Mark Baumann and Rachel Hardies presented High Conflict Cases: The Courage to Look at Your Behavior, at the November 4-5, 2011, Oregon Mediation Association’s annual conference, on behalf of Bill Eddy’s High Conflict Institute (HCI). Presentation materials for their OMA and NW DR conference are available here, and include their HCP Identifiers checklist, HCP Solutions Table, Equipoise article, and resource bibliography for mediators. Other materials and articles can be found at HCI.

Their OMA presentation focused on how mediators affect and are affected by high conflict personalities during mediation. Their topics included understanding high conflict personalities, understanding how conflict resolvers can get triggered and/or hooked, what assumptions conflict resolvers should be aware of and how they may need to change, the importance and difficulty of setting effective boundaries, and the strong challenge to ethics high conflict people can impose.

Listening to highly insistent emotions and applying techniques of empathy, attention and respect (EAR) are highly valuable skills in high conflict cases, not only for helping to reduce conflict by the parties, but also to help mediators and judges stay centered and reduce the effect of being triggered and unhooking.

30 presentations were made at the two-day multi-track conference.

Mr. Baumann and Ms. Hardies also presented at the two-day spring 2011 NW Dispute Resolution Conference at University of Washington, focusing on “movement” as technique for working with high conflict people.

Mark Baumann is a lawyer, mediator and associate of the High Conflict Institute, litigating in Port Angeles, mediating in Seattle, and consulting internationally on high conflict cases to professionals and individual parties.

Rachel Hardies is a therapist and parenting instructor practicing in Port Angeles, and a co-mediator with Mark Baumann.