Over the years, the villagers grew proud of their expanding rescue efforts which included the new hospital at the river’s edge, a flotilla of rescue boats, and highly trained personnel ready at a moment’s notice to pull victims from the water.  It cost the village a great deal of money, yet what else could they do when so many lives were at stake.

Ardell wisely notes that few people ever questioned what might be happening upstream that was causing this steady increase of victims.  There was just so much to do with the rescue effortst that no one had the time to investigate the village called Upstream.

This fable guides our belief that much of the criminal justice system in the United States and around the world operates like the village of Downstream. Vast amounts of time and money are invested in helping the victims of every imaginable tragedy and crime.  Yet, most people, even if they are interested in what is causing these crimes and tragedies, do not have the resources to stop the deluge upstream.

Mediation is an upstream endeavor that seeks to help victims at the earliest point possible in any dispute. And, unlike many other forms of conflict resolution, it can help stop escalation of the dispute before the number of casualties overwhelm the fabric of any one society. We would love to hear what ideas you have about ways mediation might provide upstream interventions.

Map of Danube Delta

Dance Troupe

Brian at the Black Sea

Shauna at the Black Sea

Sulina Harbor

We’re now in Sulina, Romania, at the Casa Sibiana, for 2 days as guests of Liana, the main Ovidius University sponsor of our trip/training, and her retinue of friends and colleagues. On Saturday, we drove north from Constanta toward the Danube Delta region over hilly coastal farm region. Then, at Tulcea, a small city on one of the lower Danube channels, we boarded a river tour boat (Russian made) and rode about an hour east to the very end of the middle channel to Sulina, the last town before this channel empties into the Black Sea.  This area is called the Danube Delta, Romania, a fascinating place and one of the world’s greatest wetlands.

The town of Sulina is very traditional and charming, with a beautiful, old Orthodox church, a weathered lighthouse, and fishermen dotting the small lagoon. The town is a summer fishing and boating destination for Romanians, but isn’t very crowded at this time of year. After a late lunch of delicious fish stew and bread, we walked around the old multi-religion graveyard where many sea-faring nationalities are represented, including British. We continued our walk about 1 kilometer east, to the end of land and a wind-swept beach on the Black Sea, where we beach-combed briefly and looked up the coast to see the southern tip of Ukraine across the Bay!

Later that day, we came back to the Casa, and had a late dinner of tasty fish dishes, local sausage, cheeses, and bread.  After dinner, a local Greek/Macedonian dance troupe entertained us with traditional Romanian dances and music.  It was a wonderful day and we thank our hosts for showing us such a lovely area of their beautiful country land.

~Brian Luther and Shauna Ries from Romania

 Harter: I’m glad you asked that question, because my involvement in our collaborative project has had a profound impact on me, personally.  I see four such arenas.  First, it has enhanced my own commitment to being an authentic self in my daily interactions with others. Second, and relatedly, it has sensitized me to the importance of acknowledging my emotions, first to myself, and then in my interpersonal relationships where emotions must be expressed in a constructive manner, in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than compromising it negatively.  This, at times in my life, has been a challenge. Third, I have always been a proponent of self-determination and feel that my own life and career bear that out. The notion of empowerment in the inAccord model has, therefore, been particularly appealing.  Seeing its power in the model, as it applied to mediation, has strengthened my resolve to appreciate the importance of empowerment in my own life.  Furthermore, as a professor, it is quality that I hope to encourage and nurture in my students.  Fourth, my new knowledge about specific skills that can foster authenticity and can improve my own interpersonal negotiation abilities has been invaluable.  I have become better at reflecting as well as reframing issues that may be problematic, and clearly notice the positive benefits of these skills in my own interpersonal interactions.  Finally, enacting these various principles has definitely had a major impact on my own enhanced ability to live and love.

Harter:  Most definitely!  There is a clear convergence between the inAccord Model’s new focus on identifying both positive and negative emotions and two present trends in the field of Psychology.  The first is the acknowledgement that positive emotions play an important role in people’s lives, that they have a function.  For years, the field was dominated by an inordinate emphasis on emphasis on negative emotions, for example, fear, anger, and depression.  These affects were highlighted because they were assumed to be the major players on the stage of  one’s psychological life, they were touted as highly functional, from an evolutionary perspective (for example, the fight or flight reaction to fear, as emphasized by Charles Darwin and later by William James).  Positive emotions were given short shrift, they were viewed as relatively non-functional and, as a result, were simply not studied.  Recent work counters this belief and identifies several functions that are critical to the inAccord Model.  For example, Frederickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions makes the claim that positive affects serve to widen the array of thoughts and actions available to the individual, they produce more flexible tendencies and solutions to life’s challenges. As a result of a broadened mind set, one has access to more personal coping resources and is more receptive or open to new information that promotes creativity.  These capacities, in turn, enhance the likelihood of success in the future.  The second building function first requires broadening, toward the goal of providing a source of agency or self-determination, akin to the concept of empowerment in the inAccord model. It spurs one toward the creation of solutions.  As a result, this new trend dovetails very nicely with the new focus on positive emotions in the inAccord model, granting them legitimacy as powerful forces in resolving conflict. Each of these functions are front and center, in the inAccord Model.

