COVID-19 has been a desolate time in the world of mediation, at least where I live. It appears that people have either set aside their differences, albeit perhaps temporarily, in order to be at peace with staying inside and being among those with whom daily dealings are necessary in order to simply make life work, or they have resorted without intermission to legal recourses or outright scorched earth. I have conducted most of my mediations of the past year via telephone or Zoom, which has meant none have had to be for local parties, and this has been a learning experience. I have concluded that while a remote process can work for mediation, it is far less than ideal, as all non-verbal cues are truncated or even undetectable, and people tend to be less than candid when they can retreat into a virtual world, which a room uninhabited by others is when those others can only see part of you and hear you only to the degree that the volume works and there is no freezing glitch happening.
That said, the other day I experienced a new phenomenon which I both hope and fear will become some version of normal in post-Covid days. My two clients, a couple contemplating divorce, were on our Zoom call from separate locations. I, of course, was in my own home. Things were going pretty well in their now-standard way, with the usual allowances for the remote format; that is, everyone having to take time for delays in audio, for the dreaded video freeze, and for the weirdness of not having the palpable energy of the humans with whom one is in frank and heartfelt discussion be part of the rhythm. Suddenly, one of the clients sat up straighter (versus the standing up that might have occurred in person) in her chair and announced, "I can't do this!"
The other client stopped talking and I must confess I was at an immediate loss and had no idea what the problem was. The discussion had actually been humming along quite well and everyone had seemed amenable if not exactly amicable.
The client, visibly upset, continued.
"I don't even know what we are doing," she said. "I can't follow. I don't understand if we're making any progress. I just don't know what, if anything, is happening!"
I gaped unattractively, I'm sure, for a moment, but suddenly I got her gist. I ran it by her to make sure I had perceived correctly, and when this was confirmed, I had a flash of insight and used it as a discussion point. This was a brilliance conceived not in my own mind but brought to me out of the sky by the sensitivities of my client. This was the issue in a nutshell:
She was not objecting to anything that had been said or not said, and she was not even channelling resentment or vitriol from the way her marriage had been unraveling of late. No. She was objecting to the constraints of the mediation in this format. It seemed that without the usual cues from her partner, and from me, she had no idea where she was in time and space with regard to the issues at hand. She could see our faces and hear our voices, but without the context of other observable human behavior, she didn't know where she stood or even what she felt or thought. She used this phrase: "I don't think you're lying to me but I can't really tell."
I thought this was a remarkable observation. She was saying, and I pointed it out, that without being able to detect the subtle energy of a human being, her spouse, the person to whom she had been closest over the period of more than a decade, she felt untethered. Her spouse was on the verge of scoffing at this but I redirected by saying that this was a kind of metaphor for all our relationships and that she had discovered something very valuable that we as human beings often take for granted without even realizing its existence.
In human relationships, especially those centered around love and family, context is everything. Devotion, loyalty, honest, kindness - these are the waters of a relationship, but context is the faucet. Without context you don't get an inside joke or an obscure reference. You don't have the history of events or circumstances or of the wisdom gained by knowing someone over time, and without these, all the love and fidelity in the world, while admirable, stand in a vacuum and don't mean much. And while we tend to think of context as these external factors, much of it is an indescribable, ethereal thing, the one we get when we stand near a person, whether in the kitchen making dinner or in line at a cash register. It's nothing we use our senses to detect. Deeper and more essential than that, it's the thing that lets us know without seeing or hearing that someone is about to speak or is refraining from it, or that a person is kind or not. We've all experienced this, and in the days before Covid I daresay most of us experienced it daily, with people known and unknown to us. We are so used to it, it may seem like a pretense to even bring it up. But thanks to the spiritual and emotional grounding of my outspoken client, I was reminded of its importance, if I had ever given it thought.
When two people have known each other for a long time, much of their relationship goes without saying. I mean this literally. A lot goes unsaid. The better you know someone the more accurate you can be in detecting their feelings or needs, if you care to do so. People are at varying degrees of expertise with this, but we all do it to an extent. When you know someone well, whether you realize it or not, it is context that allows you to know whether their silence in the darkness on the other side of the bed means they are angry, or sad, or just tired. What my client was pointing out to us was that she had none of this information. Her lack of proximity to her partner left her feeling as if her radar was jammed. An extraordinarily spiritually sensitive person, this particular kind of lack caused her more distress than it might have some others, who might have done just fine with merely the words and tone and facial expressions of one another, and, to some degree, me. But what she was able to articulate gave me an opening I might not have otherwise had here.
