Trust is key to orientation. Mediation creates and nurtures trust. What is "trust"? A belief that a person can be relied upon. Mediation is based on this confident expectation. Mediation is resolution of disputes by consensus. An agreement is brought about by trust and held together by trust. Mediation is essentially a search for consensus. There is a lot of give and take before it snow balls in to a consensus. It is not a mere patchwork of concessions. Mediation teaches people that faith in others, as an investment, yields returns. It is not a mere process of extracting matching waivers from either party.
Mediators can help parties establish trust and work together effectively in a number of other ways during the mediation as well. Allowing all the parties to "tell their stories"--to explain how they feel and why--can generate a level of understanding and empathy that begins to break down barriers between people. Mediators can also help disputants to state their grievances in a nonaccusatory way, and can help them redefine or "reframe" the conflict in an integrative or "win-win" way, rather than a "win-lose" way. Although such a reframing is not always possible, when it is, it makes the opponent much less threatening, and can be very helpful in establishing greater levels of trust between the parties.
Trust in the opponent is built up slowly over time, as the parties work together, get to know each other better, and prove to each other that they are reasonable, predictable, and worthy of trust. Sometimes trust-building exercises are undertaken before formal negotiations or mediations begin. Disputants can be brought together to work on a joint project (independent of any joint problem solving they might do) or they might spend time together socially, or involved in special trust-building programs. In the United States, for example, groups are sometimes taken on multi-day outdoor adventure trips, where participants have to learn to depend on each other to provide food and shelter and find their way. These moderately stressful experiences can draw people together very quickly and can build a level of trust between former disputants that far surpasses any that they had before.
