Metaphor-reflection in my healthcare experience

Abstract

By exploring personal narratives through metaphoric images, students and nurses increase their understanding of who they are as persons and how that self-knowledge impacts their professional relationships with those in their care. In this article I share how I use metaphor-reflection in various aspects of my healthcare involvement. As a patient many years ago, metaphors helped me apprehend the meaning of cancer in my life. Today, as a nurse-teacher and researcher, I guide students through professional self-discovery using narrative reflective process that incorporates metaphors. In clinical practice I work with nurses as they explore how narrative reflection informs their caregiver-carereceiver interactions. With expanded self-awareness nurses have the potential to further assist their patients in exploring the meaning of their illness events through metaphors, thus enhancing the integration of that traumatic event into their respective lives. By working reflectively with metaphoric images, my hope for this writing is that my own engagement in narrative metaphor-reflection encourages the readers to story their own world in a more meaningful way.