OCAMPR 2026 WORKSHOP SLIDES

I read about an hour per day on autism research and several hours per week about storytelling, narratives, and healing. Because of this, I noticed that there was a strong mismatch between autistic processing needs and the way that many story and healing narrative prompts were expressed. Then I got to thinking about the challenges of narrating one’s own life when it comes to trying to participate in church. With the mismatch in prompts, a lot of autistics are left confused. They might feel safety under the auspices of confessing “sins of my own will and sins not of my own” as a catchall, which is good! But what if they were able to increase discernment, self understanding, and partcipation over time by telling their faith stories and learning about themselves and others through the sensory and processing anchors in the faith? The result was this workshop, “Sins of My Own Will adn Sins Not of My Own: Accommodating Narrative Exposure Therapy in Autistic Orthodox Christians to Facilitate Communion and Participation in Church Community.” The title is long, but the workshop is more straightforwardly helpful, I hope, in helping caring professionals and church teachers undersand more about autistic differences, they can more fully engage autistic people in important therapeutic options as well as participating in church sacraments and community.