I’ve been doing mediation for over thirty years, primarily in family cases, but also some in business, personal injury, neighbor and workplace disputes. Over the past ten years, I’ve been working on how to adapt the mediation process for one or more high-conflict participants. It has slowly dawned on me that much of what helps is to do the opposite of what I was doing before. Most of what I have learned came from the failure of more traditional approaches that work with most people. In this article, I want to briefly point out ten paradigm shifts that seem to bring more success, when there are one or more high-conflict people involved.

I am not saying this is what you should do in mediation with the 80%-90% of people who are not high-conflict. But you can use these methods with anyone. You can also use these methods whether you are mediating with the parties in the same room together, or in separate rooms or online dispute resolution. With ongo

Mediation with one or more parties with a high conflict personality requires a significantly different approach from the standard “interest-based” model that has led the field of mediation over the past 35 years. As of this year, I have practiced mediation for forty years and have been a big fan of the interest-based approach or “Getting to Yes” approach, championed by the Harvard Program on Negotiation. However, over the past ten years I have come to realize that the emphasis must be shifted to have a chance at successfully mediating high conflict disputes. Here are the four biggest things to avoid or forget about in this approach, which I call New Ways for Mediation®.  

1.    FUGETABOUT giving the parties insights into their own behavior.

High conflict people are stuck in a self-defeating pattern of blame and denial that prevents them from seeing their part in their problems and conflicts. They are preoccupied with blaming others and avoiding