Rites of Passage

Jeff Levy, LCSW
(originally posted on Branching Out: The Live Oak Blog, and Linked In, September 2016)

​“Will it be a tree or a new garden?” my partner asked me two weeks ago. For the past 15 years, we have been planting as a way to acknowledge and memorialize people and animals in our lives we have loved and lost. The question we ask now is not “what do we do to acknowledge loss” as much as “where do we put what we’re going to do?” With several explicit conversations, we have agreed that anniversaries of losses are recognized with the ritual of digging in the earth, planting, and nurturing growth.
 
Rituals occur in our lives on a regular basis. People have weddings, graduations, quinceaneras, confirmations, and bar/bat mitzvahs. We have funerals for people who have died, and baptisms for people after they are born. It seems reasonable for rituals to find their way into psychotherapy. Books and articles have been devoted to the concept of incorporating ritual into the healing process.

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