A nurse who was learning Intrinsic Coaching® was brought into a situation involving a man who was "stubbornly refusing" to put his mother into hospice care. By doing so, he was prolonging his mother's suffering and depriving someone else of the bed. Day after day, no progress had been made in changing this man's mind and now it was her turn to try to get him to do what seemed obvious to everyone but him that he should do.
As she started talking to him, she intentionally chose to regard him as capable, creative, and complete, something that she had to do so she could see more than what others told her about him, which just happened to make sense to her, too. Doing so, of course, changed how she talked to him and that was essential to what followed.
When she asked him what was important to him regarding his mother's care, out came the story that no one knew. His mother had adopted him when he was old enough to know that she was rescuing him. She had been dedicated to him from that point on, never wavering in her love, even though he needed to be rescued over and over until he finally became the man she had always seen in him. Now, a team of healthcare professionals were asking him to give up on the woman who had never given up on him. He just couldn't do it.
The nurse's internal dialogue - her systemic thinking - gave her the impulse to start trying to convince him that he wouldn't be giving up on her but she recognized it as just that - her trying to get him to replace his thoughts with hers, which is what everyone else had already been trying to do and judging him for refusing. So, instead, she was quiet and listened some more.
Then she told him she was going to change his mother's dressings and asked him if he wanted to come and help. He said he did. As she changed his mother's dressings, he saw a part of his mother's experience he hadn't seen before. Before he had always been asked to leave and now he had been asked to be a part of it. As they talked, he asked her questions and she answered them and she also asked him in different ways and regarding different details what he was wanting for his mother's care.
By the time his mother's dressings were changed, she had come to see him more clearly and fully than before. How sad, she thought, that judging him had seemed more sensible than asking him what he was wanting. And how grateful she was for her new thinking and skills because by asking him what he was wanting he gained clarity, too, and saw his mother, himself, and their relationship in a more clear and full light than before.
His mother had dedicated everything she had to protect him from pain and surround him with all the comfort that she, as a loving mother, could provide. Now it was his turn to do the same for her, to protect her from pain and surround her with comfort, as only her loving son could do.
It would be in a hospice environment, one that would best support him in giving his mother all that he wanted for her in his love and gratitude for all she had wanted for him.
This story was told to Christina Marshall, founder of the Intrinsic Coaching® methodology. June, 2009
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