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Introduction: The intensive care unit (ICU) stay generates feelings of lack of control, uncertainty, and anxiety in the patient and their families related to a lack of information and communication about the health-disease process experienced and the treatment. Objective: to describe the characteristics of communication in the ethnos between the nurse and the family member of the hospitalized patient. Method: a qualitative study with a micro ethnographic approach that used Bardin's proposal for the analysis. The participants were 12 relatives of patients hospitalized in the adult ICU in Bucaramanga and Floridablanca (Colombia) during 2016. A semi-structured interview was conducted with five questions about communication with the nurse practitioner. Results: most of the participants were women, university students, and daughters from cities other than the place of the interview. The main theme that emerges was communication: an honest, direct, and authentic relationship between human beings, made up of four categories: information as the central axis of communication in ICU; communication that is not expressed in words, which is even more important in the relationship; communication does not flow if there is no time, disposition, and conditions to establish the relationship; and communication generates positive feelings and satisfaction. Conclusion: communication as a social process framed in the ICU as a particular ethnos demand from the nurse practitioners’ qualities such as kindness, cordiality, empathy, recognition, and understandable language, as well as feedback and willingness to establish and maintain this vital process for human relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]