ABSTRACT
This chapter is a parallel to the qualitative study on client perspectives discussed in Chapter 2 involving interviews and videotaped sessions with nurses and clients on the development of therapeutic and non-therapeutic relationships. The focus in this chapter is on the perspective of nurses. Nurses described helping factors, such as demonstrating consistency, pacing, and listening, as well as hampering factors, including inconsistency and unavailability, and nurses’ feelings and awareness. This study confirmed that therapeutic relationships evolve through three distinct phases as identified by Peplau (i.e., orientation, working, termination) and that non-therapeutic relationships also evolve through identifiable phases (i.e., orientation, grappling and struggling, mutual withdrawal). Implications for practice and theory are discussed.