I asked their forbearance while I talked for a few moments. I then explained that I understood what she meant and that this was a time to pay attention. The dissolution of a marriage, or even the potential for it, can bring up all sorts of grievances and resentments, not to mention sadnesses and wishes unfulfilled, but when everything is over, most people can still name a few things that they valued in their partner. Just now, I said, we were presented with an unusual opportunity. We could talk about the things my client thought were missing as if they were factors in the relationship, which they were. They were context.
I asked her to explain some of the things she was missing from this discussion. Like a ray of light, she immediately responded with a very clear answer. She said she was missing being able to see her husband's hands, because he was a fiddler, and she knew by what he was doing with them - fidgeting, picking at his nails, rubbing palms together - how he was feeling about their conversation. This was a clear explanation, I said, but was still related to visible elements. She got my drift, and she went on to tell how for years she had understood whether or not he would want to be close to her by how he was breathing. Just saying this brought tears to her eyes. Her voice became very sad and she couldn't look at the screen but seemed to be staring at her lap.
Her husband appeared confused.
"Breathing?" he asked quite gently, and tears began rolling down her cheeks.
She explained further that she knew him so well that for years, whenever she had wished for them to be close - holding hands while walking, snuggling on the sofa, or kissing in the kitchen -- she had gauged his breathing, which is about as vague a measure as you can get physically, barring exertion or excitement. I asked if it was really his breathing or if it was something else, like how he held his head or set his jaw. She replied that it was all the same to her, that it all felt like the same thing. I nodded along, trying to understand her thinking. But her husband quickly got it. He pointed out that it was similar to how he knew if it would be a good night for sex. He didn't even need to ask. He just knew, and he couldn't really say how he knew. He just knew her that well.
I asked them if there was anything similar going on when they would fight. They looked at each other over the airwaves and neither had an answer. How about when you were deciding something? I asked. They agreed that they rarely had to ask what the other would want, they had known each other so long. I sat for a minute and let that sink in.
In the end, there were so many points on which communication was non-verbal, and indeed, barely sensory, that it would be pointless to list them here. But my point was made with them.
I asked them, as homework, to each work on a list of times when they didn't need to talk or touch to know how the other was feeling. This mediation had reached its limit of usefulness for the day, and we adjourned after a few other practical matters had been addressed.
I can't tell you how this story will conclude, or whether this couple will decide to divorce or not. Their issues were not limited to the ones discussed here. But I thought about this lesson for several days. I wondered how often we don't listen to what our internal radar tells us about another, and how often, if we do pay attention, we get the directions right. I also wondered how many conflicts could be avoided if people would at least occasionally rely less on their five senses and more on their patience and their ability to hear unheard voices, meaning, in crude language, gut feelings or intuition. And I thought about the role of history, of wisdom, of context in deciphering the way to get through to the other side of a question.
One thing it is important to note is that until you know a person well, conversation pays. There is profit in clarity and in being forthright. Some people are so sensitive that they perceive non-verbal communication without difficulty in most cases. For most of us, it's a learning process, and talking is the best way to get things in stone until context is established. But never make intuition and extra-sensory perception into a small factor. Ultimately it may matter more than words, as words are mere symbols for meaning, whereas feelings are the direct expression of it. We work with what we have. But context and non-verbal cues have risen at least for now to the top portion of my toolbox. It would be a failed opportunity not to ask people about this often. And in my own life, while I am reminded that listening and patience are at least as important as talking and timeliness, I now have a renewed sense of the crucial voice that makes no sound. It's a thread that connects every person to every other, and that thread is burnished to glowing between those of us who love each other, especially when we love with intention. When love becomes a question, I'm not sure the thread weakens, but it may be that we stop giving it our attention, just when we need to be minding it all the more.
NOTE: the identities of the clients mentioned here have been disguised via alteration of identifying details, although permission to share their story was given by them before publication.
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