Jessie Mason was drawn to family mediation from a deeply personal experience. After working with a mediator during her own separation, she saw firsthand how the right guidance can keep communication respectful and help families move forward with confidence.
Since then, Jessie has built a thriving career as a certified family mediator, supporting couples through separation, divorce, and the complex decisions that follow. And now she’s helping Kompass students develop the skills to navigate family conflicts fairly and effectively.
We spoke with Jessie about what drew her to this field, what makes family mediation distinct, and what future practitioners should be aware of.
Q. Can you summarize your education and professional background?
Jessie: I am a certified family mediator with Family Mediation Canada. I’ve been a family mediator for about five years now. I have 300+ hours of actual live mediation under my belt at this point, so I’ve had lots of experience dealing with separation and divorce mediations.
I have an undergrad degree that is totally unrelated: social sciences, sociology, anthropology, medical anthropology, specifically in the sub-Saharan African context. I designed my own degree and was able to focus on things that really interested me at the time.
Once I realized that what I really wanted to do was become a family mediator specifically, I took the family mediation program that existed at the time at the Justice Institute of BC. Soon after, I was hired by the public system as a family mediator.
Q. What first drew you to family mediation?
Jessie: Years ago, I was going through a separation of my own and ended up with a mediator who was incredibly helpful and walked us through the whole process. We were able to keep things quite amicable. When I saw what that mediator was doing, I thought, that’s it, that’s what I’m meant to be doing.
I had been working in social services, so it wasn’t a huge stretch. I was very used to working one-on-one with people. But from that day forward, I knew this is what I wanted to do. So I completed my education and got started just a year or so after that.
Q. In your view, what makes family mediation distinct from other types of mediation?
Jessie: I think mediation prioritizes relationships, regardless of the type of mediation. That is a truth across the board.
However, family mediation in terms of separation and divorce is a little bit unique because the relationship usually must continue in some way between the parents. There isn’t a way to dissolve the relationship when children are involved. Sometimes it is about a parent stepping away from the children’s lives to attend to their own needs and well-being, but I would say most of the time the relationship continues in some way.
In family mediation, we spend some time focusing on what the relationship going to look like moving forward. How does it need to be reorganized and renegotiated in a way that can reduce the children’s exposure to conflict? When you’re out there enacting the parenting plan on your own without the support of a third party, how are you going to do that?
So I think it’s unique because we get to spend some time focusing on that communication, that relationship, and helping people figure out what’s the best way forward now that their roles have changed.
Q. Do you see any emerging trends or challenges that practitioners are going to need to understand?
Jessie: Practitioners will need to learn to be culturally responsive and reflective practitioners. Many, many of us work out of big urban environments where we are working with families from all different places in the world, all different cultures, all different religions, that influence the way they see separation and divorce.
If we come into mediation with our own value set and not much awareness of our own biases, we risk doing harm to those families who may have different views and lenses than we do. So we need to first and foremost really do a lot of self-awareness work so that we can understand what worldviews we have and why. It’s really important that we address any biases we might have in ourselves so that they don’t impact the parties we’re working with.
Lots of other disciplines have already confronted a lot of the Eurocentric worldviews that impact the way they work, and I think mediation is catching up to that now.
Q. How do you get students to reflect on themselves so that they can take that forward into a practice?
Jessie: Oftentimes I’ll model it. I’ll say, oh, here’s what got triggered for me. Here’s what I noticed about my own reaction when this party said that. I felt it in my gut or I felt my shoulders rise a little bit. I demonstrate how I notice my own reactions in myself and then what I do with them.
How do I process that within myself without losing my impartiality and without losing my ability to be present with parties? I will walk through it in a really explicit way. Here are the exercises I might do to ground my body. Here’s how I’ve developed that self-awareness. And then I might put a student on the spot to say, what’s coming up for you in this moment?
Becoming a mediator involves a lot of vulnerable introspection. We have to understand ourselves before we can work to understand other people’s conflict.
Q. What advice would you give someone who is hoping to build a career in family mediation?
Jessie: I would encourage folks to be honest with themselves about the amount of self-reflection and continued reflective practice they are going to have to do in order to be a mediator that really supports people to make decisions that work for them and their family. So much of our bias, belief, worldview can accidentally influence parties.
We need to be super aware of what’s going on internally. We need to know how we were socialized, what we believe to be true about a parent’s role, a female parent vs. a male parent, that sort of thing.
It requires a lot of self-work, and that’s what I think trips up new mediators the most. During a role play, I’ll ask them to vulnerably reflect on a bias that I can see coming out and they go oh, I didn’t realize this was going to be about me. I thought it was going to be about them.
You’ve got to be ready to hear some tough stuff, to integrate that feedback, and to provide that feedback to your fellow learners. Because this is really the only way that we’re going to grow as mediators.
LEARN MORE ABOUT FAMILY MEDIATION TRAINING FROM KOMPASS
Kompass’s 12-week Family Mediation certificate is led by certified, experienced professionals and includes a mix of videos, lectures, and live role plays.
The training can help you earn valuable designations through Family Mediation Canada, Mediate BC, the Ontario Association for Family Mediation, the ADR Institute of Canada, and the ADR Institute of Ontario.
Click below to get more details on courses and chat live with a friendly admissions advisor. We’re here to help!
