Nursing

How do my spiritual pains affect my responses to patients? Your spiritual pains or woundedness can affect your care of patients either positively or negatively. You can choose the outcome. A negative outcome can occur when an HCP who has not reflected on his or her inner experience tries to address the spiritual pain of a patient. Such HCPs may be unaware of, afraid of, or misunderstand their deeper feelings, so they are unable to accurately identify and explore patients’ spiritual pains. When patients realize an HCP does not understand them, they clam up, change the topic, give superficial responses to queries, or in other ways indicate disinterest in continuing to talk about their spirituality. This type of experience can increase patients’ mistrust of health care providers. Your woundedness, instead, can become a bridge or tool for healing communication. A healing response requires recognizing a patient’s innermost feelings. Awareness of your own deeper feelings—your own spiritual themes and inevitable woundedness—is requisite to being able to hear another’s. Thus, an HCP’s life story, with its joys and wounds, becomes a source of information for interpreting a patient’s story. For example, a nurse who is frustrated because she thinks she has not made a difference in the life of a “noncompliant” patient can begin to understand the experience of a parent whose “noncompliant” diabetic teen enters the emergency department with ketoacidosis. Or the clinician who can recognize the death and finality of every moment can be a healing companion for a dying patient.



EXERCISE 2.3 Healers do not need to have had the same experiences as patients but, to be compassionate, they do need to recognize how they have shared similar emotions. Complete the empty boxes to learn how you and patients share deep emotions. Examples are provided.



But if I’m always being wounded, won’t I die?