The Individual and Society in a World of Relations: the Power of Relational Learning in Mediation to Build a Nation.

The talk this afternoon is about ADRA’s Mongolia Project. But, in considering how best to explain that project, I decided to focus on the take-home message rather than on describing the events of the project. For those interested in the events, I have offered a 26-minute presentation on YouTube that I made for the World Mediation Forum, where I outline in detail how the project unfolded from its onset in 2017 to the outcomes up to 2021. I have authorised that link to be shared with all of you, so I will not repeat that information here, but I will outline the ongoing events from 2021 to the present.

Before I do so, however, I wish to stress that the talk is specifically about how learning from experience, or what I have termed ‘relational learning’, maintains the spirit of mediation where the private arrangements between individuals are holographically reflected in the civil society that is formed, making dispute resolution and, particularly, mediation, an agent for social change. So, let’s look at how relational learning can holographically reflect civil society.

Mediation has often been claimed by notables in the field such as Laurence Boulle as a ‘practice in need of a theory’. As a psychologist and barrister interested in Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ), I could see many theories being unconsciously used in the mediation process, both from the professions of Law and Psychology; so, my initial attempts in my PhD were to describe how those theories could unite, interact, or otherwise contribute to form some major ‘theory of mediation’.

With further research, however, my attention shifted from just describing those theories to recognising that those same theories were actually part of the macro process of dispute resolution as a continuum, much like a hologram becoming an agent for social change that impacts the development of a civil society. I also realised that this all happened because of the parties’ dealings with loss; so, loss and the impact of grief from loss on decision-making became the focus of my thesis.

As a practising psychologist, barrister and mediator over the years, I noticed that the long-term effects of grief suffered by my clients from their experiences of loss changed the very fabric of the relationships in which they lived. This was my first significant finding of commonality between the two professions of Psychology and Law, so I attempted to explore how grief influenced the parties in my mediations, if at all.

I demonstrated as part of my thesis how the 12 stages of Kathy Charmez’s work on grounded theory (where we learn from experience), could be used to engage the parties as researchers, learning about what is meaningful for them from their experiences grounded in loss, during the various stages of the mediation process. In this way, the process of mediation became a process of Self-Awareness where each party strove to understand more about how the loss affected their own and each other’s respective worldviews.

The resulting Self-Awareness, in turn, impacted each party’s readiness and willingness to make a decision that could lead to an agreement. For example, the deeper the grief from the loss, the less likely was the readiness or the willingness to settle the dispute. I learnt that grief and loss both impact the meaning we give to events, which, in turn, impacts the quality of subsequent relationships between the parties. This awareness led me to a macro analysis of the impact of grief and loss on the development of civil society and to the work of John Dewey’s Pragmatism.

John Dewey was an American educationalist at the beginning of the twentieth century who believed that democracy was best served in small-town America through the cooperation and collaboration of its disparate groups in building a series of functional and peaceful communities within the town. Dewey believed that the disparate groups together could educate each other about their respective needs and interests to minimize their losses when building a civil society.

Dewey emphasised the importance of education to meet the ever-changing social and economic needs of each of the groups. He believed that the rights of the various groups were already enshrined in the principles of Law, and that those rights formed a stable but malleable boundary through which the ever-changing needs and interests of the various groups could be met through discussion and education to minimise loss.

Dewey termed this process, where everybody had a say in balancing the needs and interests of the disparate groups, within a legal framework, ‘Pragmatism’ which was in essence, an attempt at a dispute prevention process in the development of a democratic civil society. Pragmatism aimed at avoiding obvious and/or potential disputes between the disparate groups and also aimed at formulating quick and efficient ways to resolve occurring disputes, keeping the town adequately functioning with minimum economic and social losses. This highlights the significance of both dispute resolution and dispute prevention in building and maintaining civil society. But also highlights the significant but almost invisible role that grief and loss play in developing a civil society.

