ABSTRACT
Moving this interview recursively between content and process gave the family the opportunity to explore relationships across generations. By staying with the content, as they would have had us do, we would have focused on Barbara's dilemma in a way that could have created a push for resolution. Content appeals to all of us as if it was a stationary or fixed reality. It seems comforting to all of us to use content as a means of holding together a particular belief in a "reality." It is more difficult to go forward and to experience change in the content of an experience which seemed to have offered us stability. Process is going forward through experiences and can be the vehicle that changes the meaning of the content of that experience. When we believe in multiple realities and multiple partialities, we have to interview families emphasizing the balance between the content and the process of interactions in order to make it "safe enough" for the multiple realities to emerge. When family members are able to share their ideas as points of view, instead of "truths," they are often able to evoke understanding and compassion for one another.
