Today we continue our blog series on A Framework for Trauma-Informed Mediation: A Heart and Mind Approach to Conflict Resolution by Michael Saini, Raheena Lalani Dahya & Shely Polak (Saini, Lalani Dahya & Polak, 2025).
We now turn to the following question posed by Saini, Lalani Dahya, and Polak: If trauma is a central reality in mediation, how can lawyers and mediators adapt their practice?
The answer lies in six guiding principles of trauma-informed mediation: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural sensitivity. These principles, drawn from the broader trauma-informed care framework, provide the ethical and practical foundation for designing mediation processes that are both effective and humane.
The Six Principles in Practice
- Safety – Both physical and emotional safety are paramount. This may involve staggered arrival times, private caucuses, or virtual formats when in-person participation would be unsafe.
- Trustworthiness – Mediators build credibility by being transparent about process, timelines, and confidentiality. Clients need to know what to expect.
- Choice – Empowering the parties to make choices about format, participation, and pacing helps restore agency often diminished by trauma.
- Collaboration – Instead of imposing outcomes, mediators co-create solutions with the parties, fostering investment in agreements.
- Empowerment – Small acts of recognition and validation strengthen parties’ confidence in their ability to negotiate.
- Cultural, Historical, and Gender Sensitivity – Trauma does not occur in a vacuum. It is shaped by systemic inequities. Mediators must adapt their practice with awareness of race, gender, culture, and generational differences.
As Saini, Lalani Dahya, and Polak explain:
Trauma-informed mediation is a process-based model of care… like a braid: each principle operates as a separate strand, and when intertwined, they provide a robust framework in which to conduct mediation. (2025 at 436)
Process Customization
A trauma-informed mediator’s role is not just to “facilitate dialogue” but to actively design a process suited to the parties’ needs. This may include:
- Separating parties into caucuses when dysregulation (a state where emotions, or other responses, are poorly controlled, extreme, or inconsistent with a situation, making it difficult to manage) is observed.
- Involving legal counsel to help balance power.
- Adjusting session length to avoid emotional exhaustion.
- Ensuring that vulnerable parties have access to financial, therapeutic, or community supports before negotiation.
As Saini, Lalani Dahya, and Polak note, trauma-informed practice draws heavily on Daniel Siegel’s Window of Tolerance framework, which describes the neurobiological range within which individuals can engage productively. Parties outside this window, whether in hyperarousal (anger, panic) or hypoarousal (numbness, withdrawal), cannot meaningfully participate.
Ethics at the Core
Trauma-informed mediation is deeply rooted in ethics. Building on David Hoffman’s ten principles of mediation ethics, Saini, Lalani Dahya, and Polak stress the importance of “do no harm,” voluntariness, informed consent, and procedural power-balancing (2025 at 415–417). These principles are not abstract, as they can, and frequently do, shape how mediators intervene when trauma emerges in the room.
For lawyers, understanding these principles is essential not only to protect clients but also to uphold professional duties of fairness, candor, and zealous advocacy within ethical boundaries.
This blog series continues on Friday with Part 3: Trauma Activation, Ethics, and the Mediator’s Role
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
Find Part 1 of this blog series here: