MiKK Ongoing Training 2025
7th · 8nd · 9th · November 2025, Berlin
1. Workshop: Friday, 7th November 2025
10 am – 5 pm
Psychodrama as a Tool in Highly Escalated Mediation Cases
with Kerstin Kastenholz
Workshop Description
This workshop aims to provide participants with an introduction to “Psychodrama” as a powerful, effective and enriching tool for highly escalated mediation cases. Psychodrama combines drama, improvisation, and psychological principles to facilitate emotional healing, self-discovery, and personal growth.
The term “Psychodrama” literally means “acting-out the inner experience”. The idea being to engage the “inner” world through external, dramatic expression. It is originally a therapeutic technique that involves role-playing and dramatic action to explore and express emotions, thoughts and experiences. According to the founder of psychodrama, the psychiatrist and sociologist Jacob Levy Moreno (1892 – 1974), “the truth of the soul can be explored through action”. The idea of this method is to act out scenarios or situations, either from real life or imagined, to help individuals gain new insights, process difficult emotions or help them resolve inner conflicts. Inner truths are staged on a stage. Scenic acting can help to make life more authentic and healthier.
This method can help people not only to understand their current situation differently but also to develop creative solutions for the present and future. Especially in highly escalated cases in mediation, such as in child abduction or international custody dispute cases, psychodrama methods can be used to open up new scope, reflect on the mediator’s own role and seek sustainable solutions. In the mediation process this method is particularly well suited for stage 3 where the feelings are explored and the the interests and needs of the parties are uncovered.
This workshop gives a practical, brief insight into how psychodrama can be used in mediation. Using various psychodrama methods such as “doubling”, “psychodramatic photo” and “conflict line”, the participants have the opportunity to reflect on their work as mediators in highly escalated transcultural family conflicts and to try out these new tools and methods. The focus of this interactive workshop is on movement, encounters and openness to trying something new.
Kerstin Kastenholz
Kerstin Kastenholz is a mediator, psychodrama facilitator, graduate geographer, trainer and training to be a supervisor. She worked as a consultant for International Cooperation in Peru and Cambodia on post-conflict situations and highly escalated resource conflicts for a number of years (starting 2006). During her work in Cambodia, she worked a lot on former mass execution sites. Here, dialog and artistic methods were increasingly applied in order to allow survivors and communities to process and express their trauma and to help facilitate healing.
Kerstin conducted many workshops on transitional justice and mediation in Cambodia, Peru and Germany for very different target groups. She also advised many employees on remembrance work for many years. Publications such as “Eyes on darkness” and “Hasta cuando tu silencio” were produced in this context. In Peru, she trained and advised employees of state and non-state human rights authorities in highly escalated resource conflicts.
In Germany, she combines mediation and psychodrama, particularly in her training courses on conflict management and communication in transcultural contexts. Many of her seminar participants have a refugee or migration experiences and have been exposed to various forms of discrimination and racism.
Kerstin lives in an inter-cultural family herself where three different languages are spoken every day: Spanish, Quechua and German.
Contact:
kastenholz@megem.eu
www.megem.eu
2. Workshop: Saturday, 8th November 2025
10 am – 5 pm
A Family Mediator’s Toolkit: Identifying Coercive Control and Domestic Abuse Before and During Mediation
with Adrienne Cox
Workshop Description
Effective and appropriate screening and assessment for domestic abuse in relation to mediation safety and suitability is paramount in ensuring safe and positive outcomes in mediation. Effective screening is applicable not just when deciding whether to mediate, but in fact throughout the mediation process as in some cases a parent may not openly disclose abuse due to fear or trauma. Screening during mediation can help detect signs of hidden abuse or subtle forms of coercion that might not be immediately apparent.
Research carried out in the UK by Anne Barlow and colleagues in ‘Creating Paths to Family Justice’ in 2017 found that “inadequate screening may lead to traumatic mediation experiences and / or unfair or dangerous outcomes.” This was again highlighted in the Assessing Risk of Harm report published in in the UK in June 2020.
This is especially important in international parental child abduction cases when as mediators, you are assisting parents who are in a particularly heightened state of stress. These situations involve additional layers of complex emotions, fears and concerns, to all family members involved in these cases.
This workshop aims at :
- providing participants with an increased knowledge and understanding of domestic abuse in order to allow them to carry out more effective screening and assessment for domestic abuse. This is to ensure that as far as possible, only clients that are suited to the mediation process, proceed to mediation and that clients are protected sufficiently throughout the process.
- highlighting perpetrator tactics and the impact of domestic abuse (with a focus on coercive control) on the victim/survivor and their children. It will look at screening and assessment both prior to mediation commencing and also screening ‘during the mediation’ and understanding why this is important. There will be a focus on how we might be able to spot that a perpetrator is continuing the abuse in the mediation and then do think about what to do next!
- giving participants the opportunity to think about screening tools and questions to ask clients, as well as reflecting on signposting clients where additional and specialist domestic abuse support is needed.
This interactive training will be a mix of presentation, videos, small group discussion, case studies, large group discussion and role plays as well as time for questions. It is designed to be interactive, thought provoking and informative.
