Practicing Narrative Mediation
Loosening the Grip of Conflict
Chapter One
How to Work with Conflict
Stories: Nine Hallmarks of
Narrative Mediation
This book is about taking stories seriously in the practice of
mediation. Taking stories seriously, to us, means treating them
as having the power to shape experiences, influence mind-sets,
and construct relationships. It also means seeing them as having
something of a life of their own, as embarking on a mission
that sometimes seems to drag people along behind. It means
inquiring into the work being done by such stories in conflict
situations, particularly into whether the protagonists in a conflict
are happy with the direction that a story is taking them and
whether they would prefer to go somewhere else.
Even in these few words, we have departed from some other
common ways in which people understand stories. From time
to time you may hear people say, "Oh, that's just a story," in a
way that disparages the truth value of what has been said. The
implication is that the account given is not fully accurate or t ... read full excerpt from: Practicing Narrative Mediation: Loosening the Grip of Conflict ebook
