Intimacy Paradox Questions

Interview Questions extracted from The Intimacy Paradox for Family of Origin Interviews.

• Prologue: So What Is This Play About?  The parental Narrative Act One: The Parent’s memories
  • Scene I– Earliest memories through Junior High School
    • Tell me your earliest memory in life.
    • Do you have any preschool memories?
    • What about Kindergarten?
    • Was it difficult or easy starting first grade?
    • At grade school were you well connected in the peer group or were you an outsider?
    • More of a leader or a follower?
    • Were there any special successes or traumas during grade school?
    • Any problems with discipline or achievement at school or home?
    • What kind of man was you father, with regard to maleness and masculinity?
    • How would you describe your mother as a woman?
    • have you any memories of your parent’s marriage during those years?
    • How did father relate to women and mother to men?
    • What important messages did you get about male-female relationships?
    • How did your parents handle issues of control and decision making in the home?
    • Who exercised the most control?
    • how were you father and mother as parents in those days?
    • How did they express affection and disapproval toward each other and toward you?
    • What do you think today about your role in the family at that time?
    • Were you a favorite with either parent, or the least favored?
    • How comfortable were your parents in their own sexuality?
    • What messages did you receive about sex and sexual behavior?
    • How has this teaching affected you?
    • Is there anything else of importance about the grade school years?
  • Scene II– Junior High School through the Wedding Day
    • Describe your home during the junior high years.
    • Describe your overall experience at school during the junior high years.
    • How do you remember your personal relationship developing with father and mother and brothers and sisters?
    • Any big problems?
    • Were you well motivated at school in these years?
    • Did you perform up to your ability?
    • did you have a best friend?
    • did you do much dating?
    • Did you have a steady?
    • Did you do the usual sexual experimentation?
    • Was your sexual development as a teenager fairly ordinary, or unusual in any ways?
    • What was your biggest pleasure and your biggest worry in Jr. High school? HIGH SCHOOL YEARS
    • As a senior in high school, how were things between you and your parents, especially about discipline and control?
    • Were you free to make your own decisions, choose your friends, plan your activities?
    • Which parent was the enforcer?
    • Did they generally agree on things?
    • Did you have a way of getting your own way?
    • How about your social life at this time.
    • were you poplar with your peer group?
    • Did you find a good balance between social life and school requirements?
    • Does any one achievement stand out during high school?
    • Did you have any significant love relationships during your senior high years?
    • How did those turn out?
    • where are those people today?  (if you know)
    • Did anything dramatic happen in the lives of your siblings or the family as a whole in these years?
    • When did you start to think about your future at work or college?
    • What were your parent’s ambitions for you?
    • Had you any ideas what you might want to do in life?
    • Was graduation a big day?
    • What do you now think was your biggest psychological or emotional issue during high school? AFTER HIGH SCHOOL TO WEDDING DAY
    • Was college more fun or more work?
    • What about your first job experience?
    • Did you have any significant love relationship prior to meeting each other?
    • Were you active at all, either religiously or politically at this time?
    • Tell me about the first time you laid eyes on each other.
    • When and where did you first see each other?
    • Whom did you see when you first looked at him/her?
    • What did you especially notice and respond to in the other, right from the beginning?
    • How did you get to a first date, and how did that go?
    • how did things evolve into a dating relationship?
    • Who first started talking about marriage?
    • Were your more surprised or more delighted when it became serious?
    • Was the courtship easy and relaxed or conflicted and turbulent?
    • As you think back today, who was that person whom you saw and fell in love with?
    • What attracted you?
    • With whom did you fall in love?
    • What were the attitudes of both families to your projected marriage?
    • Were both generally favorable or not?
    • If not, how did you deal with this disappointment?
    • Do you have vivid memories of the preparations for the wedding day?
    • Is there anything that stands out about the wedding day itself?
    • What is your memory of your spouse on the wedding day?
    • Where did you go for the honeymoon and how was your experience?
  • Scene-III– The Story of the parental Marriage: the Normal Developmental Family experiences.
    • I have some questions about your love life, which I wish to present in a very open-ended way so that you can say as much or as little as you are comfortable with.
    • How did you solve the universal struggle around control and decision making in the marriage?
    • Every marriage takes some attitude toward how husband and wife should relate to members of the opposite sex. Did you come to any agreement about that?
    • Was this a source of conflict?
    • Did any “third party” relationship ever take on the character of “an affair”?
    • Was there every any conflict of loyalties between your commitment to each other and your commitment to parents?
    • were there any big loyalty conflicts involving close personal friends?
    • Any strong differences or opinion about jobs, moves, homes, money, or political or religious beliefs?
    • At some point in life every married person wonders, “How did I ever get myself into a mess like this?”  When did you come closest to divorce, and what kept you together?
    • What nurtured your marriage over the years?
    • What were some of your most difficult times, and what are your best memories?
    • Do you think looking back over everything, that you would marry this man (or woman) again?
  • Scene IV– The Work Life and the Use of Time by Each
    • Are you pleased with the way you’ve spent your life?
    • did you spend too much time at work or not enough?
    • Did you choose your work in the first place or ever come to choose it?
    • Would you prefer to have done something else?
    • Were you adequately educated and prepared for work and for life?
    • Did you have an adequate opportunity to perform and achieve at work?
    • Are you [mother] pleased with your decision not to work outside the home, and not to pursue a career or profession for yourself?  have you been fully satisfied as a homemaker?
    • Are you pleased with the number of children you have had or would you have preferred more or less?
    • Are you pleased with the way in which you divided your time and energy between work outside and work at home?
    • Did the division of labor between you two work out in a satisfactory way?
    • Have you any regrets, especially you mother, that you were born at a time when fewer professional work opportunities were available to women?
    • Have you any thoughts about the importance of work in you life?
  • Scene V– The Parents behind the Parents
    • How would you characterize your experience with your own parents as they became more aged and less competent, more infirm and less independent?
    • How pleasant or uncomfortable was your contact and conversation with your parents in their last years?
    • What expectations and demands did you feel, and how did you cope with these?
    • To what degree did they grow old gracefully?
    • How did they approach their own deaths, and how did each of them actually die?
    • Did you have an opportunity to say all the things you wanted to say to each of your parents?
    • Did you receive any inheritance or favorite possessions?
    • Are there ways in which you see them living on in you?
    • Are there ways in which you see them living on in me?
    • do you have any persisting regrets about your life with them?
    • did you say a direct and explicit good-bye to each before their deaths?
    • Do you have a sense of being emotionally complete with each of them now?

