The healing circle: resiliency in nurses.

The concept of resiliency has been explored extensively in the fields of developmental psychology as an adaptive life process. Increasingly nurses have begun to study resiliency in a wide variety of settings and client populations. This article explores the concept of resiliency in nurses. Resiliency was described through the use of personal exemplar, tracing the author's odyssey of nursing homeless men in an emergency shelter. The author proposes that the traits of resiliency in nurses are widespread and largely unrecognized. There is a pressing need to cultivate and foster personal growth in nurses because we cannot give our patients what we do not possess ourselves.