Family separation is always a stressful experience for children in the short term, but most will recover from it quite quickly and go on to have a healthy relationship with both parents as they move on and ‘parent apart’ cooperatively.

A high conflict separation is one where both partners participate in an ongoing war with each other. This disruption can last years and take place in endless courtroom battles and huge legal bills. 

The Family Mediation Clinic is the only family mediation provider in the UK to use the ‘new ways for families’ model of co-parenting coaching and counselling alongside mediation.

New Ways For Families® is an approach that has been developed by the High Conflict Institute in the USA. The model was created by Bill Eddy, based on his experience as a family lawyer, mediator and family therapist.

The primary goal is to teach parents the skills necessary to effectively resolve disagreements around child arrangements and family finances, whilst remaining calm and protecting their children from the conflict. 

New Ways for Families ® is the preferred model when dealing with high conflict cases. It preserves the psychological and emotional health of your children, saves the stress and expense of going to court and allows you to remain in control of the outcome. For married or never-married parents it can be used at the beginning of any case which includes child arrangements or as an intervention at any time that child arrangements break down.

We are able to offer our unique ANCHOR transformative mediation package which is facilitated by two dual-trained psychotherapist-mediators with a high level of training and experience in this area.

Firstly, you will begin with an individual pre-mediation meeting to help prepare you for the process before you begin your joint sessions.

Joint mediation sessions can be face to face or we can offer shuttle mediation if you are not able to be in the same room as your ex-partner.

A ‘New Ways for Families’ ® practitioner and counsellor works with you both individually between sessions. 

During two joint Anchoring meetings, both the counsellor and mediator work together with you to help overcome any issues where you may have become ‘stuck’.

As part of the process, you will be given access to the highly successful New Ways for Families® online co-parenting training and 4 sessions of one-to-one co-parenting coaching.

At the end of the programme over 70% of couples will manage to come to an agreement. We will provide you with all the paperwork required to enable your agreements to be made into a legally binding court order if appropriate.

Our transformative Anchor approach to mediation is designed for couples who would usually be unlikely to come to an agreement outside of court or who are already involved in the court process.

Anchor practitioners have been trained by the ‘High Conflict Institute’ and have many years of experience working with families where there is implacable hostility and allegations of parental alienation.