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Mundial de Mediación - World Mediation
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Mundial de Mediación - World Mediation
Forum - Forum Mondial de Médiation
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If we accept the above-mentioned idea, it is beyond any doubt that the concept we have about who the members of a family are will have much importance in the process.
The concepts developed by the systemic family therapy may be useful for us.
In the legal arena, as in ordinary people's minds, when they refer to the family, they usually think of the "typical family" (father, mother and two children). But in the reality of our mediations we find that only rarely do the families who come to us follow that pattern.
Father, mother and children form a kind of family that has been named nuclear family.
In Latin and Latin American families, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins are usually included in it. It is interesting to take these people into account because they are part of the network of the couple that comes to mediation and they can become valuable prompts. The genogram of these families grows upwards. This kind of constellation is known as extended family.
The ever increasing number of divorces and the constitution
of second marriages has brought to the surface a new constellation that
is made up of the different family nucleuses, i.e., the nuclear family,
the new family of the mother , the new family of the father, and sometimes
the families of the second husbands/wives of the mother and father. The
genogram of these families grows to the sides.
It is usual to hear the names of the members of these new families during the mediation process in a divorce, for example, when the schedule of visits or the vacations are fixed. Adults have difficulties in visualizing the bonds that tie the different members, while children see much more clearly the network of relationships. These families have been called different names in the literature: re-married family (due to the new marriages -lawful or not); bi-nuclear family (considering that children have two family nucleuses - father's home and mother's home); and family therapist Phoebe Prosky has named them expanded family, the one that I prefer.
There are nowadays other formations that have no
name, such as "my mother's boyfriend"; in Argentina the title "vantage
friends" is starting to be used, but I prefer
Kenneth Gergen's designation of "friendly
lovers " because it
includes both members. They are stable relationships that do not live together
(or they only do during weekends or vacations), that do not share the project
of having children (because of biological impossibility or just because
they do not want them). Because of all this, this relationship is different
from the relationship of occasional lovers. Another case is the case of
homosexual couples, that do not have a legal recognition in most countries.
The recent court ruling in Israel favoring a gay partner of a Colonel to
receive the money from his partner's pension is a sign of the changes that
are going on.
This is not just theoretical thinking; these ideas
have a clear application in practice as they will lead us in the hard choice
that, as mediators, we must make about "who shall we invite to the process?"
and "at what stage of it shall we welcome or dismiss someone"?.
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