Adrienne Cox
Adrienne has been an accredited family mediator in England for over 20 years. She ceased practice as a family law solicitor in 2000 to focus on mediation and become a Family Law Lecturer at Exeter University in 2002. In 2013 she started her own private family mediation practice and stopped lecturing in 2015. Adrienne joined the Family Mediation Standards Board in 2015 (Responsible for the regulation of family mediation in the England and Wales) as one of its founder members, leading on working panels for both accreditation and training and was involved with, amongst other areas, implementing standards for child inclusive work and co ordinating the PPC Code of Practice. Adrienne retired from the FMSB in July 2020.
Adrienne has trained on mediation foundation training courses and has designed and run mediation courses effective screening for domestic abuse, communication, child focused mediation and child inclusive mediation, which are areas in which she has a particular interest. She has presented at various conferences, in the UK and abroad. Adrienne has been sitting on the Family Solutions Group which is a sub group of the Private Law Working Group ( in England and Wales) and is a founding member of the Mediation and Domestic Abuse Network, whose aim to enable conversations to take place between the Domestic Abuse sector and mediation community which focus on ensuring that mediation is as safe as possible for participants.
3. Workshop: Sunday, 9th November 2025
10 am – 5 pm
**** Change of Programme ****
Emotions as Compass: From Escalated Family Conflicts to Manageable Mediation. An Emotionally-Guided, Systemic Approach to Cross-Border Family Mediation
with Mirella Kreder
Workshop Description
It could be argued that family and child abduction conflicts are like a wildfire: the conflict spreads quickly and is highly destructive – especially in cases where communication between the parents has stopped. In most cases, the conflict is highly escalated before the parties even arrive in mediation. Yet, understanding and addressing the emotional dynamics at the heart of the dispute, underneath the parties’ positions is essential for preventing further escalation and supporting constructive outcomes. Both primary emotions and meta-emotions – the emotions parties have about their own feelings – play a crucial role in shaping perceptions, decisions, and interactions.
In this interactive MiKK workshop, participants will explore how emotions can be mapped, understood, and channelled in mediation using tools such as the “Emotion Map”. Mediators will learn how to identify the underlying emotional drivers of conflict, recognize patterns of manipulation or emotional destabilization and use strategies that ensure each party has the chance to express their needs and interests in a safe and fair environment that and respond in ways that seek to maintain safety, fairness of the mediation process, and also put the focus on the best interest of the child.
Through practical exercises using systemic questioning, resource-oriented capacity building, and emotional intelligence – focusing on empathic attunement, and emotionally grounded communication – participants will gain strategies to support parties in expressing and processing emotions constructively, while also given the chance to develop their own self-awareness and emotional regulation. Participants will explore recognized models, including Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, and Siegel’s Window of Tolerance. Using these frameworks, they will learn to recognize emotional patterns, connect emotions to underlying needs, and understand the limits of self-regulation under stress.
Using the above approaches and methods even highly escalated conflicts can become manageable and solutions-focused by restoring communication and ultimately fostering outcomes that address the parents’ as well as the children’s needs. This approach emphasizes that mediation is not only a process for problem-solving or negotiation, but also an emotionally intelligent, relational practice that requires attentiveness to both the parties’ and the mediator’s inner dynamics. Participants will leave with practical tools and reflective skills to work effectively in high-intensity family conflicts, ensuring that emotions become a source of insight and resolution rather than further escalation.
Mirella Kreder
Mirella Kreder has a longstanding and extensive career in communication and mediation. She graduated in International Business Administration from DHBW Mannheim, Germany, in 2006, and began her professional journey in relationship and complaint management, leadership consulting, and team building at EnBW AG for over a decade. She later earned her Master of Science in Business and Organisational Psychology from Euro-FH Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
Mirella is a qualified mediator specializing in cross-border disputes, business, workplace, and family mediation, including highly escalated child abduction cases. She has been collaborating with MiKK for several years as a CBFM-trained mediator and member of the International MiKK Mediators Network. A native German, Mirella has lived and worked abroad in Belgium, the UK, and the Czech Republic, where she has established herself as an independent consultant, facilitator, trainer, and coach. She is the founder of Mirella Kreder – Integrated Consulting and Mediation, offering services in communication, conflict management, organisational change, and self-development. In her work, she emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, understanding others, and cultural sensitivity, helping clients navigate complex and emotionally charged situations locally and internationally.
Mirella is also a lecturer for the advanced course “The Practice of Intercultural Mediation” at WIFI Österreich, designed for graduates of the mediation diploma course and mediators wishing to deepen and specialize their knowledge. She co-authored the chapter on intercultural aspects of mediation in Ulrich Wanderer’s Mediation and contributed a chapter on the role of communication in life and business in Christoph Nauer’s From No Time to Free Time.
Continuously studying communication processes and emerging trends, Mirella believes that understanding emotions and fostering emotional intelligence is key to resolving conflicts and building bridges in even the most complex contexts.
www.linkedin.com/in/mirellakreder
www.consultandresolve.com
info@consultandresolve.com