We instinctively create rituals for children: bedtime stories, birthday candles, kisses for scraped knees. But what happens when adults cross life-changing thresholds with no ritual to mark them?
By Janeth Nuñez del Prado, LCSW | Desert Bloom Psychology & Consulting.
The Familiar Sequence
I was at the gym, moving through a workout routine I have done many times, after a period of significant life disruption.
There was something comforting about returning to a familiar routine after a period of significant disruption in my life. I knew the exercises, the sequence, what came next. I began thinking about how much we rely on familiar routines, particularly during times of uncertainty or change.
I started thinking about how many rituals exist in my own life that I don't typically call rituals. The morning coffee in the same spot. The dinner table. The run through the bosque. The way I always pause before beginning a session and remember what my client shared with me the last time we met.
And then I started wondering: what exactly is a ritual? What do rituals do? When did we stop offering them to adults — and why?
The Rituals We Overlook
Anthropologists define rituals as liminal events — threshold experiences that mark a socially recognized transition. Van Gennep described the structure as separation, transition, and incorporation. You enter as one version of yourself and emerge changed.
We tend to think of rituals as the big things. Religious ceremonies. Weddings. Funerals.
But many rituals are small and ordinary. Repeated. Meaningful. Shared. Grounding. Even drinking coffee in the same place each morning can be a ritual — a transition between states, a preparation of the self for what the day requires.
Ordinary anchors keep us tethered. Rituals often involve something more: a sense of meaning, connection, or intention. The morning coffee can be both.
(For more on ordinary anchors, read: Ordinary Anchors: What Keeps You Here When Everything Feels in Motion (https://www.desertbloompsych.com/blog/ordinaryanchors)
How Values Are Passed Down
Growing up, both of my parents worked incredibly hard. They loved us deeply. But family dinners were not a major part of our family culture. We often ate separately. TV dinners were common. Schedules dictated meals.
In my own family now, we have dinner together every night. Some nights dinner is elaborate. Other nights our children are eating cereal while my husband and I have smoothies. The meal changes, but the ritual remains. Before we eat, everyone shares one thing they are grateful for.
What strikes me most is that the ritual now belongs to the children. If we forget, our six-year-old son reminds us: “Oh no, we forgot gratitude!”
At some point it stopped being something we imposed and became something internalized — part of our family identity, something felt as needed. The gratitude ranges from profound — especially what comes from my nine-year-old daughter, who has a way of naming things that stops me — to entirely ordinary. A moment of shared connection with a new friend. A snack they liked. A good day that didn't announce itself as significant. It is not the content that matters. It is the coming together and marking a transition from the outside world to the internal world of family and the safety of home.
What I find particularly interesting is how children internalize family values through these repeated experiences. We didn't set out to teach our children a lesson about gratitude every evening. We simply made space for it. And now, when we forget, our son reminds us. It's become something he expects and values on his own.
Besos, Candles, And Bedtime Stories
Every culture, every family, every childhood is held together by small repeated gestures so ordinary they are almost invisible, so necessary we built them in without being told to.
In Bolivia, a child falls and someone kneels close, rubs the wound, and says sana sana, colita de rana. The pain is witnessed before it is even fully felt. In New Mexico, an ouchie gets kissed. Somewhere a candle gets blown out over a birthday wish. A tooth disappears in the night and something small and magical appears in its place. A bedtime story gets told in front of a nightlight. The front door gets photographed on the first day of school, year after year, until the child is nearly grown and the parent is the one who needs the ritual most.
We seem to understand, without being told, that children need them. Rituals help children feel safe, connected, comforted, seen, accompanied, and prepared for transitions. The kissing of the boo boo does not magically make it better — but it allows the child to see that the pain is witnessed and tended to. And it allows the parent to feel a sense of agency in a moment when we often feel helpless. The ritual holds both purposes simultaneously.
In some cultures, ritual marks transition with the whole body and the whole community. Firewalking — practiced across Hindu traditions, Shinto ceremonies in Japan, and indigenous communities in the Pacific Islands — is one of the most documented examples. The walker crosses fire and comes out changed. The community witnesses. Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas found that the heart rates of firewalkers and their watching family members synchronize during the walk — the body and the witness bonded through the ritual. You walk in as one version of yourself. You walk out as another.
We culturally recognize the magic of rituals. We build them into childhood and into our most sacred ceremonies. And then, quietly, we stop.
When Do We Stop?
We don't ask our friends or partners to kiss an ouchie. We take an aspirin and move on. We don't create bedtime rituals for one another. We don't build many ceremonies around the ordinary and extraordinary transitions of adult life.
If rituals are so important for children, why do we stop offering them to adults?
Do adults stop needing them? Or do we simply stop creating them?
Does the gradual erasure of the magic of childhood bring with it the unintended consequence of losing our belief in the healing power of ritual in everyday life?
