OT Stories

Last year I took a class for my MA in OT called Story Making. The general idea behind the whole class was to recognize that all stories have certain elements with the purpose of getting an idea from one person to another. We focused mostly on how to understand and interpret both spoken and unspoken language to understand our patient’s need. In hindsight, I find it funny that there would seem to be a whole school centered on this idea.

Maybe it seems like an “err, duh,” but I had not linked the idea of communications with therapeutic story making, until now.

In class, we spoke about how drama is comprised of peripeteia and resolution. We focused on how to translate the actions and minimal words of a 4-year-old autistic child into an understandable need. We focused on helping an older adult who struggled with the idea of never living alone again. We focused on how to tell a mother how to feed her preemie child after the child is having trouble eating. These are all roles of occupational therapists. My focus going into this program was to help OT’s communicate amongst themselves and with those outside the field.

What I had not thought about was how vast and impactful communication is in our lives. It had not occurred to me that the mere positioning of houses on a street would influence how the community would interact. I had not thought about how I was going to communicate the design of my on-line community to programmers, or how to design it so it would accomplish the vision I have in my head.

So, I am sitting here, reading and writing about communication and some of its facets, trying to get my head around the fact that the basic function and design of the space right down to the font kerneling can have far reaching affects on my community’s ability to perform the lofty goals I have set out to accomplish. I am in awe of those who have already done this for their niche communities.

Nevertheless, for now, I have to take it one-step at a time and focus on understanding the successes and failures of those who have gone before me, and try to learn from their choices. I will find the resolution to this peripeteia, I assure you. I might die in the process. And yet, as many of my friends will attest, I am far too stubborn and I have come too far in my life for a mere website to take me down.