In relation to grief, Dewey realised that there was a two-way interaction between the individual and society where the one made up the other, as if the interaction was an interdisciplinary response between the psychology of the individual’s needs and interests on the one hand, and the development of Law to administer society on the other. He stressed that there was no such thing as the ‘individual’ outside of the relations that contributed to the formation of that individual.

Relationship, then, was for Dewey the most important element in any interaction, whether that interaction occurred between people, between people and the environment or in any other combination. Acknowledging grief led to maintaining healthy and effective relationships and was key to the smooth functioning of a civil society, whether that society was in small-town America or in a village in Africa or in Mongolia, and minimising loss to avoid the impact of grief on those relationships was a key unspoken factor. My response to Dewey’s work in considering how to build tomorrow’s world is to recognise that his work is still relevant today.

Dewey was such an effective educationalist that he influenced the work of George Kelly, who applied Dewey’s principles to the workings of the inner mind to develop his Personal Construct Theory, otherwise termed the individual’s ‘worldview’. Like Dewey, Kelly emphasised the significance of relations, whether those relations were with the environment and/or with people and stressed, like Dewey, that it is only through our relations that we can apply meaning to the events in our lives as part of our ‘world-view’, i.e., as part of our ‘personal constructs’.

The views of John Dewey and George Kelly were a forerunner to the views of Kenneth Gergen, who in his book ‘Relational Being’ defined the way we relate as a ‘game in the making’ much like children making up rules as they go for the games they play. Gergen’s account of Relational Being is best described as the process of ‘being’ in a world of relations where things are experienced personally but agreed to collectively. In other words, it is the collective expression of the personal experience that forms a higher level of ‘truth’ which encapsulates each party’s specific version or experience of truth, much like the six blind men describing the elephant in the room from their vantage point.

Each blind man is correct in their description, which is their truth, but none is correct in describing the whole elephant. It is only when we share information that we gain the bigger picture. So too, in mediation when we collectively share the impact of the grief on our respective lives through the exploration of issues, can we ‘walk a mile in the other’s shoes’ and doing so enables the grief to be dissipated so that we can see the world from a higher perspective or, as is often termed in the dispute resolution literature, ‘from the balcony’ which enables us to see the whole elephant.

The concept of seeing the world from a higher perspective is best explained by Vago and Silversberg’s mindfulness theory, where a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness is explained through the concepts of Self-awareness, through Self-regulation, to reach Self-transcendence (S-ART). Vago and Silversberg claim, like Dewey, Kelly and Gergen that we are made up of our transactions with the world and regulating the experiences of loss raises our consciousness to a higher level or Self Awareness to reach Self Transcendence where we see the world and ourselves as being united. Being mindful throughout the mediation process opens the path for authentic dialogue, enabling empathy, co-operation and collaboration between the parties that co-creates richer meaning to our shared experiences.

Also, Isolina Ricci stresses the importance of relationships in her 4 Stages of Relationship Chart, which originated from her work on considering the impact of divorce on Children. She explains the first stage to be Acquaintance/ Business Stage, the second to be, Friendship, the third is called Positive Intimacy and the last stage is termed Negative Intimacy. These stages offer a road map for each party to know where along the 4 stages they currently stand and are a fundamental part of the Normative Information Session (NIS) used in my Re-Constructionist Model of Mediation to offer a practical exercise where the parties assess their own level of readiness to deal with particular issues.

Ricci claims that whether the loss is in Family Law or Commercial Law, the best stage to move forward from loss is when the parties are ready to move from Negative Intimacy where negative assumptions rule, back to Business or Acquaintance stage where there are no assumptions – easier said than done. Ricci also claims that both parties must have passed through the stages of shock and grief before they can return to the Business/Acquaintance stage in a constructive frame of mind with which to better handle the loss.

Conducting the mediation at a stage where the grief for one party is still high will not only be unsuccessful but could cause more harm if the thought that the other party does not care about the feelings of the grieving party prevails, or where the grieving party is so overwhelmed that everything is interpreted by them as deliberately set ‘to make my life a misery’.