  Act Two: The parent’s Reflections

  • Scene I– Family Traumas: The Universal Events
    • In your view, what caused the divorce?
    • As you remember it, what effort was made to avoid it, both by you and by your spouse?
    • Do you now think the divorce was inevitable?
    • If you could go back in time, would you try to stay married or divorce again?
    • If you divorced again, are there any ways in which you would try to do it differently?
    • Would you do it sooner?  Later?
    • Is there anything about the aftermath of the divorce that you very much regret and would try to do differently?
    • Can you think of particular ways in which you contributed to the problems that led to the divorce?
    • Could you have been different?
    • do you think that your marriage was a mistake in the first place and should not have happened?
    • do you see any positive results from the divorce?
    • Did any good thing come from the marriage?
    • Was any good purpose served?
    • [ page 142 – questions about death of a child ]
    • [ page 143 – questions about alcoholism ]
    • [ Questions about marital infidelity ]
    • [ page 144 – questions about breast cancer  ]
  • Scene II– Looking Back: A Retrospective
    • Would you choose to be born again into the same family, having the same parents and the same general circumstances in life?
    • If you were to make changes, what are the most important changes you would make in the family and the circumstances into which you were born?
    • Would you choose to be your very same self again, with the same body and mind, the same gifts and liabilities?
    • In what ways might you choose to be different?
    • Would you choose to spend your life in the same way again, carrying on the very same work, living in the same places, and pursuing the same goals and values?
    • Do you think, in retrospect, that your growing-up years in the home and at school properly prepared you to deal with life?
    • Were you adequately prepared and adequately warned?
    • As you recall it, were you in charge of your life most of the time or did you feel mostly helpless and at the mercy of circumstances, circumstances that were often unpredictable?
    • In retrospect, what person9s) do you think was the most influential in helping you decide your most important life decisions about your education and friends and work and love?
    • In short, other than yourself, whom did you hold the most responsible for the way in which your life has turned out, and do you feel more appreciation or resentment for that influence?
    • Do you believe that you have had a fair shake in life?
    • Have you been unusually lucky or just average, or was the deck stacked against you?
    • Do you think, looking back, that you struggled more or less than an average amount, with fear or sadness?
    • Have you ever felt hopeless enough or discouraged enough to consider ending your life, even briefly in passing?
    • Do you think that you have been mostly a success or mostly a failure in life, both in your personal and in your work life? What are the reasons for your answer, either way?
    • Do you take most of the credit or responsibility for that outcome, or do you see strongly contributing or mitigating circumstances?
    • Do you think you succeeded in getting your life pretty well together?
    • What achievements first in your work and second in your personal life have given you the greatest pleasure and satisfaction?
    • Do you think that your parents came to see you more as a success or as a failure in life?
    • What were the reasons for that judgment?
    • Did you mostly fulfill or mostly disappoint their expectations?
    • Were they more pleased or more disappointed or more surprised by the way your life turned out?
    • Pick out any two or three key decisions in your life that you would like to have back again.  What are they, and if you had the chance, how might you decide or behave differently?
    • What two or three maters have caused you the most personal embarrassment or shame in life?
    • What have been the most significant loss experiences in your personal life?
    • how have they affected you?
    • How have you coped with them?
    • How do you stand emotionally in relationship to these losses today?
    • What has been the biggest single personal difficulty or challenge in your life that you believed you  have mastered or at least managed well?
    • What major crisis have you survived in your life?
    • In retrospect, what enabled you to survive them?
    • Name two or three persons who have been heroes (or heroines) in your life or people whom you have greatly admired?
    • Can you say why?
    • Who have been the two or three closest and most intimate personal friends in your life?>
    • What have these relationships meant to you over the years?
