How can a nurse let herself know her human responses and the breadth and
depth of the possibilities called forth by the other? How can she be,
search, experience, become in an accord with the calls and responses of
her lived nursing world? It is a chosen, deliberate life-long process.
The process itself is generative. One experience opens the door for the
next. In humanistic nursing practice theory we call this kind of
experiencing authentic, genuine, or "letting be what is." It is man
conscious of himself, not necessarily acting out, but aware of his human
responses to his world and their meanings to him. This quality of
personal authenticity allows one's responsible chosen actions to be
based in human knowledge rather than human defensiveness. Man is a
knowing place. From education and living experience one assumes an
initial innate force in human beingness that moves man to come to know
his own and others' angular views of the world. Humanistic nursing is
concerned with these angular views, these differences being viewed by
nurses responsibly and as realities that are beyond the
negative-positive, good-evil standard of judgement. Or, for example,
nursing is concerned with how this particular man, with his particular
history, experiences being labeled with this general diagnosis and being
admitted, discharged, and living out his life with his condition as he
views it in-his-world.
Man has the inherent capacity to respond to other man as other man. Only
each unique nurse faced with the chaos of her alternatives in a
situation can then choose either to relate or not to relate and how to
relate in-her-nursing-world to others. Choosing to and how to relate or
respond cannot be superimposed on man from the outside by another. A
person, to a degree, can be coerced to behave outwardly in a certain
way. For example, physically, in a spatial {6} sense, a nurse can be
ordered into parallel existence with another. Being existentially and
genuinely present with another is different. This human mode of being is
chosen and controlled by the self. It takes responsible self-ordering
that can arise only in the spirit of one's own disciplined being.