by admin on December 28, 2009
Earlier this month, the Shoreline Eldercare Alliance (SEA) gave a presentation on loss and change at Peregrine’s Landing in Clinton, Connecticut. The evening featured excellent speakers and an attentive audience.
The emphasis on “change” was an especially helpful one. It is easy to think of aging as simply decline and inevitably negative. This perspective reinforces our tendency to try to try to deny aging and to fight it — in ourselves and others.
Yet to see aging as a normal change as we go through life makes it easier to discuss, to plan for, and to adapt to. Elder mediators can help with conversations about “change” and how it affects us and our loved ones.
by admin on December 28, 2009
Earlier this month, the Shoreline Eldercare Alliance (SEA) gave a presentation on loss and change at Peregrine’s Landing in Clinton, Connecticut. The evening included excellent speakers and an attentive audience.
One of the points that hit home to me as a mediator was the perspective that our society has an especially difficult time discussing death. We use euphemisms to describe it (e.g., “if something happens to me.”) We avoid discussing our own end-of-life wishes, leaving our loved ones to make educated guesses about what we would want but never expressed. We refuse to acknowledge that death is inevitable for all of us.
Elder mediation can help families have difficult — but important — conversations about death. These conversations can happen far in advance of death, when the family is gathered as death is near, or at any time in between.
by admin on December 28, 2009
Sometimes one party to a dispute contacts me to pursue mediation, fully convinced that the mediation process is the right way to resolve a conflict as effectively as possible. At times, another party to that dispute is reluctant to pursue mediation and asks me to serve as an arbitrator.
Most people have had little or no experience with either process. Some have heard a little about divorce mediation but have never heard about mediation used in any other context. When we discuss the differences in these conflict resolution processes, the distinction that is often the most important is the question of control.
In arbitration, the parties ask the arbitrator, within limits that they set out and agree to, to resolve their case for them. The arbitrator is then in control. In mediation, the parties work with the mediator’s help to decide their case. The parties are always in control of their own dispute.
by admin on December 28, 2009
“ADR” is short for Alternative Dispute Resolution. Lawyers, in particular, know the term as one that describes alternatives to litigation. ADR certainly includes arbitration and mediation, and may be used to include certain types of fact-finding, negotiation, facilitation and related processes for conflict resolution.
“DR” stands for Dispute Resolution. This term is an explicit recognition that the processes that were once “alternatives” are now much more likely to be the norm. Very few lawsuits are tried to conclusion with a verdict and judgment to end the case. The vast majority are concluded some other way: including forms of Dispute Resolution such as mediation and arbitration.