ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the document on nursing intervention: supportive counseling and empathic listening. It explains the stories of Sara and Joe share a common thread, despite their outward differences. Each begins with a patient who is isolated and suffering, unable or unwilling, for one reason or another, to enter productively into conventional therapeutic programs or treatments, who is alienated from the day-to-day world of ordinary human conversation. The chapter begins with the nurse's alertness to a pattern, gesture, or other element of behavior which is specific and unique to the patient, but which lends itself to reconstruction in the form of a simple, time-limited game or activity. The game or activity incorporates many of the traditional therapeutic competencies - the show of attention, of empathy, of patience and confidence and compassion, the sense of genuineness and emotional availability, the commitment to establishing a protective interpersonal sanctuary, a holding environment, which is nourishing and stable.
