RITUALS — A Way Back
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and follows Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The sequence makes sense.
The physical effects of sexual violence may heal in time, but the impact on mental and emotional health often takes longer. In recent posts, I’ve explored grief—its necessity, its uneven pace—and the experience of “ambushes,” when a sound, smell, or image unexpectedly returns a person to their moment of trauma.
Two words have guided us: Safety. Support. First, get to a safe place. Then, find support.
But what happens next? What helps a person return to themselves? One answer is ritual.
A ritual employs intentional actions, often repeated, sometimes shared, that reconnects a person to a sense of order, identity, and community. They exist in many forms—religious ceremonies, athletic routines, performance traditions. The goal is to prepare, to center, to ground.
In the context of trauma, rituals serve an additional purpose: restoration. Many who have experienced sexual violence describe feelings of dislocation—of being unsettled, disconnected, unclean even. While different traditions offer formal practices of cleansing or renewal, ritual does not need to be tied to a specific faith or institution. Rituals can be created using simple elements—water, light, scents, touch, words—combined into a personal or communal act of re-centering. What matters is not complexity, but intention and repetition.
In East of Apple Glen, following her assault, Robbye O’Malley’s “sisters” create just such a ritual. It is offered in support as she releases her anger and restores her sense of bodily autonomy.
They conclude with a shared affirmation:
My body is clean. My body is my own.
My mind is clear. My mind is my own.
My heart is pure. My heart is my own.
The words are simple. The act is powerful. Healing is not only about surviving what happened. It is about reclaiming what was taken—agency, identity, connection. There is no single path forward. But rituals—whether personal or shared—can provide a way back.
Back to the present.
Back to community.
Back to oneself.
And that is no small thing.
