Imaging ourselves: nurses' metaphors of practice

Metaphors are vivid, expressive tools popularly used in everyday conversations. The familiarity of metaphors combined with their capacity for generating meaning make the metaphor a powerful heuristic device for effecting nursing discoveries and pedagogical shifts. Exploring nursing metaphors can provide opportunities to develop new understandings of nursing and challenge metaphorical images that may be constraining and/or obscuring significant elements of holistic nursing practice. A research study that examined the metaphorical images of practicing nurses uncovered a wide variety of images. The thematic analysis of the metaphorical descriptions illuminated four major themes: (a) the character of nursing work, (b) power and empowerment, (c) nursing as a growth process, and (d) the relational nature of nursing. Nurses' metaphorical images provide a window into the complexities and ambiguities within nursing practice. The images highlight the significance of social and organizational constraints that influence how nurses take up their practice, the ways in which nurses feel unable to practice holistically, and the struggles nurses encounter when they try.