6. I supported patients' rights to agape-type love
relationships with others: families, other staff, and other
patients.
7. I showed respect for patients as persons with the right to make as many choices for themselves as their current capabilities allowed.
8. I attempted to help patients consider their currently expressed feelings and behaviors in light of past life experiences and patterns, like and unlike their current ones. {100}
9. I encouraged patients' expression to better understand their behavioral messages and to enable me to respond overtly as therapeutically as possible.
10. I verified my intuitive grasp of how patients were experiencing events by questions and comments and being alert to their responses.
11. I attempted to encourage hope realistically through discussing individual therapeutic gains that could be derived from patients' investment in therapeutic opportunities available to them.
12. I supported appropriate patient self-images with as many concrete "hard to denies" as possible.
Each of these nurse behaviors was repeatedly evident in the months of recording patient-nurse interactions. For the conceptualization of the term "comfort," a representative clinical example was given to enhance the meaning of the behavior cited (see Appendix). When compiling materials for the conceptualization of this term, I found 12 assumptions about psychiatric nursing that I had written for the theory course in one of the first class sessions. Although these assumptions were expressed in different words, their congruence with my 12 selected behaviors made me believe that these behaviors were somehow verified both in my conceptualized philosophy of psychiatric nursing and in my behavior while being a psychiatric nurse.
Next I struggled with an idealistic conception of comfort as opposed to a continuum of behavior which would indicate a person's degree or state of discomfort-comfort. Again, reflecting on and teasing out aspects of my data, I set up four behaviorally recognizable criteria for estimating a person's discomfort-comfort state:
1. Relationships with other persons which confirm one as an existent important person.