Professional Family Mediators: Who Are They?
December 8, 2015
Hosted by Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
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Guest Information
Episode Description
What is the history of family mediation in the U.S.? When, how, and why did it start? Many people thought that family mediation would become the first choice approach to divorce in the 1980’s. Why did that not happen? Why are there still so many people who have never heard of family mediation? Why does that matter? What makes a family mediator a professional? Why did the founders of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM) decide to form the organization? What are APFM’s current goals? How will the public benefit from APFM’s work? How common is it for people to get divorced without hiring lawyers to represent them? Five founding members of APFM, one guest at a time, discuss these questions and more.
Family Matters
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Our goal is to share good ideas about helping all kinds of families handle the challenges and problems that are common in today’s world. We seek to help people heal, grow, and thrive in a culture in which marriage, parenting, and other family relationships are under great stress.
We will feature experts on a variety of family matters. Topics may include building and maintaining healthy relationships, family mediation, divorcing with minimal damage, strengthening marriages, LGBT families, forming and maintaining stepfamilies, single parents, creating constructive separation agreements, addiction, preventing or ending abuse, and other Family Matters.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D is an author, speaker, professional family mediator, Director of Colin Family Mediation Group, and a Founding Member of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM).
Having survived a nightmarish divorce, Dr. Colin actively supports divorce reform efforts, teaching people how to take a lot of the pain, financial cost, acrimony, and trauma out of divorce. She also loves learning and teaching about building healthy relationships and solving family problems long before anyone has a reason to consider divorce. She has been a foster parent, a married parent, a divorced single parent, and a remarried stepparent.
Formerly a research psychologist studying attachment and other aspects of human development, Dr. Colin has been providing family mediation services since 1999. She specializes in helping couples and ex-couples develop co-parenting plans and financial agreements that support their children’s security, self-confidence, and healthy development as well as their own adult well-being.
Dr. Colin has published two books, “Human Attachment" and "The Guide to Low-Cost Divorce in Virginia: How to Do It Yourself.” She has also written a variety of articles published in journals and on the Internet.
