Arguments with neighbours can have a huge impact on quality of life. It’s very easy to get trapped into familiar, destructive conversations and behaviours. Mediation is a proven way to resolve these disputes and reset relationships.
It’s very hard to know how many neighbour disputes there are out there.
Our experience suggests that there was a quiet period in March April May 2020 but that numbers have increased over the summer. The amount of time people are spending at home certainly has an impact.
Most neighbour disputes start as noise complaints. In the summer, they’re usually about noise in the garden, late night barbecues and music. In the winter when people are spending more time inside, they’re more about loud TVs, door slamming and banging on the floor.
As relationships sour people stop communicating and that brings with it more serious anti-social behaviour, property damage, nasty confrontations and hostility.
Mediation has proven to be a very effective way of resolving these types of dispute and resetting relationships that have become problematic.
Anyone who’s been in an argument knows what it’s like to spend more time thinking about what you’re going to say next. It is hard to listen when you’re arguing. So the first thing we focus on is giving each party an opportunity to be heard, uninterrupted.
Bringing a new person into a conversation changes the feel. There’s a predictability about conversations with someone you argue with. Having an independent neutral person in the conversation changes the tone and stops people from resorting to familiar digs and insults.
Because the relationship has soured and communication stopped, people rarely know what the situation is like for the others involved. It’s usual to spend time thinking about how much the other person has got it in for you.
So we mediators want is people to say how the current situation impacts them, how it makes them feel and what they actually want. People often want the same thing. They both want privacy, space, a way of interacting with their neighbor that’s civil. People generally don’t want hostility.
Then the conversation becomes about what needs to happen to get there together.
Since lockdown, it’s much harder to see people face to face. This has forced us mediators to get confident using online video communication. It works very well and I think it’s here to stay. In my view, that’s a very good thing because it allows mediation to take place more flexibly and at times that suit the clients better.