What is meaningful to one person may not be to another and as an occupational therapist we need to be mindful of this in our practice.
Christiansen and Baum (1997) explain: “meanings reflect our overall interpretations of life events. Most of our intentions and actions are filled with meaning. This meaning comes from the nature of a situation and how we interpret its significance based on our current goals, values and past experiences. There are individual meanings and collective or shared meanings” (p53)
Meaning is derived from our life experiences and no one person has the exact same encounters in their life-time as someone else. These daily patterns of our lives – which are meaningful to us – make us who we are (Hinojosa, Kramer, Brasic Royeen & Luebben, 2003) and can be obtained from many different sources and experiences; they shape our worldview, values and beliefs and give us goals and inspiration. Meaningfulness is associated with everything we do; these are known as our occupations.
In the above post I talked about the older persons’ group that I ran who thought that the recycling activity was silly, it never occurred to me that it held no meaning for them like it does for me or people of my generation. What is meaningfulness? I believe it is so personal you cannot really explain it, but as a professional in the occupational therapy world it is the biggest thing we have to be concerned about with whoever we are in contact.
ReferencesChristiansen and Baum (1997) explain: “meanings reflect our overall interpretations of life events. Most of our intentions and actions are filled with meaning. This meaning comes from the nature of a situation and how we interpret its significance based on our current goals, values and past experiences. There are individual meanings and collective or shared meanings” (p53)
Meaning is derived from our life experiences and no one person has the exact same encounters in their life-time as someone else. These daily patterns of our lives – which are meaningful to us – make us who we are (Hinojosa, Kramer, Brasic Royeen & Luebben, 2003) and can be obtained from many different sources and experiences; they shape our worldview, values and beliefs and give us goals and inspiration. Meaningfulness is associated with everything we do; these are known as our occupations.
In the above post I talked about the older persons’ group that I ran who thought that the recycling activity was silly, it never occurred to me that it held no meaning for them like it does for me or people of my generation. What is meaningfulness? I believe it is so personal you cannot really explain it, but as a professional in the occupational therapy world it is the biggest thing we have to be concerned about with whoever we are in contact.
Hinojosa, J., Kramer, P., Brasic Royeen, C., & Luebben, A. (2003). Core concept of occupation. In P. Kramer, J. Hinojosa, & C. Brasic Royeen, Perspectives in human occupation: Participation in life (pp. 1-17). United States of America: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Reed, K. L. (2005). An annotated history of the concepts used in occupational therapy. In C. H. Christiansen, C. M. Baum, & J. Bass- Haugen (Eds.), Occupational Therapy: Performance, participation and well-being (3 ed.). Thorofare: SLACK Incorporated.
Reed, K. L. (2005). An annotated history of the concepts used in occupational therapy. In C. H. Christiansen, C. M. Baum, & J. Bass- Haugen (Eds.), Occupational Therapy: Performance, participation and well-being (3 ed.). Thorofare: SLACK Incorporated.
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