One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that people rarely come to mediation without already having some idea of what it’s going to be like. Maybe a friend went through a divorce. Maybe an attorney explained the process. Maybe someone spent three hours reading a Reddit thread at midnight. We’ve all been down an internet rabbit hole at some point.
And somewhere along the way, they’ve started putting together a picture of what mediation is supposed to look like.
Sometimes that picture is pretty accurate. Other times, not so much. The interesting part is that most of these assumptions make perfect sense. If you’ve never been through mediation, you’re filling in the blanks with whatever information you have. The trouble starts when those expectations don’t quite match what’s actually happening in the room.
One of the biggest misunderstandings is that I’m there to figure out who’s right. People sometimes expect me to listen to both sides, weigh everything they’ve told me, and eventually decide who’s being reasonable. I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit quietly while everyone talks in circles, either.
I’ll ask questions. I’ll get specific. I might ask how a proposed parenting schedule is going to work when school starts, or what happens when someone’s work hours change. Occasionally, someone will look at me like I’ve just taken the other person’s side because I questioned something they suggested. But questioning an idea isn’t the same thing as disagreeing with it. I’m trying to understand how it works, and just as importantly, whether we’re all understanding the same thing.
I’m not deciding what matters. You bring what matters, and I make sure there’s room to actually talk about it.
Of course, when people believe someone is going to decide who’s right, it makes sense that they might arrive ready to prove their position. Every once in a while, someone comes with a stack of printed text messages. Sometimes it’s emails. Sometimes it’s screenshots they’ve been saving for months. And I understand why. When you’ve been dealing with something difficult for a long time, you want someone to understand how you got here. You don’t want to leave out the one detail that finally makes everything make sense.
Context matters. Absolutely. There may be things that happened months or years ago that explain why a particular topic is difficult to discuss today. I’m not interested in pretending those experiences didn’t happen. But there’s a difference between understanding what brought us into the conversation and spending the entire conversation trying to determine who was right three years ago.
At some point, we still have to talk about who’s picking up the kids next Thursday.
That’s often where people discover that mediation isn’t quite the conversation they expected. Instead of asking them to prove everything that happened, I’m asking questions about what needs to happen next. Sometimes those questions are straightforward. Other times, they uncover something neither participant realized needed to be discussed.
And that brings us to another expectation: that mediation is supposed to end with everything settled.
I can understand why people think that. They’ve made time for the session, gathered information, and probably spent a fair amount of energy preparing themselves for the conversation. Naturally, they’d like to leave knowing everything has been resolved. But not every mediation unfolds that way.
Sometimes people work through every topic in one session. Sometimes they resolve several issues and discover they need additional information before discussing another. Sometimes a decision that seemed simple takes much longer than expected because the participants realize they understood the proposal differently. And sometimes they simply don’t agree.
I’m not going to push someone into a decision just because we’ve been sitting together for three hours. The decisions belong to the participants, and that includes deciding whether they’re ready to make one. Reaching an agreement can be an important part of mediation, but it isn’t something I can manufacture by keeping everyone in the room long enough.
That distinction matters even more when mediation has been ordered by a court. People sometimes assume that because a judge required them to attend, they’re also required to settle. Those are two different things. A court may require participation in mediation, but that doesn’t mean participants must reach an agreement or accept terms they don’t agree with. I’m there to facilitate the conversation, not to make the decisions for them.
Of course, knowing you don’t have to agree doesn’t necessarily make the conversation easier. One of the concerns I hear is that mediation can’t possibly work because the participants don’t communicate well with each other.
Sometimes people tell me they can’t get through a five-minute conversation without arguing, so how could they possibly sit together for several hours?
It’s a fair question. But if everyone already communicated beautifully, understood one another, and worked through disagreements without difficulty, they probably wouldn’t be looking for a mediator in the first place.
The difference is that mediation gives the conversation a structure it may not have had before. I’m there to ask questions, keep track of what we’re discussing, and step in when the conversation starts going somewhere that isn’t helping us understand the issue. Sometimes that means slowing things down. Sometimes it means asking someone to explain what they meant. Sometimes it means taking a break or meeting privately for a little while.
None of that guarantees the conversation will be easy. It does mean we’re not relying entirely on the same communication patterns that may have brought everyone to mediation in the first place.
Another interesting thing happens when people begin talking about possible decisions. They often bring up what they’ve heard a judge would do.
Almost everyone knows someone who’s been through family court. A brother, a cousin, a coworker, a neighbor, someone at the ballfield who apparently has the entire Florida court system figured out. And naturally, people compare what they’ve heard to their own circumstances.
The difficulty is that two families can sound remarkably similar until you start talking about the details. What worked for one family may not address the circumstances of another. Even when people are discussing the same general topic, their schedules, finances, responsibilities, and priorities may be completely different.
I don’t predict what a judge would do, and I don’t use someone else’s experience as a measuring stick for what participants should decide. What I can do is help them look at the decisions they’re actually discussing and make sure there’s room to explore how those decisions might work in their own lives.
This becomes especially apparent when we’re talking about parenting plans.
A parenting plan can look like a collection of schedules, holidays, responsibilities, and other details that need to be written down. And yes, there’s paperwork involved. But those words eventually become real life.
School mornings. Haircuts. Doctor’s appointments. Braces. Sports. Holidays. A child who suddenly wants to join an activity that happens on the other parent’s weekend.
I’ve seen what appears to be a relatively small detail turn into a much longer conversation because two people have very different ideas about how it would actually work. One person thinks a schedule allows flexibility. The other thinks it establishes a firm routine. Both may believe they’ve been perfectly clear, right up until I ask what happens when something changes.
And that’s where the conversation becomes interesting. Not because I’m trying to complicate something simple, but because the details often reveal what people actually mean. A plan that sounds perfectly reasonable in the abstract can look different when we start talking about an ordinary Tuesday.
That’s something I wish more people understood before mediation. The conversations aren’t always about the enormous decisions everyone expects to discuss. Sometimes the seemingly ordinary details are where participants discover they haven’t been talking about quite the same thing.
So when someone asks me what mediation is really going to be like, I can’t tell them exactly how their session will unfold. I don’t know which topic will take ten minutes and which one will take an hour. I don’t know whether they’ll agree on everything, some things, or nothing at all.
What I can explain is my role in the process. I’m not there to decide who’s right, tell anyone what to do, or push for an agreement. I’m there to help create a conversation where the participants can understand what they’re discussing, explore the decisions in front of them, and determine what works for their circumstances.
And whatever your cousin, coworker, or that person on Reddit experienced, we’ll be talking about your family, not theirs.