Welch Alex Clinical Psychology Professor Urdang 3-01-07 Midterm Exam
For this paper I interviewed a fellow Wheaton student of whom I have only seen in passing. Carla is an eighteen year old freshman and is currently planning on majoring in Studio Art here at Wheaton College. I chose to interview a freshman because I thought it would be an interesting and very important time period in a person's life. The transition of leaving home and going away to school can have a significant effect on someone's personality and emotions and I was curious as to how other people handled the change. During the interview I discussed many topics with Carla such as her family life and her thoughts on leaving home as well as issues concerning money and relationships. Carla grew up in a small suburb of Philadelphia with her mother. Her parents got separated when she was four and went through a horribly drawn out divorce that started when Carla was four and was finalized when Carla was ten years old. Carla lived with her mother during this time and rarely saw her father at all. Her mother and father barely spoke to one another and Carla's father refused to pay child support on numerous occasions which often resulted in vicious legal battles. Due to the fathers lack of financial support Carla and her mother were forced to move to a smaller house and had to drastically cut down on their expenses so her mother could send Carla to a good private school.
When speaking of her father she was soft spoken but I could still sense the resentment in her voice as well as a hint of guilt. She later told me that she had barely spoken to her father in over 3 years but just recently before she had come to Wheaton he had contacted her a couple of times and seemed to want to start up some sort of a relationship, which I though accounted for the slight guilt that I heard in her voice. Due to the fact that it was only Carla and her mother for a large portion of her life she had an extremely close relationship with her other and attributes most of her sanity to her. She said that leaving her mother was one of the hardest things she had to deal with when leaving for school. I then continued to ask Carla about her cultural and ethnic background and she informed me that her mother was almost 100% Irish and her father was 100% Lebanese. She didn't really identity with the culture from either her mother or fathers side but said that if she would have to identify her self as one or the other she would identify as Irish. I also assumed she did this because of her close relationship with her mother and her little knowledge of her father. When asked about her values and what she values most in life she was quick to respond that she placed great value on her friends and on her artwork, which she says is one of the major things she does to calm and relax herself when she is stressed. She also emphasized that trust and loyalty and a need to have fun were traits that she valued most in her friends. I assumed that Carla put so much emphasis on trust and her friends because of her seemingly unstable family life she experienced as she was growing up, her friends were her home base.
When asked the question "In terms of your current life, what experience/s would you say were the most crucial turning points" she made it very clear that it was her parents divorce and her father's remarriage to a woman whom she hated that had the most effect on her life to date. Another crucial turning point in her life was leaving home and coming to Wheaton College and she said it had taken her all of last semester, which was longer than she had anticipated, to get situated and used to her surroundings. The next question I asked Carla evoked the most revealing answer throughout the entire interview. I simply asked her if she currently had a boyfriend, in which she responded no. I then asked her what her relationships with the opposite sex were usually like and that's when she revealed to me that she had never had an actual relationship with a man. She said she had dated around in high school but it never actually got involved enough to develop an actual relationship. I found this very revealing and immediately associated this lack of emotional intimacy with the opposite sex to her absent relationship with her father. I have chosen to focus on this detail of Carla's life and find an explanation for her actions through a couple different psychological perspectives. According to Carver and Scheier's work (1988) on Erik Erikson Carla is in the young adulthood stage of her life where the conflict is intimacy vs. isolation. Intimacy is described as a person's ability to develop a close and warm committed relationship with another person, which could include both sexual and non sexual relationships. Erikson (1988) believed that in order to have true intimacy one must be willing to open up to another person and disclose personal
