Before entering school, I was, for two years, a mental health psychiatric clinical nurse consultant to a staff of forty-five visiting nurses. I had become intrigued { 105} with what I had come to understand about consultation related to clinical situations. I wrote a paper for publication on the subject. Busy in the process of returning to school, and awaiting the publication of two other papers--both of these proceedings feeling unreal and out of my control, not to mention self-exposing--I merely filed in my desk the typed submittable rendition of this consultation paper. Now, I dug it out. This meant that I had two conceptualized presentations of similar type personal experiences in nursing consultation to compare and contrast. From these, my conceptualization of clinical, and the values on which my clinical practice rests, could be extrapolated.
A Student Consultation Experience Becomes Clinical
In the graduate student nurse consultation experience I felt helpless, confused, unwanted, guilty, anxious, and unimportant. It was a passion-filled experience for me. As a nurse-student consultant among interdisciplinary nonstudent-consultants I experienced dependency for my being and doing on persons I viewed as anxious, critical, nonempathetic, and inadequate. We were attempting to offer consultation to a professional group of nonpsychiatric mental health oriented consultees who were anxious and felt inadequate in this area. I felt forced into an observer rather than participant mode of being, and my recorded data support this. Impotency comes to mind when I recall this experience, as well as a racking rage and suffering that obliterates feelings of love, good-will, tenderness, or hope. About that time I was reading Nietzsche's eternal recurrence phenomenon[15] and viewed it most pessimistically--all was awful, it would continue to be awful, life was just a vicious cycle of awfulness.
Defense or health, it is questionable. Suddenly, perhaps it was having hit feelings of rock bottom, I began to view Nietzsche's eternal recurrence phenomenon optimistically. Did the polarization of my negative feelings magnetically call forth my opposite feelings? All, now, contained the new, it would continue to contain the new, life was a series of similar and yet different cycles that always contained the new.