Can rituals help with grief?

Rituals have always been used as a way of making sense of death. They work as culturally appropriate ways to find communion in tough times. Ritual grieving across cultures and across ages speaks to its universal importance. In our culture, though, ritual isn’t terribly important. It tends to take the form of entertainment, such as sporting events and music festivals, rather than as a way of making meaning of existential themes such as death. As the role of religion decreases, so too do religious rituals.

The decline of rituals in our society means that often we do not have the resources to feel supported in grief. Without culturally shared ritual practices, the responsibility falls on us to create and design our own rituals. Unless we are embedded in a religious or spritual community, it can be difficult to find ways to do this. Some people find this responsibility over whelming, but I believe it offers is an opportunity to exercise our own freedom and our own creativity.

Rituals are a significant and powerful way to work through grief, and it is often central when taking a “continuing bonds” perspective on grief work (discussed here). The power of rituals come in their experiential components. Rituals involve not only thoughts about the things we’ve lost, but embodied ways of experiencing ourselves differently in relation to the loss. It is a way of continuing to relate to what is lost by bringing it into our lives in a symbolic way. When we work with rituals we symbolise what the loss means to us, which helps to build a relationship which is different, and which allows for the grief to travel down newly opened channels. Grief becomes problematic when it is stagnant and stuck. The feelings and thoughts associated with the loss cannot be metabolised and stay like a chunks of meat stuck in our throats. Ritual allow for movement. They create the conditions under which the emotional and psychological energy can find a way to be integrated. This process is a kind of experiential knowing:

“symbols and rituals should not be understood only in terms of the cognitive, but also in terms of the experiential, emotional, aesthetic, somatic and relational – and to regard these as secondary is to miss aspects that are essential to ritual’s power and importance” (Ezzy, 2014)

Ezzy points out here the importance of experiencing, as opposed to thinking. We have all had the experiences of our thoughts looping over and over again around a specific problem and getting no further to resolving it. Real insight, and real change, only occurs when our thoughts about something align with our bodily feelings in a way that we experience as different.

Grief therapy can offer people ways of creating their own rituals in ways that work for them. Even without therapy, you can create and establish your own rituals as a way of processing grief, or even simply as a way of connecting with others. Some examples, taken from Francis Weller, include: talking circles, letter writing, the use of symbolic objects, reading/writing poetry, revisiting significant places and revisiting significant times (annual events etc).

Sources

Ezzy, D. (2014). Reassembling religious symbols: The pagan god Baphomet. Religion.

Weller, F. (2015). The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. North Atlantic Books.