The second recent trend has been the identification of a new subfield in psychology, labeled Positive Psychology.  Martin Seligman spearheading this movement, as its founder.  Seligman and followers decried the over-emphasis on negativity within the field at large, urging psychologists to shift their focus to positive topics such as optimism, gratitude, serenity, hope, precisely those psychological commodities that have found their way into the inAccord model.

Beyond the traditional emphasis on negative emotions, the field has historicall been consumed by negative diagnostic labels are pejorative, demeaning and stigmatizing individuals who come to therapy.  The inAccord model as applied to mediation offers an alternative to the potentially negative effects of some therapies.  Individuals are not viewed as helpless, pathological creatures with deep-seated problems that are resistant to change.  Mediation offers an alternative that provides a hopeful path to conflict resolution, one that encourages self-determination, as individuals are empowered to take active role in solving one’s own problems, and in so doing, are granted a sense of dignity.  Empowerment has much in common with another relatively new concept in the field of psychology, the concept of self-efficacy, first introduced by Albert Bandura.  Self-efficacy refers to the belief that the person has the power to personally make positive goals actually happen in his/her life.

Harter: That is a critical question.  The answer is at the heart of another theme that has dominated my own thinking and research.  People must first learn to get in touch with their emotions that are powerful forces in their lives, some of which can be destructive, some of which can be constructive.  Disputants must first be encouraged to acknowledge their own emotional states, as realistically as possible.  Mediators must be trained to assist disputants in labeling and expressing their feelings rather than moving too quickly to cognitive skill development.  Thus, the design and inclusion, in our collaborative research, of a self-report survey to enquire about disputants’ perceptions of their own emotion is critical, as a first step.  As you have described, often the initial emotions are intense and not always manageable.  More, your own contribution of addressing two categories of emotions, those that are empowering as well as those that are disempowering is a major contribution of this work.  A major contribution of your own thinking has been to illuminate the notion of a match or a mismatch between disputant emotions, where a match means that both disputants report the same type of emotions, that is, both indicate that they experience either empowering emotions or disempowering emotions.  In contrast, a mismatch is observed when one party reports empowering emotions but the other party reports disempowering emotions.  You have developed a very convincing case that the issue of a match versus a mismatch has profound implications for the intervention approach that a mediator selects.  This focus on emotions represents a very creative contribution to the field of mediation.

Harter: Quite simply, they are totally and directly antithetical.  The inAccord model emphasizes transparency, akin to authenticity as I discussed earlier.  Toward this goal, the inAccord model identifies specific skills to encourage disputants to get in touch with their true feelings, and to do so with clarity.  Inflated self-enhancement has no place in this model, given that it compromises those types of authentic interpersonal interactions necessary if disputants are to actively resolve the conflict.  But before one can move to the acquisition of new skill sets, many of which are cognitively based, there is some groundwork that needs to be laid.

Harter: I describe many of these barriers to authenticity in my recent 2012 book entitled The development of the self: Developmental and sociocultural foundations published by the Guilford Press. The contemporary self is a cause for concern.  Social psychologists studying adults have identified numerous self-enhancement strategies, self-serving biases, unrealistic or inaccurate self-perceptions, as well as narcissistic tendencies that compromise the authenticity of the self and, in the process, dilute the quality of one’s interpersonal relationships.  In my book, I trace the developmental origins of these pernicious paths to self-deception, many of which are actively supported by our socialization practices.  For example, there has been a startling national initiative to raise the self-esteem of our nation’s children and adolescents in recent years, with our schools at the hub of this movement, which began in California a number of years ago.  Critics of this craze have argued that children’s sense of self-esteem and competencies are being inflated unrealistically, rather than focusing on the acquisition of actual skills and abilities.  Studies also reveal that narcissism is on the rise in our nation, beginning in adolescence.  Too many of our youth are encouraged by their parents to feel entitled when they do not deserve this mantle.

Harter: There were a number of concepts that I found intriguing and that stemmed from my own interests and research.  One is the notion of authencity, the capacity to be one’s true self, acknowledging and expressing one’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and opinions appropriately.  By appropriate I mean in a way that others can actually listen to and hear, if they are expressed in a manner that is not interpersonally destructive.  The inAccord concept of transparency is very analogous, promoting the goal that disputants as well as mediators access their authentic self as clearly as possible. To do so appropriately, one needs to learn specific skills, which are captured precisely by those emphasized in the model, reflection, reframe, and questions, the Touchstone skills.  However, in today’s society, authenticity is in short supply, there are many challenges and impediments compromising our ability to access and display our true selves.  We are bombarded with media messages and images that dictate how we should act, what we should look like, in order to meet the punishing standards of appearance for women and men in our culture.  We are bombarded with dictates about what we should buy according to the latest trends, what we should think and say and what we should not say.  In short, we are given a societal blueprint for who we should be as a person, as a self.