We are all many people in one.
Those many parts of a person’s self are often referred to as ‘saliences’. They will surface (become salient) depending on the situation in which the person finds themselves. Deciding ‘whom to speak to’ in the person in front of you is, or should be, a conscious process for a Mediator. This involves thinking through the many points of contact open to you and others within the same conversation. If the mediator addresses a party only according to the most obvious salience (plaintiff, defendant, alleged bully, alleged victim and so on), the mediator denies them and the mediation process of the opportunity to connect at other levels.
The notion of saliences provides a way of identifying aspects of the other person which are probably in play in a decision-making situation but which may be invisible and inaccessible to the other for a variety of reasons, of which conflict and anxiety are among the most usual.
The purpose of assisting a party to break out of their most obvious salience is that they tend to get stuck in it, deepening anger and attachment to that role. For example an angry father/mother in a family dispute or an alleged bully/victim in a workplace dispute.
Often, both party’s perception is that the other is stuck, but paradoxically it is the persistence in addressing each other with a single salience that is intensifying the anger – and the “stuckness”.
To address this and to enhance the need to move parties beyond entrenched positions, the Mediator must be genuinely interested in getting to know the Parties and what makes the parties tick – their needs, concerns and interests. An experienced mediator will also encourage this behaviour in the parties themselves, even if it’s for selfish reasons – “I need to move on”.
Engaging with another salience in the same person assists people to see the other differently – they are not merely that angry father/mother, but many other things, and therefore enables them to expand their repertoire of behaviours. Once this transition takes place (often unperceptively) they can also expand the choices they perceive and can step into a more rational state of mind than the one that gave rise to the stuckness.
At a broader and cultural level the appeal of a wider range of saliences is also critical. Speaking to a person or a group by reference to their country, politics, religion or skin colour freezes them into cultural mode, the salience that is the least penetrable, increasing frustration for all.
By underlining what is different , what separates you, you frustrate the possibility that there are similarities that could bridge the differences.
It is at those levels of salience that you are more likely to make useful contact and begin to speak meaningfully about hopes, fears and agreement.
