What is Occupational Therapy and is it for you?

What is Occupational Therapy? And is it for you?

 Now that is a great question and one I have been pondering over. I have been an occupational therapist for 27 years and have worked in every setting you can imagine including, schools, hospitals, outpatient rehabilitation centers, home care, and sensory gyms. I have worked with all ages and stages with people with a variety of disabilities including, Williams syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, burns, mental health issues, ADHD, orthopedic issues and cancer. The one thing that all these people are is they are HUMAN! They have senses, organs, and similar body parts. AND not one of them is the same, they are all different.

Which leads me to the question “what is Occupational Therapy?”.

 The way I see it is Occupational Therapy is a service that provides individuals with tools to live their lives to the fullest. No one treatment session is the same, no one tool is the same and like I said, not one person is the same. If you consider that occupation is the thing you do every day and you are stuck in one area of it, that is the thing that an Occupational Therapist would help you develop and grow at and in. For example, a child's, adolescent and teenagers occupations are play, eating, dressing, social life,and school. A young adult's occupation is maneuvering through college, work, and social life. And an adult is all those things plus potentially having to manage all the people around them. 

 So, what does an Occupational Therapist actually do? In my own words, from my own experiences, we look at the whole person, listen with our senses to what is going on inside and outside of the person and provide tools, in the moment, to facilitate success with what is important to that person. Say WHAT? For example, I am working with a child with ADHD, he was having difficulty actually going to school. He was afraid he would get sick in school and that took him out, it had him frozen with fear to even go to school. Together we started to look at his physical body sensations, what would happen inside his body before he even got dressed in the morning. From there, we looked at how he was breathing and he began to understand what it meant to actually take a deep breath. We came up with a written plan of what would happen each morning and an action plan for what if he actually started to feel sick when he got to school.  With the help of his family and the school he is now back in school feeling confident. Now I inquire about what came first, ADHD or the fear, the sensory overload or the behaviors? That is what we are working on now so that the next thing to prevent him from doing the things will be with less struggle and greater ease. 

Action planning together. What what happened in the past versus present and what is possible in the future.

Is Occupational Therapy for you? If you are a human and you have an “Occupation” that you are struggling with the answer is YES! AND even better there are SO MANY OT’s that specialize in so many different areas I am sure you could find one. 

Here is a great resource or you! Check out The OT Collective Book, https://otlifestylemovement.com/about/ just scroll down to the bottom to see it!