aspects of your life. Although he doesn't specify that these relationships need to be with the opposite sex I truly believe that Carla's inability to form an intimate relationship with someone of the opposite sex stems from insecurities relating to the poor relationship she has with her father. She is afraid that if she opens up to a male figure she will once again end up feeling rejected like she did with her father. So instead of accomplishing intimacy within this life cycle, Carla has found herself at the opposite end of the spectrum and deals with her from isolation relationships with the opposite sex. Isolation is described as the feeling of separation from others where you are unable to communicate with them. According to Erikson (1988) a person can drift into isolation for different reasons. One reason being that there is simply no one there to fill your need for intimacy so therefore you drift into isolation or another reason being because you fear that you will lose your own sense of identity in the process of forming a intimate relationship with someone else. Another theory that could be used to explain this type of behavior would be Bowlby's theory of secure and fearful attachment. In this theory Bowlby (2008) believes that a persons ability to form attachments with others stems from the relationships they experienced during infancy and childhood. In order for a child to be securely attached he had to experience feelings of trust, comfort and intimacy with their parents as children. If the child grew up with these feeling he will be able to easily get close to others as an adult without fear of abandonment. Since Carla experienced rejection and abandonment from her father at a very young age I don't believe that she is securely attached. Rather I feel that Carla
has what Bartholomew and Horowitz (2008) call fearful attachment. Fearful attachment is apparent in infants when the infant shows little sign of distress during separation from the parent and shows few sings of clinging to the parent upon return. In adults this is apparent when people (like Carla) choose to not invest themselves with relationships and express discomfort in getting close to others. Another theory that could be applied to this situation would be the theory of object relations. The theory of object relations focuses on the bond between ones ego and an outside object, the object always being another person. All object relation theorists, such as J. Klein (1987), agree and emphasize the fact that a persons' pattern of relating to others is laid in early childhood and these patterns will reoccur consistently throughout this person's life. I believe this theory relates well to Carla because she experienced a sense of rejection from her father when she was a child and this stress was internalized and therefore she will carry and apply these representations to the men that she meets throughout her life. As a whole I thought the interview went pretty well. Before we started the interview I tried to remember some of the things we read in the Interviewing in Action book. I found Bianca Cody Murphy and Carolyn Dillons (2003) book really helpful in giving me appropriate guidelines and hints to make an interview go smoothly. I made sure to look at nonverbal communications such as the person's tone of voice, body posture, eye contact and facial expressions while at the same time trying to be aware of my own affect so I would put her at ease. It was hard
though to find a quiet area on this campus that was aesthetically pleasing as well, so unfortunately we ended up going to a collaboration room in the library and I would have preferred somewhere a little warmer. It was without a doubt awkward for a large portion of it in the beginning because I had never been introduced to Carla before and I could tell she was uncomfortable opening up and telling me a lot of things. She did disclose the problems that her family had throughout her childhood but she was very hesitant and I don't think she told me most of it. She was much more at ease telling me about her transition from home to life at college, although I didn't find anything really outstanding in her responses on that subject, it seemed a lot less personal. If I were to do the interview again I think it would be a lot better if we could have more than just one meeting because the more at ease she got with me the more information she'd be willing to provide. As an interviewer I think I did a good job at putting her ease by having a more casual conversation and not sounding too professional, which isn't my style. Although there were times where I think I could have pressed her a little harder for information in terms of her family or how she felt about her father deserting her. I also wished I had asked more questions about her fathers new wife and what it was about her the Carla disliked so much and in return how did this woman feel about Carla and if she felt that effected her relationship with her father over the years. I felt a little uncomfortable getting that personal with her right off the bat and I keep thinking that if maybe I had pressed a little harder I would have gotten more information out of her. As a closing note, I am aware
that I was supposed to focus more on how she manages to deal and cope with her everyday problems but she didn't have any straight answers for me on that topic. She dodged the question every time I asked her about it, whether it was because she didn't quite understand what I was getting at or she just didn't want to answer, I'm not entirely sure. But when she revealed that she had never had a boyfriend before I found it very interesting and right away thought there was a correlation between that and the absence of her father, so I decided to run with it and from my findings I am sure that there is a positive correlation between the two. I found this exercise very appropriate and a useful experience that I'm sure will serve as great practice if I ever do decide to go into clinical work of any kind.