“When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.” (Nietzsche)
Relationship breakdown and the resulting fall-out is an abyss most people do not like to look into, even as they tumble into it. As family mediators, our job is to accompany and support people’s navigation into, through and, hopefully, out of the abyss again. This is not an easy task, and based on my discussions with fellow family mediators at a recent meeting, it is all too easy fall into the trap of either carrying, or pushing our clients back out of the abyss rather than helping them through it at a healthy distance.

The lines of the family mediation profession are blurry enough at the best of times. We step in and out of the roles of therapist, adviser, support worker and information provider without really being any of those. But more importantly we forget to easily who really has to do the work of mediation and risk, in systemic terms, “over functioning” (see below). We want so desperately for our clients to go away with a positive outcome, be that an agreement, a new communication strategy or at the very least a deeper understanding of their conflict, that we risk taking the work out of their hands and spend (as I have done) hours outside the mediation room analysing, wondering, or brainstorming the elusive solution.

This can happen out of performance anxiety, that is, wanting to be seen as a “good”, effective, competent mediator (admit it, we all have times when we feel like that) or also out of becoming triangulated and drawn into the clients dispute. As Wayne Regina, a Bowen Systems therapist with a keen interest in mediation, puts it “The danger is that the mediator will be swept up in the drama or begin to over-function or under-function out of anxiety.” (Regina, W. (2011) Applying Family Systems Theory to Mediation University Press of America Inc., p. 120.)

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