Beyond Interest-Based Negotiation will be presented by Stephen H. Sulmeyer, JD, Ph.D. at the 2018 Collaborative Divorce Texas Advanced Interdisciplinary Training. Stephen is a lawyer, psychologist, mediator and Collaborative Law practitioner. His psychotherapy practice is based in Marin County, Calif. Sulmeyer’s unique blend of law and psychology allows him to identify and work effectively with, rather than shy away from, the underlying psychological obstacles that are often the real barriers to the resolution of conflicts.
Stephen will argue that it’s important to look beneath the parties’ positions to discover their underlying psychological interests. He argues that rational discussion of interests is insufficient to resolve the kinds of emotionally charged conflicts often seen in our Collaborative cases. To defuse heated emotions, to cut through impasse, and to get to the deepest levels of resolution, we need to help our clients explore their deeply held and often unconscious emotional needs, survival based fears, identity preserving beliefs, and spiritually informed ideals.
To work on the emotional level we need not only new skills for dealing with our clients, but practice at accessing hidden structures in ourselves. If we insist on masking our professional and personal anxiety by playing it safe, all we will find is what we already know. To guide our clients into the vulnerability and resilience necessary to access their deepest needs, we need to take a much scarier and uncertain path. We need to develop the capacity to be comfortable with the discomfort of our own vulnerability; to allow ourselves to question and relinquish our need to be seen as competent and smart; to allow ourselves to sit with the unsettling anxiety of not-knowing; and in this way to become skilled at mustering our own resilience.
The training will be held at the Austin Bar Association Office located at 816 Congress Ave. # 700 on June 15, 2018. Registration will begin at 9:15 and the training will be held from 10am- 4pm. Brochure and on-line registration available at www.collaborativedivorcetexas.com. This training is a way to fulfill the requirements for credentialing and master credentialing if a member is missing that “box”.
