There was something different though in recalling and reflecting on the
past as opposed to current experiences. One's past would be visible in
view of how one approached and experienced the present.
Self-confrontation moved me beyond confining myself either to the past
or to the present. In my writings one could detect a comparison of what
had been known with what was coming to be known. It was as if a light of
a different hue lit up the whole--past and present--as a different
scene. Similarly I viewed and experienced my clinical experience
differently. I gained awareness of a quality of my being that always had
been there, but which I hid. Now I valued this part, struggled with it,
and expressed it directly with courage, integrity, and pride. The power
with which this self-actualization imbued me has been sculpturing my "I"
into a form of my choosing ever more acceptable to me, and accepting of
others.
Concept Development
In a nursing theory course the final assignment was: develop a concept
relevant to nursing. Again I found myself struggling. The didactically
stated importance of investing precious time and energy into
constructing a synthetic conceptualization of a term eluded me. Time and
energy spent to better understand man as he was known to me in the
nursing situation seemed so limited. In these situations persons were
expressing so many things at one time, how could the conceptualization
of one term be relevant. Finally I understood: no one was saying that
any one term could equate any particular or group of {98} nursing
situations. They were saying that to communicate the nature or
experience of nursing with words, to develop nursing theory, relevant
terms needed clarification as to the meaning they conveyed and
delineation as to their inclusiveness and exclusiveness.
As this struggle subsided I could hear, "a term could be developed as a
concept or synthetic construct if one conceptualized its why, what, how,
when, and where and how these interrelated." In approaching concept
development the last but not least hurdle was, what term did I consider
relevant enough in nursing to expend this precious time and energy on
considering the many possibilities. The first term I began to
intellectually play with was "ambivalence." Now, I would attribute my
selection of "ambivalence" to my then existing ambivalence about
conceptualizing a synthetic construct. Then, I based its selection only
on its existence in my clinical nursing world. I was working
therapeutically on a regular, individual basis with an ambivalent
adolescent male labeled diagnostically as a paranoid schizophrenic. I
began to consider my clinically recorded data of my sessions with Bob
through ambivalence. What were the relationships between why, how, what,
when, and where Bob expressed ambivalence?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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