Power in the Room: The Invisible Participant
Every mediation has more participants than the sign-in sheet suggests.
You can’t see this one, but you can feel it: who sits taller, who avoids eye contact, who waits to speak until it’s “safe.”
That unseen presence is power, and it shapes everything that happens in the room.
Why Power Matters
Power determines who believes they’re allowed to speak, whose emotions get labeled “reasonable,” and whose pain gets categorized as “too much.”
When we act as though mediation neutralizes all that, we create an illusion of fairness that’s more dangerous than open imbalance. Pretending power doesn’t exist doesn’t make the space neutral; it just makes it dishonest.
Power isn’t always intentional or abusive. Sometimes it’s structural: age, race, gender, education, income, or institutional authority. Sometimes it’s emotional: confidence, language fluency, trauma history, or simple familiarity with conflict itself. But it’s always in the room, and it’s always influencing the process.
Recognizing the Invisible Participant
As practitioners, we need to read power the way we read tone or timing.
Ask yourself in real time:
Who’s directing the pace of the conversation?
Who’s performing calm because they don’t feel safe?
Who apologizes before they speak?
Who hasn’t spoken at all?
The answers will tell you more about the negotiation climate than any opening statement.
Balancing the Room
Addressing power doesn’t mean taking sides; it means balancing conditions.
Here are a few practical interventions:
Name the dynamic without blame.
“Sometimes one voice carries more weight in a room like this. Let’s make sure both are heard.”Adjust structure, not people.
Rotate who speaks first. Offer equal time. Use written reflection or caucus when one party dominates verbally.Regulate yourself.
Your tone and pacing model safety. A dysregulated mediator amplifies the strongest nervous system in the room, and that’s often the most powerful participant.Acknowledge lived experience.
Saying “I can see this topic lands differently for each of you” validates both perspectives without assigning fault.
Power and Trauma
For parties with trauma histories, power isn’t theoretical, it’s physiological.
A raised voice, a sudden interruption, even where someone sits can trigger fight-flight-freeze responses.
Mediators who understand this regulate not only dialogue but the environment itself: seating, tone, breaks, pace. Psychological safety is created through structure, not slogans.
Reframing Our Role
The mediator isn’t a referee balancing fairness after the fact; we’re architects designing spaces where fairness can exist.
That requires humility … and attention.
Power doesn’t vanish because we declared neutrality. It quiets when we make it visible, accountable, and shared.
Closing Reflection
Power is the invisible participant that never leaves the room.
Our task isn’t to silence it or pretend it’s gone; it’s to ensure it doesn’t silence anyone else.
Mediation succeeds not because everyone becomes equal, but because everyone becomes safe enough to be fully human while the work gets done.