Composing Peace: Conflict, Family, and Connection. Member Spotlight: Lara Traum
When Lara Traum talks about peace, it sounds less like an abstract ideal and more like a daily practice that begins at home. It shows up in family conversations, moments of uncertainty, and the quiet work of helping people navigate change with care. “Peace is not the absence of conflict,” she says. “It’s the recalibration of conflict into productive opportunity.” From her base in Queens, New York, a place she calls “the most demographically diverse county in the world,” Lara brings a deep respect for difference into every room she enters. As a mediator and attorney, she sits with families at some of their most vulnerable moments, holding space not just for agreements, but for the relationships and humanity that remain.
Lara is a first generation American and the daughter of refugees. She is bilingual in English and Russian and practices mediation with families locally and internationally. As an attorney barred in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, her legal work focuses primarily on family and matrimonial law alongside what she describes as “Life Cycle Law”. This includes divorce settlement, premarital agreements, cohabitation and coparenting support, and estate planning. She explains her work simply. “There are many stages of the life cycle that humans need to embark on, and none of the stages should be relegated to administrative systems alone,” she says. “Mediation holds space for all the things that are real for families – law, culture, values, dignity, and the pursuit of peace.”
Her belief in mediation as a human centered process is foundational. Lara describes her approach as multilayered mediation, one that allows for creativity and flexibility. “It’s not a formula,” she says. “You don’t just plug people into a system.” Sometimes that means bringing in extended family. Sometimes religious leaders. Sometimes child specialists. Sometimes nobody at all. “You build the room based on what the family actually needs, not what the process says it should look like.” Her work often extends beyond legal questions into cultural and religious norms that shape family life. For Lara, honoring those layers is essential. “Family peace and integrity begins in the home,” she says. “That’s how we achieve world peace.”
Her path into peacebuilding was anything but linear. Before law school or mediation training, Lara was a musician and choral conductor. She speaks about it with warmth and clarity, noting how natural the transition feels in hindsight. “I was always standing in the cacophony of voices, always trying to blend,” she says. After college, she worked extensively with teenagers through choral programs and began to notice how the dynamics of harmony and conflict in music mirrored the relational dynamics shaping their lives. Harmony, timing, and listening were not just musical concepts. They were human ones.
Lara became a mediator before she became an attorney. She describes the shift not as a sharp career pivot, but as a gradual recognition of what she had always been doing. Today, about eighty percent of her practice is mediation, with collaborative law making up much of the remainder. Beyond her private work, she is deeply engaged in the professional mediation community. She is the immediate past president of the New York State Council on Divorce Mediation and serves as a trainer, preparing new mediators for the field. She is also the co author of the 2026 book Family Lawyer as Peacemaker, a title that reflects her belief that legal practice and peacebuilding are not opposing forces. “Legal work and peacemaking are not mutually exclusive,” she says.
When Lara defines peace, she is clear that it is not about eliminating disagreement. Peace, for her, is an active and participatory process. “It’s not a static endpoint,” she explains. “It’s a way of showing up in relationships, especially when things are difficult.” In mediation, this means facilitating outcomes that the parties themselves can live with. “I would never be comfortable with a resolution that the clients are not satisfied with,” she says, even if it appears successful from the outside.
The challenges of this work are significant. One of the most persistent is compassion fatigue. “In order to immerse authentically, you are also swimming in their murky waters,” she says. Family disputes are emotionally raw, and holding space for them takes a toll. People cry. People shut down. People get defensive. You feel it in your body. Lara emphasizes the importance of self care and intentional pauses, sometimes needing to put in extra effort to reset before returning fully to the work. International families add further layers, including cultural expectations and differing legal frameworks, all of which must be navigated with sensitivity.
Neutrality, she explains, does not mean being without perspective. “As a mediator, I’m still human. I have my own thoughts, biases, experiences,” she says. Her practice of neutrality is grounded in humility. She walks into each mediation reminding herself, “I do not know what matters to them. It’s up to me to learn. I walk into rooms knowing I might be wrong about almost everything, and that’s actually the point.” Her role is to help people tell their stories and facilitate their best outcomes, not her own. There is no one size fits all approach.
Success in her work is often quiet and deeply personal. “Success, for me, is seeing kids who aren’t carrying their parents’ conflict on their shoulders anymore. Smiling children – that it was success looks like” she says. So are former partners who can sit together at an adult child’s wedding or families who are able to remain part of their religious or cultural communities after separation. “We all have spaces where we feel we belong and feel safe,” she says, “and not having to divvy up or lose those spaces after divorce is a marker of success.” When households change shape but participation and belonging remain intact, she sees that as a meaningful form of peace.
Trust building is central to everything she does. Many clients enter mediation skeptical or unsure, but willing to try. The first five to ten minutes of a session are often pivotal. When people realize they are being truly listened to and that no outcome is being imposed, the tone shifts. “Genuine curiosity disarms people,” she says. She takes responsibility for educating herself culturally so that clients understand where her questions are coming from and feel respected in the process.
Politics inevitably enter the room as well. Traum has worked with families whose relationships fractured over irreconcilable political differences, yet who still needed to co-parent or maintain shared responsibilities. She does not see this as unusual. “People can have different political views from one another and still function,” she says. “Polarization is not the material of peace. Bridge building is.” Her focus remains on shared humanity rather than labels, and on creating space where people can connect even when they disagree.
Over time, her understanding of peacebuilding has evolved. Early in her career, she was drawn to problem solving. Now she sees her role differently. “My role is not to be a defending saviour,” she says, “but rather to serve as a lighthouse that ships can use as a guide while sailing through their storm.” Empowering others to find their own solutions is, for her, the real work.
What gives her hope is both the persistence of peacebuilders and the reality of conflict itself. She finds hope, she says, “every time there is a child who grows up between multiple homes and is well adjusted and reflecting well on it.” She finds it in trainees who realize how much complexity they are capable of holding. If she could change one thing about the field, it would be the growing polarization within mediation communities themselves. She worries about slipping into advocacy that narrows who is included in bridge building. Her vision remains expansive. Peace work, she believes, must include people we do not typically think of as peacebuilders. That, too, is part of holding space for what is real.
Article by Shamailah Islam, MBBI Writer