relationship (which is especially important if there are children involved.)

If mediation is so helpful to resolve divorces, I began to wonder, why can’t mediation be used to help people stay in marriages? The most destructive aspect that causes many marriages to end is fighting about divergent values. Learning how to handle the inevitable conflict present in marriage is crucial to a marriage’s continued viability. Having seen many of the things that go wrong in marriages through my divorce work, I’ve started to recognize where mediation could have helped the marriage stay on track rather than divert toward an irrevocable path.

Yes, martial counseling can be very effective, but sometimes it does not work for a couple and something else might. That ‘something else’ could be mediation. Why not mediation to stay married, rather than just mediation to get divorced? What an epiphany! It was like when Reddi-whip introduced chocolate whipped cream. After it came out, it was so obvious as a tasty alternative to vanilla. But prior to its appearance in stores it was unimaginable.

I began to write about marriage, divorce and mediation to stay married. I published articles in local publications and on the internet, emphasizing how conflict resolution plays such an important role in keeping a marriage healthy (you can see the articles on my website laurieisrael.com and my website mediationtostaymarried.com). Through my writings and through my network of clients and their friends, people started find me and contact me to help them stay in their marriages.

A Mediator Can Help

Mediators have a special set of skills that can help a couple work through their problems. The first of these is techniques and knowledge as to the many ways to resolve and address disputes. Mediators know how to help people express themselves clearly (or translate an imperfect expression) by “reframing”, so that conflict can be clearly addressed.

Sometimes parties can trade interests, so that a resolution provides more of what each party wants, and is no longer a “zero-sum” game. This can get people out of fixed positional bargaining and can lead to new openings in their interactions.

A mediator can sometimes help people find solutions that they did not think of themselves. It can help a couple to have a third party view their interactions and give them feedback.

Most if not many disputes have issues leading to impasse. Mediators are specialists in breaking through impasse and helping the parties come to resolution. The fact that mediation tends to be short-term and does not go to the depths of interpersonal and family patterns can be helpful in breaking up a logjam of marital anger.

Mediation to Stay Married

Mediation to Stay Married offers couples a safe place to work their way through sustaining their marriage. It’s voluntary, neutral, and non-adversarial, and led by a mediator who will help define areas of conflict for mutual solutions. In a non-threatening and comfortable setting, the mediator will set the stage for frank discussions. Sometimes the financial issues in the marriage are the most important conflicts, and an estate planning attorney, or divorce attorney or financial planner can be brought in to help assist the couple during the mediation process.

Mediation to Stay Married can be used in connection with marital counseling, individual therapy, and outside legal counsel for estate planning and other legal issues. The negotiations and understandings in Mediation to Stay Married may or may not result in a written agreement. This is totally up to the couple. In any event, knowing Mediation to Stay Married is available and trying it to address marital problems can be a step forward in mutual understanding and respect, and may let a marriage live to see a new day.

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Copyright © 2007 Laurie Israel. All rights reserved.

Visit Laurie's websites: laurieisrael.com and mediationtostaymarried.com! Her LifeTwo bio is here and her recent articles are listed here.