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.
