Mediation

Jill Nagle provides mediation based in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to families, coworkers and other pairs or groups in need of help communicating or resolving conflict. In the NVC model, needs never conflict, only strategies. The Nonviolent Communication model helps participants hear and understand each other’s feelings and needs. Once this happens, strategies that meet everyone’s needs emerge organically.

How can NVC mediation help families?
NVC mediation can help families stuck in “the same old argument” transform that argument into understanding. It can help shift rigid stances between spouses, between parents and children, between children, and among whole groups. It also provides tools for moving more easily through future conflicts.

How is Nonviolent Communication mediation different from therapy?
Therapy brings in more of the past to help clients understand and transform their behavior in the present. Mediation works with what is alive in clients right now: their feelings, their needs, and what would make life even better in this moment. Little time or attention goes to the past.

How does this kind of mediation differ from other kinds of mediation?
In the mediation system that stems from our legal structure, mediators (who are often former judges) sometimes comment that mediation is successful if everyone goes away unhappy. In Nonviolent Communication, the goal is that everyone’s needs get met. This model differs drastically from other models in that NVC mediators do not expect anyone to give something up, otherwise known as “compromise.” We come in expecting that everyone’s needs will get met, and this is what happens much of the time.

How does your practice differ from other NVC mediators?
I like my clients to go away with skills in hand to use in their daily lives, so all my clients receive a complementary quick reference guides, as well as a brief lesson on how to implement NVC in outside of sessions.

How is your one-on-one mediation service different from what I would get in one of your classes?
NVC is a big part of what we teach in the Conscious Parenting classes. We also teach skills based in other schools of thought, such as Montessori. The classes offer a broad spectrum of skills to bring to parenting and human relationships in general, and complement one-on-one services extremely well.

The classes do not, however, offer long periods of concentrated attention in which your particular challenges get mediated using NVC. Most classes, we do work one-on-one with volunteers from the class for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, so participants get a taste of this type of work. However, to work with a longstanding or deeply rooted conflict, we recommend a session of at least three hours to start.