In this work consultation experience my feelings were openness,
reflectiveness, pain, helpfulness, alertness, searchfulness,
appreciativeness, receptiveness, responsiveness, wantedness, competence,
joy, and importance. It was both a passionate and a dispassionate
experience. As a working consultant I met with consultees either alone
or as part of a collaborating team of consultants. Often the situations
the consultees presented which they struggled with and stayed in struck
me with awe. They aroused my humility while making me feel whole and
fulfilled in my participation with the consultees. In my explorations of
and with the consultees my presence, thereness, and authenticity were
all important. Buber would say that my aim in consultation was to
"imagine the real" of what the consultee and the patients and families
she discussed with me "could be."[16] This was my initial disposition. I
aimed to be open to and accept the potentials of these others.
In initial receptiveness, grounded in my comfort, was the "key" to the
"door" of the consultant-consultee "I-Thou" relation in which I could
come to know intuitively the experience of this particular other
nurse-in-her-lived-nursing-world. The consultees offered their
lived-nursing-worlds each in their unique ways. Some discussed directly
their pains, joys, adequacies, and inadequacies. Some discussed
indirectly their panic, success, action, and immobilization. Some beyond
being able to discuss their lived-worlds {107} spontaneously acted out
their lived-worlds. For example, these often behaved toward me as their
patients and families behaved toward them. These kinds of acted out
lived-worlds I had to sense my way into to understand. When I began to
wonder what it was that they wanted from consultation to take back to
their lived-nursing-worlds, I would pull out of the "I-Thou" form of
relating. This wonderment became my conscious clue. It was time to
reflect and look at what my explorations had uncovered.
At this point transcending this "I-Thou" relation, I would look at "It."
Seeing, now, what was within me, what the condition of my being was that
I had intuitively taken on from the consultee, I would set it apart from
myself, and see it as an empathic response. I knew that these feelings I
experienced which I received existentially, globally through the
compound of the consultee's words, tone inflection, volume, facial
expression, posture, and positioning to me were what she experienced in
her-nursing world. Verbalization of this empathized understanding
fulfilled several purposes: (1) it conveyed my sympathy or joy with, and
always my caring, (2) it validated that I saw it as it was for this
nurse, and (3) it opened the door to our working through the possible
meanings of the nurse's experience and to speculating about outcomes of
alternative future nurse actions and behaviors.
Cognitively the range of these consultation discussions was broad. Some
common themes were social and health histories of families, pertinent
psychological growth and development factors of persons in the families
of concern to the consultees, relationships between persons within the
situations, resources available to the families, ways the consultees
could relate with the parents and patients' families, friends, and other
professionals in the situation, and the meaning of all these themes to
the particular consultee.
This clinical consultation experience necessitated my being certain
ways. It necessitated my being authentic with myself with regard to what
responses were called forth in me in relating with a particular
consultee. I viewed honesty with the consultee as a value necessary to
the consultation process. In approaching the consultation I needed to be
open to the consultee's angular view and predisposed toward an "I-Thou"
relationship. The "I-Thou" relating necessitated subsequent scientific
understanding extrapolated from it through reflection on it as "I-It."
My hope in consultation was to offer both a cognitive, as well as, an
ontic experience in which a mutual feeling apart from and toward the
other would exist. This latter seemed most important to me. If the
consultee experienced my being authentically present with her, she then
would be apt to offer this type of relationship to the patients and
families of concern to her.