FEELING OF GUILT AND RELIGIOUS COPING AMONG PARENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN

Abstract

The subject of the research; the aim of this study is to determine the feelings of families with special needs children when they first learned about their children's situation and afterwards, and to determine whether the parents use religious ways of coping by revealing the place of guilt among these feelings. The main purpose of the research is to determine the positive or negative effects of this process in the lives of families, and to determine the moral support needs in this respect. Semi structured interview technique which is one of the qualitative data collection method was used. Interviews were hold with 10 parents whose children receive special education from Sakarya Serdivan Rehabilitation Centre and Private Sakarya Gelisim Special Education and Rehabilitation Center. The interviews took almost an hour. After the interviews, the tape recordings were turned into text and transferred to the computer. Data was evaluated based on the predetermined themes and concepts that were confirmed at the end of the study. Parents felt sadness, guilt, unrighteousness, regret, anger, anxiety, fear, exam etc. when they first learned about their children's special condition. It was recorded that some participants were sad and mournful with the shock of the first diagnosis and it took time for them to accept the current situation. Some participant, on the other hand, considered this situation as a gift from God besides feeling sad and mournful. In this study, it was determined that because most participants had a hard time to make sense of the situation they were in with the shock of the first diagnosis, they felt intense quilt, sinfulness and rebellion. Some participants experienced internal feud thinking 'God, why me? What's the damage?', 'I wonder if this would happen to me again if I hadn't married my spouse?'. Other participants accused themselves, doctors and people around them thinking 'I wish I had gone to the doctor earlier, it had been intervened earlier, there had been no misdiagnosis, there had not been any preterm birth'. The use of 'I wish/If only' expressions revealed that they did selfquestioning and had a hard time to make sense of the current situation in their inner world. Even though some feeling and sentences used with the shock of the first diagnosis are considered as negative religious coping techniques, in time parents started to accept the situation and use positive religious coping techniques by clinging to religion. It was found out that parents receive more support from family, spouses and friends to deal with the process as well as government agencies. Besides, it was observed that participants use religious coping techniques such as praying, trust in God, advert God, count one's beads and make a vow etc. It was seen that even though quilt, sinfulness and rebellion feelings appeared frequently, parents accepted the situation in time, got mature for trust in God and tried their best to get through the obstacles of life with their children. Being a believer while dealing with the situation, the main consolation sources for the parents were determined to be as follows; get a reward from God in return to make their children happy, consider themselves heavenly and hope for it, ask for remedy from creator as the name of 'Safi' and consider children as healing source for themselves. The conducted study showed that parents who felt intensive quilt, sinfulness, punishment and negligence with the shock of the first diagnosis used negative religious coping techniques. However, it has been observed that this negative religious coping techniques turned into religious rituals such as trust in God, patience, prayer, glorifying the God and transformed into an emotion-oriented positive religious coping techniques. Being a parent with special needs children provides opportunity to grow more mellow by pain, seeing people as not only a body but a body-spirit association and reaching the ore called as core. Thinking from this point of view, religion will be the phenomenon that helps most. Karatas concluded in his study with parents whose children are visually disabled that parents experienced spiritual maturing in their lives after traumatic incidents, raise their awareness for this kind of events and got spiritually mature as a result of what they had been through (Karatas, 2018). Spiritual maturing is the feeling the reaching of being complete. Being a parent with special needs children teach to be patient, to absorb the obstacles and to be solution oriented when there are problems. Participants expressed that their children made them more patient, contribute to their personal development and they constantly think ways to be more useful for their children. Interviews with the parents with special needs children revealed that families want to tell about what they experience and how they feel in process and to receive moral support. Participants asked for researhers' phone number and wanted to make an appointment after. Even this request showed that how much parents needed moral support. As a matter of fact, parents had to deal with the intensive stress and anxiety in this process. Parents' starting to carry out spiritual practices based on the religion they believe showed that they were in need of moral support. Families benefited from their beliefs in order to make sense of the vexed issue they experienced.