Spirituality: The Big Picture

This week, I made a lot of progress with my blog. With two posts completed and another in progress, I'm starting to feel good about what I've accomplished. My first post was about the merits of identity-first language vs person-first language, and I was able to share some sources on the subject that I found helpful. As I've continued, however, I have noticed that it is hard to get a sense of my own writing without another person to look it over and offer suggestions. For now, I've managed with re-reading my posts multiple times and running them through a spell-checker, but most writing does best with multiple proofreaders.

My second post this week was an autism resource masterlist (of doom). Since being diagnosed nearly two years ago, I've done a lot of research, and I found it helpful to keep track of helpful resources in case I wanted to use them later on, whether for projects or for education. For this post, I organized this list of sources and compiled them to share with others. I especially appreciate this list because of the high number of useful, respectful information sources in one place. When I was looking up these things for the first time, I'd often get frustrated and exhausted by the sheer number of ignorant, fearmongering advice sites for "families living with autism." With this list of my own, I don't have to waste nearly as much time getting exasperated by others poor understanding of autism and can instead improve my own understanding of it, as well as anyone assigned to proofread my essays.

The third post that I worked on this week, that I'm not quite done with, is an adaptation of a teaching I gave one time at my college ministry that focused on the Bible and Disability. As someone who likes to think deeply about topics related to identity, this intersection in identities was a pretty topic for me to think about and analyze how the two fit together. As both a Christian and a person with a disability, my experience of one often effects my experience of the other. I've already written out my testimony (story of faith), but now I need to figure out which parts to share and which parts to omit for privacy and conciseness. That's one thing that I've thought about a lot with creating this blog, finding the line between undersharing and oversharing. This topic for my blog relates a lot to last week's discussions about occupation and spirituality.

When thinking about spirituality, one usually thinks about the big picture, life as a whole, but experiences of spirituality can vary significantly between individuals. Spirituality, therefore, is both a community endeavor and a personal experience. 

For me, I would say that my experience of spirituality effects nearly everything about me and how I view the world. It gives me a framework for understanding my experiences and the experiences of others, and it gives me avenues to seek out connection with others. While Hasselkus' varying definitions of occupation can be used to encompass basically any function of human life, I would say that my spirituality enriches my occupations more than occupation enriches my spirituality. However, my definitions of these words would likely be different from Hasselkus as well.

Looking back at past occupations, I can see how my spirituality influenced my experiences of them. As a Christian, any time I enjoy nature, I get enjoy what I see as intentional, detailed creation. My spirituality effects my enjoyment of nature, as well as my view of myself. For my new occupation, my blog, I spend a lot of time looking into my identity as an autistic person. As a Christian, I see my autism as an intentional part of the way I was created, not a mistake or a happenstance. In this way, my viewpoint on the matter is very different than it would be if I experienced my spirituality in a different way. 

However, I will say that there are some occupations of mine that I would say are minimally affected by my spirituality. As a huge nerd, I don't know that my experiences making cosplay costumes or fanfictions would look too much different if I had a different belief system. 

Some occupations are affected in ways that I would not expect. In school, for example, my faith changes the way that I interact with learned materials. Last week in Professional Development, we learned about internal and external loci of control. According to our class, having an internal locus of control is related to having a higher sense of self-esteem, whereas with an external locus of control, "failure is attributed to stable, external, and uncontrollable events... there is little we can do to effect

change and we are unlikely to use assertiveness or any other strategy to get the job done. This is a loser's or victim's script." 

Within the occupation of learning, the way that I interact with this material is changed by my experiences of spirituality. This helps me recognize the upsides and downsides to this worldview. If I were to have an internal locus of control, it's true that I would believe that I have the ability to change scenarios around myself, which is good if things go well, but if things go poorly, according to this worldview, I would believe that I was the sole cause for my own suffering. This is a lot of pressure to put on oneself, to believe that all success or failure would be caused by myself and my own actions. Instead of seeing failure as "attributed to stable, external, and uncontrollable events," I see my experiences as due to a combination of my own actions, and the result of something larger than myself.

Rather than internally berating myself for undesirable outcomes, I can enjoy positive circumstances that I had no hand in bringing about. Rather than stable, external, uncontrolled events, I see stable, external, controlled events, just not always controlled by me. Of course, some things are within my own control such as my ability to study for a test, engage in self-care, and the daily tasks of living, but with my views on spirituality, my world's rotation isn't determined by myself and my decisions. For me, this worldview takes a lot of the anxiety and pressure out of the smaller decisions and helps me to simply focus on living my life, not overthinking it. 

Of course, this view can vary for many people, but for me, having an external locus of control isn't always a bad thing, and it can have a positive effect on my experiences of occupations, both new and old.

When thinking about the importance of spirituality in terms of my future career as an occupational therapist, I find it interesting that the most recent OTPF chose to include it as a vital area of patient practice. Personally, I think that it's important to include this aspect into our views of occupation and occupational therapy. After all, spirituality can be a monumental source of identity and occupation for some people, so making sure it is addressed can be extremely important in our ability to provide care to clients. 

As someone whose experience of disability was shaped by my spirituality, I fully agree that occupational therapists should at least encourage patients to address this portion of their wellbeing while engaging in therapy. This can look like different things for different people, but it usually boils down to how we see ourselves within the larger world, within the big picture. Things like meditation, spending time in nature, or engaging in meaningful social spheres can remind us that we're not the center of the universe, and if we're not the center of the universe, neither are our problems or worries. This can be a source of relief, if only for a little while. Finding ways to see this big picture can provide context to our concerns and our occupations, which is why it should be a focus of occupational therapists when possible.

Blogception Blog Link:

https://autisticot.blogspot.com/2022/09/christianity-disability-and-autism-my.html