Helping, Fixing, Serving
Helping, Fixing, Serving
“Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.”
- Rachel Naomi Remen MD, Kitchen Table Wisdom
By Alan Tony Amberg APRN with JungEun Park-Landis (NMH Chaplain Resident) and Tammy Dubose RN (APRN trainee)
Helping and Fixing
I have asked hundreds of nurses why they entered the profession. Usually, the answer is some version of “I wanted to help people.” Then there are the folks who love the technology, the procedures. Look at the “Surg” part of “Med-Surg.” It may seem that we are “fixing” broken “parts” – but are we mindful enough that these are actually living parts of people?
Often our clinical language does not begin to represent the level of intrusion into the lives and bodies of the people we serve. It speaks of the facts, but not the emotional and psychosocial meaning. Can we remember that people themselves are not the disease? Can we see them rather in their ecosystem, a rich, full tapestry of family, home, career, hopes and dreams?
What’s more, helping and fixing can be exhausting and depleting for us. It’s a one-way interaction. And it’s us “doing” to the patient. “You came to us to be fixed. We are telling you what will fix you. Please let us do our job.” Unfortunately, those pesky patients don’t always do as they are told. (If truth be told, we don’t either. My exercise, sleep and diet today were not stellar either.) Patients are human. They are complex, interactive beings. And so are we.
How Can We Instead Serve?
First, we could change the way we speak about the relationship. Where we speak of working as a collaborative interdisciplinary team, perhaps what we should say is that we are “the patient’s chosen interdisciplinary team.” They choose us to work with and for them. Certainly, they may feel broken and want us to “fix” them. Yet is it good to let them foster that dependent perspective? When we serve people, there is retained a wholeness that we can tap into for this healing journey. It becomes a two-way interaction. For both the patient and ourselves, there is something to be gained and changed by pain, striving and slowly building or re-building. This how we and our patients learn that life is not instant answers. All of us learn patience – how to surmount setbacks and celebrate tiny victories. We all learn grit. If we are willing and diligent, we find compassion, and ultimately, wisdom.
The chaplains teach us to approach all our patients as though they have what they need already within them. A hidden, and as yet unborn wholeness, just waiting for the patient to find it. We can benefit by asking ourselves: “What if I acted as though the patient has something wonderful to gain from all of this? What if restoration to baseline is not the only goal, but also integration and transcendence?”
Ultimately, Serving Serves Us Both.
If we are fixing and helping – that is, giving to our patients in a one-way flow – we can get depleted. If we insist that this movie run on our script, then the patients must take our direction, repeat our dialogue, and we all assume that the trajectory is always “better.” Healing done this way means we have both missed out. We have deprived the patient the opportunity to own their process, and we have set ourselves up for a very narrow definition of success. Whether they are returning to life, finding a new normal – or seeking a loving and peaceful death – we must first serve them, support their ownership of their process and allow ourselves to embrace witnessing their process of becoming their best selves. When we truly serve and partner, whatever their health, everyone grows, and everyone transcends – meaning we get to become our best selves, too.