Vago and Silversberg’s theory and Ricci’s theory both stress the significance of relating with the various parts of ourselves and with the various parts of the environment, which makes us who we are, and both accord with Gergen’s theory of Relational Being, as do Dewey and Kelly. Gergen claims that even the most consummate loner is in a relationship with the environment and is therefore intricately connected with it, so that there is no such thing as the individual outside relationship which is why adequately functioning in a relational world is so important, and why I have used the term ‘relational learning’ as a significant and ongoing process in the Mediation model I have developed called the Re-Constructionist Model (RM).

From Dewey’s work, I realized the significance of dispute resolution and/or prevention in minimizing loss to build and maintain a civil society; from Kelly’s work, I realized the significance of empathising with each other’s worldviews or personal constructs as they constantly change in interaction with our environmental and social worlds; and from Gergen’s work, I realized that the process of mediation itself could similarly be described as a ‘game in the making’ – ie as a way of mindfully dealing with the reality of the moment as it constantly unfolds to affect not just the microcosm of settlement but, more importantly, to affect the somewhat holographically, macro cosmos of social change.

I realized also that the micro perspectives of theories like the grounded research from Kathy Charmez, where we learn from experience, and the macro perspectives of John Dewey’s ‘Pragmatism’ represented a holographic aspect, where the agreements from the micro world of mediation were reflected as institutions in the macro world of civil society. That is, a social constructionist model of mediation, such as the RM, allows the parties to participate as researchers who can better accommodate their individual needs into a macro world of relations where those relations are experienced, felt and institutionalised.

In other words, a social constructionist approach makes use of the whole dispute resolution continuum from the Psychological level at one end, to the Legal level at the other to present a holistic understanding that captures the spirit of any dispute.

The focus on the above interdisciplinary theories of law and psychology when engaging the mediation process led me to make the following claims that formed the foundational elements of my thesis:

1. The first claim is that disputes are a common part of everyday life and occur whenever our expectations are shattered, and an attempt is made to redress that loss. As such, we live in an ever-changing world to minimize our losses.
2. The second claim is that we attribute meaning to every event of our life, and we do this either consciously or unconsciously. The meaning we give to events arises from our value base or beliefs, which in turn arise from the shared assumptions we make about how things relate.
3. The third claim is that the impact of grief on decision-making proportionally affects the outcome of the dispute such that the greater the grief felt, the less likely that a settlement will occur. Collectively acknowledging the effects of grief enables the grief to dissipate and allows for forward movement.
4. The fourth claim is that any dispute can be resolved provided BOTH parties are ready, both parties are willing, and both parties are able, ie, have the skills to do so. The series of exercises offered by the educational platform in the RM called the Normative Information Session (NIS) enables the parties to determine whether they are ready, whether they are willing and whether they are able, i.e. whether they have the necessary skills to address each issue as it unfolds to the point of resolution.
5. The fifth claim is that the implementation phase of the parties’ agreement in mediation, which I have termed Observer Self, is the process that manifests a public social order from the terms of a private contract. The Observer Self phase in the RM therefore offers a thorough reality testing of the parts of the agreement, which includes contingency plans if the expected outcomes are not met, with the aim being to construct into manifestation, i.e., to institutionalize new foundational relations for the parties, whether together or apart.
6. My seventh claim is that an interdisciplinary or social constructionist approach to mediation enables the essential organic nature of our humanness to be fully experienced as it arises out of grief from the Loss we experience. I further claim that this essential nature of humanness cannot be recreated or supplanted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our current exponentially advancing digital world, but can only be experienced and felt personally.
7. My final claim is that every mediation unconsciously offers parties that same opportunity for social change, but a social constructionist model offers parties that opportunity consciously, as does each of the professions of psychology and law. A social constructionist approach to Mediation can therefore be seen as an interdisciplinary process that contributes to appreciating everyday reality-constructing practices where private arrangements between individuals become pragmatic and practical solutions which unfold as concepts of day-to-day justice and emerge as the ‘way business is done here.’

