I was honoured to meet ‘Jane’ when her psychiatrist referred her for supportive out-patient therapy. Interestingly, this was around the same time that I had fully embraced the Tidal Model to guide my practice.
Our journey together began as we worked through the Holistic Assessment, which took three visits to complete. I remember Jane commenting at the time, that she found the questions thoughtful and appreciated the transparency of the documentation. Through this process, she was very able to clearly define her problems, her strengths, her resources and her goals. This work served to launch our collaborative journey towards recovery and reclamation.
Jane is bright, articulate, highly motivated and eager to work towards her goals. She has accomplished much in one year. Her interest in the Tidal Model led her to read the literature I provided and she also searched the Tidal website on a few occasions.
Although I had introduced myself as a nurse on our first meeting, Jane was under the mistaken impression that I was a social worker. After a few months, she noticed my nursing diplomas on my office wall, and expressed much surprise and pleasure that I was indeed, a nurse. She told me about her past experiences, which had been extremely negative. She described nurses as being ‘disrespectful, non-caring, and outright brutal,’ and her experience as ‘being violated.’ Jane described her relationship with nurses as punitive where ‘if I didn’t get with the program, I didn’t get privileges.’ Following an involuntary hospitalization in the United States about twenty years ago, she was left with a lasting impression of nurses being like the ‘Gestapo.’ Jane has said that she might not have attended her visits with me had she known I was a nurse. Instead, she said she felt supported and respected by me. She still marvels, that a model that considers the person as the expert in his or her own health and well-being, could be considered anything but just common sense.
I try to use the Tidal Commitments and Empowering Interactions with all my patients. I have these posted on my office wall so my patients know what they can and should expect from me. I truly value the Tidal Model because it fits so well with my own personal and professional values and beliefs about nursing and person-centred care. So Tidal nursing was not a leap for me. The Tidal Model provides me with a framework that is congruent with my practice. In the past, the approaches I used became boring and useless paper exercises. Now, I feel like I live this person-centred approach every day. Because it is recognized as research- based, it gives validity to what I do, especially with my colleagues in other disciplines.
