Learning to Enter Flow in Interacting with Potential Patients

In this final analysis of two interviews, I would like to examine the obstacles and mistakes that I encountered during the first interview and the improvements in the second interview by evaluating the levels of self-disclosure of each interviewee and the natures of the messages-both mine and the subjects’, as well as the quality of expressions, such as body languages.

The interviewees exhibited drastically different levels of self–disclosure; while the first interviewee, Ms. Jun, indicated signs of societal bias, the second interviewee, Mr. Keranakis did not have much difficulty describing his illness in great details and was able to express his feelings. For instance, Ms. Jun dodged revealing her complex feelings by giving a series of very short answers to most of the questions regarding her family and personal life. After the interview, she revealed to me that in her upbringing in a strict, “old school” Asian family, self-disclosure is considered as lack of emotional control and personal weakness: “There is a societal bias against self-disclosure. It isn’t considered �nice’ to talk about yourself too much, or to discuss your feelings or needs outside a narrow family circle”(Messages, 25) In contrast, the second interviewee, Mr. Keranakis, gave lengthy, detailed answers to the most questions. More notably, he openly expressed a wide spectrum of emotions such as doubt (“My son told me to try it [Eastern medicine treatment] anyways” The second interview, 2), anger (“That was a mess. I think they made me worse” The second interview, 2; “I am all fed up now” 5), gratitude and love (“Meri can’t stand the pain I am going through though, she gets hurt by it. She doesn’t sleep either. She takes very good care of me” 5) and even a sense of humor (“Then again, I was a surgeon, we never got along with internal medicine anyway, haha” 7).

Although the interviewees have shown different levels of self-disclosure, I felt that both interviewees gave earnest answers, free of noticeable contaminated messages. However, the conciseness of the answers of Ms. Jun can be viewed as a sanitization of her messages regarding her personal life, such as her romantic life and wedding plan. At the end of the interview, she revealed that “there are a lot of things that cause stress in my life right now. Like I don’t know what direction