A social constructionist approach to mediation enables the parties to consciously function adequately in a relational world as ‘relational learners’ to engage with the following theories:

1. Kathy Charmaz’s – grounded research theory, where we learn from events grounded in our experience.
2. Kenneth Gergen’s – game-in the making theory – where the process of mediation can itself be seen as a ‘game in the making’ where there is no such thing as the individual outside relationship.
3. Isolina Ricci’s – 4 stages of her Relational Table, from her greater study of the impact of divorce on Children (Acquaintance/Business, Friendship, Positive Intimacy, Negative Intimacy).
4. Neimeyer and Sands’s – meaning reconstruction theory, where the meaning attached to loss is changed to better impact our worldview.
5. Eric Berne’s – Transactional theory, where the mediator aims to communicate with each party as Adult – Adult.
6. Vago and Silversberg’s – Mindfulness theory, where living in the present enables the parties to reach Self-Transcendence.
7. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s – 5 Stages theory from her work on Grief and Loss in Palliative Care studies.
8. John Dewey’s Pragmatism, where the needs of the disparate groups of the town are understood and accommodated by the townspeople via education to explain how social changes are institutionalised to change the very fabric of society.
9. George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory, which took the concept of Dewey’s Pragmatism on a macro scale and applied it on a micro scale to the individual’s various psychological needs. Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory describes how the disparate needs of the individual can be constantly refined through their education to make up their world view or personal constructs.

The researchers/authors mentioned above all agree that the process of relating is an experiential process that releases our humanness as we overcome the grief from loss and give meaning to the events of our life that enable us to live better with the loss. In considering the claim made by Boulle and others that mediation is a practice in need of a theory, I claim that a social constructionist interpretation offers such a theory as it enables the various processes engaged in mediation to be consciously experienced by the parties.

That is, grieving releases our humanness from the suffering and vulnerability we feel and allows us to experience meaningful dialogue and collaboration that fosters a culture of understanding and harmony with which to live a cherished life of relations with the world, and to live a life of cherished chosen relationships that can only happen through suffering grief from loss. This is how Loss fuels the meaning we give to life.

Time does not permit me to go any further into the theory. My notes will be available for those interested. As stated at the outset, the take-home message is that this discussion about relational learning is NOT just a theoretical discussion but a practice that arose experientially as ADRA’s Mongolia Project.

The RM was used in the Mongolia project, as Mongolia is today at the stage that Australia was when Di Gibson was asked to head the Mediation Unit of the Sydney Registry in the 1990s. As a psychologist, Di realised that unless the grief and loss of the parties going through divorce/separation was acknowledged, any settlements would not be long-term effective. So, to ensure the success of the Mediation Unit, an assessment process was designed to offer mediation only to those participants who were emotionally ready. Those who were not emotionally ready, would be sent to counselling or to whatever other service was required.

The aim of the mediation process then was to maintain a humane and mentally healthy civil society with a high success rate.

Di’s Meditation Unit had a very high success rate – over 90 %- because of its effective assessment procedure. As Mongolia has very few resources to build a new Family Court, it was considered best to utilise its existing resources and follow the same intake process for its new Family Court as was used in the Mediation Unit of the Sydney Registry of the Australian Family Court in the 1990s.

That intake procedure is the same procedure used to develop my RM Model, which I have adapted as the Normative Information Session (NIS) and the success of the NIS is demonstrated by the fact that I have continuously and successfully used it over the last 30 years in all manner of mediations, not just Family Law.

As mentioned above, I have provided a video that runs for 26 minutes and outlines in detail the work ADRA has done with its Mongolian counterparts from 2017 – 2021, and I urge those interested to view the video. But, again, as mentioned above, the take-home message is that dispute resolution, and mediation in particular, is an agent for social change where agreements made by individuals become contracts that form ‘the way business is done here’. And, that this way of ‘how business is done here’ in turn holographically becomes institutionalised into ways of behaving in civil society. In other words, the power of individual agreements gives rise to civil society, creating a holographic experience.

