​THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NURSING

-THIS IS ONE OF THE STEP BY STEP TO HAPPINESS, ENJOY THE PROCESS-

When I think about nursing the first thought that comes up in my mind is ‘I do a really tough job’. Ask that to the majority of the nurses and most of them they would answer the same.

Why is that? Why instead of thinking ‘ I do a really tough job’, we don’t say  ‘ I do the best job of this world, It really makes me happy’.

It would sound different, is not it? Does it sound like we are not happy? Yes. Why? I have been trying to answer this question for a long time, from the very first time I came back home after a really bad day. I will try to analyze the reasons why we say that. From when I was a student, I found myself very interested in psychology. I studied, thanks to my amazing professor and nowadays a friend of mine, the process of attachment we develop with our parents, especially the mum from the moment we were born. Bowlby and Winnicott are two of the most important specialist in this field. They did some interesting studies on the type of attachment babies have for the mothers. Depending on that we become what we are today, we are deeply affected by the relationship we had with our mother. Reading more about it, Winnicott makes a powerful example. Imagine we are babies, we are completely dependant on others, the only action the baby can do to call for attention is crying: crying for food, crying for pain, crying for poo. If you are lucky enough to be attended is fine, but what if nothing happens. What if the baby is left there without been attended. Just put yourself in the shoes of that baby, you cannot do absolutely anything to reverse the process, you are left there crying. Now, this has been found to create traumas that are going to be part of the person forever. It will be part of you and you won’t even necessarily know it because you do not remember.

Many other behaviors like those ones shape us, and they go and shape us right there when we cannot defend ourselves.

Depending on this kind of experiences (and many more) we start to behave accordingly to what we experienced. When we are born and we grow, we are filling up our luggage of experiences already, without even having the capacity to decide for our destiny. I invite to read more about that, perhaps you will find some analogy about who you are and why you behave in some ways rather than others. I decided to take this studies forward and I applied this theory specifically for nurses. I wrote my dissertation about that, if you are interested I could share it with you. I wanted to study the type of relationship the nurses has with the patient and depending on the way the nurses behave with the patient, analyzing what kind of relationship they had with the mother. I remember very well when on a sunny day in September, during my lunch break in between one lecture and another,  I met my professor. We were discussing the topic of the dissertation and how to work on that and he said something ‘Anybody that choose a profession of help has a lack at one point of their life and is trying to compensate it helping someone else’. I did not get it, I was not even close to getting what he told me, I was too young and too concentrated on other aspects of my life. Make yourself a question at this point and then I will tell you about my experience:

Why did you choose nursing?

Just answer to yourself. Now think about the relationship you had with your parents. Ask now: what kind of nurse are you? Again, answer to yourself. The last question is: what kind of relationship you had with your parents? It is like building a puzzle, a very complex one. Putting together this pieces can be hard, sometimes (at least it was for me) painful. I will introduce myself to have an example. I have no memories at all of the first years of my life. I know the details explained by my parents only. Before continuing I need to make a premise. My parents are lovely people, nice and I believe they gave me individually their own 100% until today. I feel very lucky to have them and whenever I need them they will always be there for me. This is not about pointing my finger towards them trying to put the blame on them for the ‘problems’ I have today. When I talk about problems I mean insecurities. I had and I have a lot of them. Facing them it was the beginning of a journey. Recognising one by one all the insecurities were coming up during my life was my beginning of putting the puzzle together. One of my biggest was not to be good enough. Not good enough at school, at work, playing football, being a good partner, being good, only good. I think from here anybody can exchange with what I have just said. The way I was balancing this was to try and do that extra action to compensate for that. It was always very though.

You create an image of yourself which you never know if you are wearing ‘a mask’ or it is the real you.

I saw myself changing and readjusting so many times and for so many times going back to the same starting point, lost. I did not know who I was and what I was doing. In my nursing who I was and what I was doing was reflecting on me being very caring, too caring, not on my chords. If you think that is good, you are wrong. It is exhausting, for me and you end up doing everything for the patients. You know how bad that is for the patients and for their recovery. Those aspects of my insecurities would come up in my personal life as well leading me to an infinite vortex of unknown. I lost myself trying to compensate for a lack I had with my parents. You might wonder how do I know it is because of my parents? Because I am conscious of what my parents gave me and what they did not. How come? Because also they had problems with their parents and so on. It does not mean they do not love you, it means that nobody is perfect and nobody can be a perfect parent.

From the moment I started to realize so many things about the relationship with my parents and about my own behaviour towards all sorts of situation, a world opened up.

Going through it was tough and it is still hard. But there it comes the solution. Very simple and straightforward. Leave the blame on the side, instead be grateful to your parents, perhaps feel grateful you had them. Begin to understand the beauty of your life and accept who you are. Once you accept who you are, accept and be aware of your behavior toward yourself and others. That, of course, include your nursing life. There is nothing to change, just make that little extra effort to be aware of the mechanism you have been trapped until today, you can escape them but not only, you can look at them with different eyes and make of your ‘problems’ a solution. Look at the qualities that those ‘problems’ took you. For me, those insecurities taught me always to push harder and be more focus in life. It taught me there is a fine line in between caring about myself and caring about others. It taught me life is beautiful just because there are those problems because life without them is not as nice as it looks.

-THIS IS ONE OF THE STEP BY STEP TO HAPPINESS, ENJOY THE PROCESS-

Lorenzo Pilastri