How Does Family Conflict Resolution Work?

When families come to me to resolve their disputes over family assets after someone passes away, often the family members are not speaking to each other and are represented by lawyers. Because of the times we live in our discussions will be over Zoom. I always start my discussions with a separate conversation with each family member and his or her attorney and make sure the attorney is on board with me speaking directly to their client. Once that is agreed, I ask the family member to tell me about the conflict, what their relationship was like with other family members before this conflict arose, how this conflict got started and whether they are still on speaking terms now. Then we get into the weeds of the conflict: what they were expecting to happen to the assets that are now part of a disputed estate and where it all went wrong.  I do this with each of the family members. As you can imagine very different versions of what went wrong will be told.  It may take hours and several sessions to get to a resolution of the dispute and any resolution will turn on whether each of the family members is willing to let go of any need to mete out punishment and move to a place where they are more interested in resolving the dispute than in seeking retribution. There is no magic formula for moving family members to that different space and therein lies the challenge in a mediation…finding the unique pathway for each family conflict that will bring each unique family to a different understanding of the conflict in order to consider a resolution they can live.