Hearing of it I searched for and found Debbie Mazhindu's thesis "Ideal Nurses: The Social Construction of Emotional Labour": This showed me the ideal, as in ideal nurse, can be a tyranny and as such it has a  life of its own with an insatiable appetite. But it's a confidence killer to others who are stuck with it and try too hard and take on too much. Read it all, it's enough to make your hair stand on end.

Her thesis, with the concept of emotional labour, offers much more. Try www.emotions-at-work.co.uk. But it was seeing the tyranny of the ideal that got me going. Other tyrannies lie  in wait. What about the tyranny of what ought to be?

The ideal is paradoxically a threat to a health care system which can ill afford any of its nursing staff being stressed out and off sick, or even thinking to leave the profession.

We pause to look at the phrase emotional labour. Hard labour yes; skilled labour too and we understand what a labour of love is. Yet emotional labour seems a clumsy idea.

I realise that I'm making 'emotional labour' into a generic phrase. The academic world may find little of interest in what I'm struggling with. But in dealing with someone who is hard work we're fully stretched to make sense of what's going on. And that, to me, is emotional labour, of being sucked dry.

A social construct is something we make or create or build in our own minds. In the context of nursing we construct our own image of the ideal nurse, and the Sunday Times on 12 th June 05 contrasted two women.

Two nurses, two hospitals. As a war weary foot soldier, far from home and it's cold outside which would you prefer.

But working nurses know what's expected of them that are continually updated from conversations with patients which spell out the significance of everything they do. And management concepts such as total patient care offer an idealized view of nursing, as do best practice manuals and interactions with managers.

A real problem is that the ideal, like the perfect, is unattainable. And it becomes self perpetuating and to question it is a heresy. Yet it is a social construct, a mind monster that denies any sense of well being to those who suffer from having it on board. Debbie reports the gap between nurses (idealistic) professional aspirations and their practice becoming an endless source of stress and frustration, and often causes burn out.

And that nurses reflecting on their clinical experience speak of the messy areas of emotions. Yet traditionally they have been discouraged to speak about things they find uncomfortable distasteful or threatening.

Some nurse specialists said that if they needed to talk about a difficult aspect of their work they would not discuss it with their peers but with their medical consultant. It seems that medics tend not to evaluate or judge their performance in the same way as nursing peers. We see the power and the fear of the idea of bad or worst nurse; another social construction.

Unable to access their feelings in tricky situations leaves nurses vulnerable and depressed. The same applies to us all, whatever our work, profession or difficult domestic situation. Yet those feelings, properly understood, are the basis of staying sane in such a place, or deciding to cut our losses and move out.

The idea of the tyrannical, the obsessive was not new to me. It has cropped up time and again in my life. And unwittingly I had been a tyrant. But now with Debbie'ss thesis I had a handle on it and could look at it