The Threshold No One Marks
Some of the most significant transitions in adult life occur with little or no ritual acknowledgment. A pregnancy loss, the end of an important relationship, a change in career, or a difficult experience that changes how we understand ourselves can all have a profound impact on our lives.
We have established traditions for recognizing certain milestones, such as weddings, graduations, and funerals. These occasions bring people together to acknowledge that something important has happened. But many other life experiences don't come with the same opportunities for recognition, even when they involve significant loss, change, or personal growth.
I wonder what it would look like if we were more intentional about acknowledging these experiences, both for ourselves and for the people we care about. Not every transition calls for a ceremony, but I think there is value in recognizing when something important has changed in someone's life.
The Resurrection Plant
When I end a course of therapy with a client, I give them a resurrection plant and a handwritten note.
It began as a small gesture. It has become a ritual I believe in.
The end of therapy is not always a triumphant moment. Sometimes it is survival — a person who came in barely holding on and leaves with more room to breathe. Sometimes it is recognizing the parts of us that helped us survive and are no longer needed. Sometimes it is simply acknowledging that something has shifted, even if the shifting is quiet and incomplete and still in process.
Therapy is designed to accompany people through thresholds. But the threshold of ending — the goodbye itself — often goes unmarked. We do the work together, and then one day the work is done, and the person walks out the door and back into their life.
I try to mark that.
The plant is a resurrection plant — the kind that appears dead, curled and dry, and then opens completely when given water. I chose it deliberately. I give it with a note that is written for that specific person, that specific journey, that specific threshold they have just crossed.
The plant is symbolic of the work we've done together. Even when it appears completely dried out, it can open again when given water. I like the idea of giving clients something tangible to represent their experience in therapy, along with a handwritten note acknowledging their efforts, the changes I've witnessed, and what I hope they'll carry with them.
The resurrection plant is an adult ritual. A rite of passage for a transition that had none. It only works because someone gives it and someone receives it. The witness is part of the medicine.
Something In Us Remembers
One of the things I find interesting about rituals is that we don't necessarily have to understand why they matter in order to benefit from them. We may return to a particular place, repeat a familiar activity, or hold on to a family tradition without ever consciously thinking of it as a ritual. Sometimes it's only when that experience is interrupted or no longer available that we recognize how important it was to us.
I've noticed this in my own life. When I run through the bosque, along the same familiar path, I often think about the baby girl I lost. There is something about being in that particular place, surrounded by the cottonwoods and the Rio Grande, that allows me to feel connected to her. I didn't intentionally create a ritual around remembering her. It simply became part of what that experience means to me.
I imagine many of us have similar experiences. Someone might light a candle each evening to remember a loved one, carry a small object that reminds them of someone important, or return to a familiar place during a difficult period in their life. These activities may seem ordinary, but they can carry considerable personal meaning.
What interests me is how naturally we create these rituals, often without recognizing them as such. They offer us opportunities to remember, acknowledge important experiences, make meaning, and maintain connections with people and parts of our lives that continue to matter to us.
The Body Before the Mind
There is a long tradition in therapy that honors the cognitive work. The reframe. The new narrative. The changed relationship with a thought that has been running the show for years. That tradition is real, it has changed lives, and it deserves to be honored.
But it is not the only form of healing. And for many people — perhaps most people, across most of human history — it is not the primary one.
Rituals do not ask us to think differently. They ask us to mark something somatically. To stand at the threshold and say with the body what the mind has not yet found words for: I was here. This happened. I am not who I was before.
Jung understood that water holds two distinct medicines. Still water offers reflection — the unconscious showing us what lies beneath the surface when we are finally quiet enough to look. Moving water offers transformation — something carried away, something worn smooth, the self becoming something it was not before. I stood at a waterfall recently and felt the difference before I had a name for it. The water was doing something. I let it.
In therapy, we often focus on helping people understand their experiences, make connections, and develop new perspectives. But understanding something intellectually isn't always the same as feeling that something has changed. Rituals can offer another way of acknowledging an experience, particularly when words feel insufficient.
Sometimes that looks like going into the water. Sometimes it looks like a plant handed across a desk with a note that says: we see you. Sometimes it looks like a family sitting down together at the end of the day, remembering before they eat that there is always something worth being grateful for.
The forms are endless. The need and function are the same.
Something happened here.
This mattered.
I am not exactly the same person I was before — nor should I be.
A Few Questions to Consider
As you think about the rituals in your own life, consider which ones you've created intentionally and which have developed over time without much thought. Are there family traditions or everyday practices that have taken on particular meaning for you?
I also invite you to think about the significant transitions you've experienced. Which ones were acknowledged or celebrated? Were there others that received little recognition, even though they changed your life in important ways?
Rituals don't have to be elaborate, religious, or shared with others. Sometimes they emerge naturally from our experiences. Other times, we create them intentionally to recognize something important in our lives. What matters is the meaning they hold for us.
This piece is intended for informational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care.
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