    • Have you been able consistently to share your inner life with these persons?
    • Have these persons remained trustworthy throughout?
    • Have people treated you overall as well as you have deserved or at least as well as you have treated them>
    • Do you believe that you have been adequately appreciated and acknowledged for your achievements and contributions both in your work life and in your personal and family life?
    • who was your most important spiritual-ethical teacher?
    • When was the time of your greatest spiritual doubt, the darkest night of your soul?
    • What particular beliefs or values have sustained you through your lifetime and have helped you live to this day?
    • Have these beliefs and values changed much since you were a young adult?
    • Do you believe in God today?
    • Has the best moment in your life happened yet?
    • If yes, when was it?  If not, when will it be?
    • has your life been worthwhile?
    • do the story and the outcome of your life make sense to you>
    • Has the effort you’ve made been worth it?
    • has there been on the whole more joy than pain in your life?
    • Do you see yourself as a mostly happy or mostly unhappy person?
    • Do you regard this life as fundamentally benevolent and trustworthy or does the world seem to you to be overall more malevolent and untrustworthy?
  • Scene III– Death and Dying: A Prospective
    • You are now at an age which most key decisions in life have already been made and, indeed, the majority of life has already been lived.  What is it like or you to have reached this age?
    • how are you negotiating this stage of life with your spouse and vice versa?
    • How are you presently feeling about your own approaching death? No one knows, but everyone wonders.  So in that spirit, when do you think you will die?  that is, at about what age?
    • How do you think you might die when that time comes?
    • How would you like to die?
    • Whom would you like to have with you when you die?
    • As you continue in life, whom do you miss the most of those friends or relatives you have lost to death?
    • Do you think you or our spouse is more likely to die first?
    • Do you have a preference?
    • If you are the one who is left, how will you handle that loss and what will you do to fill the void?
    • Would you expect to live for long after your spouse dies?
    • How has your spouse’s death affected you?
    • How would you want or expect your relationship with me to change, if in any way, if your spouse dies before you?
    • Have you any philosophical basis for hope of any religious faith of any sort, with regard to a continuing existence for yourself after your physical death?
    • If yes, on what do you base that hope?
    • If no, how are you handling your expectation (and fear) that you will in every sense totally cease to exist upon your physical death?
    • What do you see as your most important personal legacy or contribution to the world?
    • How do you see yourself living on in your family, especially in me and my children?
    • What expectations or goals, if any, do you still continue to hold for me and my life?
    • If you were to have the choice whether to come back again, would you like to live another life on this earth or will once have been enough for you?
    • Why do you feel about this the way that you do?

  Act Three: The Client’s Declarations

  • Scene I – Two Special Announcements
  • Scene II – A Statement of “Personal Differentness”
  • Scene III – A Statement of Appreciation and Appreciation
  • Scene IV– The Remaining Years: The Continuing Coevolution of the Intergenerational Relationship
    • How will it be to relate as psychological equals?
    • What are the implications of that?
    • What do the “former parents” themselves expect and want now?
    • How does it look to son or daughter?
  • Scene V– Awarding a Gold Star and Preparing for Reentry
    • Are they [ parents ] uncertain or confused about any matter?
    • Is there anything at all that they themselves now feel about the experience they have been through>
    • What is their mood and what is their dominant feeling as they prepare to leave and return home?
    • Have they any as yet unspoken or half-formed questions about anything that has been transacted here?
    • Have they a concern about any implication or message of any sort about either one of them or their personal lives or the family’s history or their relationship to or their influence upon their son or daughter?
    • Is there any implication or nuance that remains unclear or troublesome?
    • Have they been treated fairly?
    • Is there any other business?

Epilogue: So What Was That All About?  The Dynamics of the In-Office

Consultation

• Establishing the contract
• Debriefing Parents
• Follow-up Questions
• Declaration of Independence
• State of the Union
• Today parents, tomorrow the world