The initial 9-day training in Mongolia in 2019, sparked four sets of Mongolian delegates to visit Australia between 2019 and 2021. Since then, there have been a further 5 sets of Mongolian delegates, making a total of 9 groups that have visited Australia from the four participating Mongolian organisations.

ADRA currently has 4 Memoranda of Understanding with its Mongolian counterparts to highlight the four ongoing projects, all of which will culminate with the formation of the Mongolian Family Court which is set to occur in January 2026, despite the lack of funds to build a new court in the likeness of the Australian Family Court.

The Judicial Council of Mongolia has requested advice from ADRA about how best to achieve the formation of their new Family Court, noting their lack of funds to build a new building. The response has been as follows.

It is proposed that there be a Family Court, complete with Appellate jurisdiction as a separate entity. The Court could include the Family Youth and Child Development Authority (the Authority) as one arm and the Judicial Council (the Council) as the other. The Authority is comprised of psychologists and social workers, who pre-2019 training, would advise families about services available, but after training, assisted families to resolve their disputes and also taught families conflict resolution skills to resolve their own disputes.

As such, it was suggested that using a social-constructionist model of Mediation for Family Law would be the most effective way to strengthen Mongolian families, and to that effect, when divorcing or separating couples wanted to formalize their status, they would be encouraged to make an appointment with the Authority, who could then assess their suitability to go directly to mediation. If there was any indication of Family Violence or child protection concerns, the parties were directed to counselling and stayed in Counselling until the psychologist and social workers involved were willing to issue a certificate to say that the party(ies) were ready for mediation.

If the parties were deemed to be ready for mediation, an appointment would be made with the Council where two mediators – a male and a female- one from law and one from psychology/social work – would inform the parties of what to expect from a mediation process from a PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint would last for about one hour, after which the attendees were could leave if they were too daunted to stay for the next part. The parties who left would then make another appointment for another Information Session, and this could occur up to three times before the parties would feel sufficiently comfortable to go to the next step of the mediation process.

This model would make best use of Mongolia’s current resources and would ensure that there is more cooperation between the Authority and the Judicial Council that there has been to date. Both the Authority and the Council are mindful that further training is required for their respective staff, and at this stage, it is yet to be decided whether such further training will be in-person or via AVL. To date, since 2021, all training has been via audiovisual (AVL) with the four groups – the Authority, the Council, Erdenet University, and the Non-Government family relations agency that focuses on the Mens’ Group.

In summary, In 2017, when I first visited Mongolia, there was a mediation Unit in the Judicial Council of Mongolia, headed by Ichinkhorloo Ragchaa, that had been functioning for 10 years, having been trained by JICA (the Japanese International Cooperation Agency) in the facilitative model. The model was very successful for Commercial and Building and Development matters, but had a success rate of only 5% for Family Law. One reason for this was that mediators were paid by having a % of the successful outcome of the dispute, which worked well for commercial and building matters, but did not work at all for Family Law matters.

Another reason was that there was no word for Mediation in Mongolian, the closest being reconciliation, which was not the aim of Family Law.

The needs analysis conducted in 2018 listed the points that needed attention, and a program was developed, which was delivered in 2019, courtesy of a workbook that was translated into Mongolian by Rotary and made available to the 66 staff of the Authority and the 44 Mediators of the Council. The 9-day training was very successful and highlighted the need for change for Family Law matters once it was understood that the strength of any civil society as a community depends on the strength of its family unit.

The experiential nature of the Mongolia project where we learn from experience and engage the parties as researchers during the various stages of the mediation process to learn about what is meaningful for them from their experiences of loss, cannot be overstated. I wish to stress how learning from experience, or what I have termed relational learning, maintains the spirit of mediation where the private arrangements between individuals are holographically reflected in the civil society that is formed, making dispute resolution and, particularly, mediation, an agent for social change through the power and spirit of relational learning.

