Insight Today:
A Home for Conversation
Insight Studies Roundtable
What is distinct about Insight mediation is the recognition of the truncating impact of threat on people’s ability to listen and learn as well as the connection between a person’s sense of threat and their defend-conflict behaviours. The impact of threat on cognitive functioning is to truncate curiosity and focus attention on defending and protecting in ways that are often habitual or rash. Insight mediation is a way for parties to change their conflict behaviours. By attending to process and broadening understanding of possible futures, a mediator facilitates learning conversations by helping the parties become curious.
Insight Mediation offers mediators novel tools and strategies for helping parties transform conflicts by gaining and verifying insights about themselves and others. Exploring Expected Futures is used in situations where the mediator notices parties are remaining locked in their defense-attack behaviours leading to an awareness of the need to shift the pattern of the parties’ conversation. What the mediator does not do is stay in the problem-saturated narrative, as this will sustain parties defend patterns of interacting. Nor does the mediator simply ask what parties care about right now. Instead he directs attention to future expectations because this is where the deeper, most pressing cares and threats generating the conflict are to be discovered.
Economics Actually by Quinn and Benton is the best introduction yet to the macroeconomic theory of Bernard Lonergan and a fruitful example of understanding what it is to understand social practices. The presentation is accessible to lay readers in economics and invaluable to those interested in social justice, the common good, and Catholic social teaching.
Dr. Robert Luby is the Director of Medical Education at the Institute for Functional Medicine and served for 26 years as a board-certified family physician serving patients in community health centers. Judith Gervais is a health coach and educator empowering chronically ill people to live fuller, healthier lives.
Of Related Interest
*The Institute for Functional Medicine
*Functional Medicine Coaching Academy
*Epigenetics and Epitherapeutics with Moshe Szyf
Dr. Robert Luby is the Director of Medical Education at the Institute for Functional Medicine and served for 26 years as a board-certified family physician serving patients in community health centers. Judith Gervais is a health coach and educator empowering chronically ill people to live fuller, healthier lives.
Of Related Interest
*The Institute for Functional Medicine https://www.ifm.org/
*Functional Medicine Coaching Academy https://functionalmedicinecoaching.org/
*Epigenetics and Epitherapeutics with Moshe Szyf https://hkgepitherapeutics.com/about/moshe-szyf/
The Insight Mediators have “something specific” in mind when they are being curious about the parties in a conflict, but they don’t know what it is, so they keep themselves open to a wide range of data and a wide range of options. Yet the “something specific” provides the criteria that will tell them when they have found what they’re looking for. Mediators frequently ask questions in order to gain insights for themselves. At other times, they ask questions in order to evoke insights in the speaker. In the example described here ,the Insight Mediator focuses on the listener, and seeks an insight that results in a change in that party’s pattern of listening to the speaker. The “something specific” is an as yet unknown insight that invites a change in one or both of the parties.