Two-way Vision

I've found that, in order to have a really good conversation with a patient at the hospital, I rely a great deal on having double vision - the capacity to see the world from not only my eyes but also from the patient's.  When I can't put myself in the patient's place, the conversation falters in awkward ways.

Conversations tend to go well when I'm talking to patients who are women or around my age, because I experience the conversation like a good Skype conversation where both people can be attentive to the camera feeds.  After all, when Skyping with someone, the main screen view is my perspective looking towards the other person and their surroundings as they look from my gaze.  Yet there's also that smaller box down in the right-hand corner where I see the world as my conversation partner sees it, with me and my background as the object of sight. The angle of light is different for the two different cameras, and I can see the difference and the similarity with those two camera views running.  That whole screenshot is how I imagine the best conversations happen inside the chaplain.  My primary perspective is, naturally, my own, and yet I can also take into account my conversation partner's perspective.  Really good pastoral care when I can be that present to both sides of the conversation.

But this Skype metaphor first came to me because I have been trying to figure out what is going wrong when conversations go badly.  I find it very difficult to talk with men, especially old men in their forties and fifties and sixties. It feels very flat... I'm just looking at this other human organism sitting in the same room, and well, there they are.  It's kind of like looking at an image of someone on a movie screen, where you'd only hypothetically wonder what that movie character would think if they could see you sitting there in the cinema.  In terms of connectivity, it feels more like a static image, and not a Skype conversation with a return gaze.  But this is super problematic -because these patients actually are real and, even if I have no intuitive sense of their perspective, they actually are looking at me and apprehending me as a presence there in the room; so it makes me nervous to know I'm not invisible to them.  So it's a perfect storm for crippling self-consciousness.  It's like Skype does a one way freeze:  I just see a blurred and frozen image of this person with no feedback perspective at all, and yet I know intellectually that the patient is watching me and can see me flounder perfectly clearly.  This has made for some really awkward conversations, especially since several of the older male patients I had today had trach tubes and really were just sitting there looking and me and not capable of saying anything or giving me anything to work with.  I wish I could have seen the world a little from where they sit, because patients in that situation are so lonely and themselves desperately wish for connectivity to be re-established.

I've got to find someway to keep Skype from freezing!