The insight of Ichinckhorloo Ragchaa, head of the Mediation Unit of the Mongolian Judicial Council, to visit Australia in 2018, prompted the development of relationships where trust and a willingness to cooperate resulted 8 years later in the formation of an independent Family Court in Mongolia. This result is beyond the wildest aspirations of any of the participants from ADRA and from our Mongolian counterparts, but is proof of the effectiveness of grassroots cooperation where trust and goodwill join to strengthen Mongolian families and, by default, to also strengthen Mongolian civil society.

Another delegation of Mongolian dispute resolvers attended ADRA’s 40th anniversary via AVL on 28 and 29 July 2026, where they updated us about the workings of the Mongolian Family Court. The Mongolian delegates are to be congratulated for their incredible insight, their commitment to serving their nation and their incredible courage to maintain a democracy as their civil society despite the two giants of Communism – Russia to the North and China to the South – in their landlocked position. Their willingness to learn and to scour the earth for the best methods to incorporate into their civil society makes them a pleasure to work with.

To my knowledge, they are still the only First Nations People who are successfully and fruitfully governing their own country and it has been a great source of honour to have been of assistance in their continuing efforts to do so. This project is still a work in progress. We look forward to the next chapter.

Sources

1. ‘Mediating With Mongolian Families’, Australian Dispute Resolution Association (Workbook, n.d.) https://mediationquest.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Mongolia-Workbook-July-2019.pdf.
2. Katherine Johnson, ‘Mediating with Mongolian Families’ (Youtube, 31 October 2020) https://youtu.be/y-BNjtnFkKA?si=U1GJ_TTnwftwwP6Z.
3. Katherine Pavlidis Johnson, ‘Advanced Mediation Workshop – Different Emotional Stages in Family Conflict and Mediation’ (Speech delivered at the Accord Group, Sydney, 9 June 2011).
4. Laurence Boulle, Mediation: Principles, Process, Practice (LexisNexis Butterworths, 2nd ed, 2005).
5. Katherine Pavlidis Johnson, ‘The Re-Constructionist Model of Mediation: A Social Constructionist View of the Quest for Meaning to Make Sense of Loss: From Empowerment and Recognition to Relational Learning Around Loss as an Access-to-Justice Measure’ (PhD Thesis, Macquarie University, 2022).
6. Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis (Sage Publications, 2006).
7. Bill Warren, ‘Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychology and Dewey’s Pragmatism: Some Direct and Some “Intellectual Context” Aspects’ (2010) 7 Personal Construct Theory and Practice 32.
8. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (The Free Press, 1966).
9. George A Kelly, The Psychology of Personal Constructs (Routledge, 1955/1991).
10. Kenneth J Gergen, Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (Oxford University Press, 2009).
11. Kenneth J Gergen, Play and New Openings (September 2010) Brief Encounters from The Taos Institute http://www.taosinstitute.net/Websites/taos/Images/ResourcesNewsletters/9-2010%20Ken%20on%20Play.pdf.
12. David R Vago and David A Silbersweig, ‘Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, and Self-Transcendence (S-ART): A Framework for Understanding the Neurobiological Mechanisms of Mindfulness’ (2012) 6 Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 1.
13. Isolina Ricci, Mom’s House, Dad’s House: A Complete Guide for Parents Who are Separated, Divorced or Remarried (Fireside, 1997).
14. Isolina Ricci, Mom’s House, Dad’s House for Kids: Feeling at Home in One Home or Two (Fireside, 2006).
15. Isolina Ricci, The Co-Parenting Toolkit: The Essential Supplement for Mom’s House, Dad’s House (Custody & CoParenting Solutions, 2012).
16. Robert A Neimeyer, ‘Fostering Posttraumatic Growth: A Narrative Contribution’ (2004) 15 Psychological Inquiry 53.
17. Eric Berne, Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy: A Systematic Individual and Social Psychiatry (Grove Press, 1961).
18. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Dying and Death (Scribner, 1969).
19. Eric Berne, Games People Play (Grove Press, 1964).