During this holiday season, you have probably engaged in many rituals without even thinking about it. You participated in holiday rituals if you did any of the following: celebrated one or more holidays, decorated your home with holiday objects, ate traditional holiday foods, gathered with family and friends to celebrate holidays, attended religious services, exchanged gifts, or participated in any other kind of tradition.

In my family of origin, these are some of our Christmas rituals: gathering with my mom and dad’s sides of the family to celebrate on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, eating traditional Italian and Slovak foods (e.g. my maternal grandma makes mushroom soup and orders decorated religious wafers to put on the table that are eaten with honey, which are traditions from her Slovak side of the family), and participating in family rituals (e.g. that same grandma blesses our foreheads by making a cross shape with a fingertip dipped in honey). One of my favorite rituals of ours is playing board games together.

Why do people participate in such rituals? What purpose do such rituals serve? How does this relate to drama therapy?

Defining Rituals

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ritual has several similar meanings. For the sake of brevity, I will include the ones that seem most fitting for our purposes in examining the role ritual plays in drama therapy: “a ceremonial act or action; an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner”.

Similarly to Merriam-Webster, the Oxford dictionary also has a variety of definitions that are alike. Again, I will share the one that is most fitting for this article: “a series of actions or type of behaviour regularly and invariably followed by someone”.

The drama therapy textbook Current Approaches in Drama Therapy defines ritual as “the establishment of a ceremonial frame, space, time and demeanor for transformative purposes”.

In summary, rituals are acts that we perform or repeat in a particular manner. While some rituals are done out of habit, such as our morning routines (e.g. regularly choosing a particular order for using the toilet, showering, brushing teeth, eating breakfast, etc. after waking), other rituals are done with intention (such as that of setting structure in and giving purpose to our lives).

The Role of Rituals in Everyday Life

All rituals provide us with a sense of predictability and comfort whether they are performed out of habit or intention.

Using the morning routine example above, think about your own routine and how it is unlikely that you would feel happy if someone or something caused you to have to break your routine. You might feel “off”, unsettled, or grumpy. You might feel like your day got off to a bad start and might fear that the break in routine sets you up for a bad day in general. So although such a routine is habit and is not done with intention, it provides you with a sense of predictability and comfort.

Now let’s examine the holiday rituals mentioned above. Such rituals are more likely done out of intention to do any of the following: honor religious beliefs, bring community together, share experiences together, and celebrate common values (e.g. love and joy). Although these types of rituals may be done less frequently than the habit type mentioned above, they also provide predictability and comfort. In addition, they provide a sense of sacredness to the acts.

Throughout history, dramatic rituals have been performed for all of the aforementioned benefits. People have long used dramatic rituals to celebrate and mourn, deal with life transitions, and share common feelings (e.g. shared fears, sorrows, desires, successes, and losses).

Events such as baby showers, birthday parties, graduations, weddings, and funerals are dramatic rituals that have other benefits aside from the ones already mentioned. They also allow people to have a dramatic way to express their feelings (which provides more catharsis than just verbally expressing feelings), allow such people to be witnessed and validated by others, and help people bond through shared experiences.

The Role of Rituals in Drama Therapy

Rituals can be used in drama therapy in various ways. To provide a sense of structure and predictability during sessions, dramatic ritual can be used in the beginning and end of sessions. My favorite beginning and ending ritual is “the Magic Box” activity. At the start of the session, I invite clients to throw unwanted feelings and thoughts into an imaginary box and then pretend to destroy the box in whatever way pleases them. At the end, I invite them to pretend to take desired feelings and thoughts from a different imaginary box.

Like the events identified above, dramatic rituals in drama therapy sessions have the ability to provide expression of feelings, witnessing/validation of feelings, and social bonding. For example, in group therapy, rituals can be created around themes of shared feelings so that group members can fully express their individual feelings and be validated by each other.

To give you a concrete example of how I have used rituals in drama therapy, I will share an activity that I did with a former client. The client was a young teen who worked with me after having disclosed sexual abuse by a family member. Her symptoms included depression, anger, anxiety, distrust, and a general sense of feeling broken. After working together for a few months to stabilize her coping skills and process her trauma, we did a ritual that involved creating a representation of her broken self and transforming that part of herself into someone who is healing. She chose to create her broken part with clay, and then she chose various activities we would take that part of her through to transform the pain she has endured. For example, we used a toy amusement park set and a sand tray to take that part of her through some healing time at a park and a beach. When she created the clay part of her, I asked her to choose a name for that part of her. At the end of her journey of dramatic ritual, I asked her to choose a more empowering name for that part of her since she was now transformed through the ritual.

Summary

Using rituals in drama therapy provides structure and predictability, expression of feelings, validation of feelings, and social bonding in a way that talk therapy alone does not provide.