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Rituals, Routines, and Resilience 189

just what the “doctor ordered,” as they are activities that explicitly seek to
enhance community bonds, strengthen its structure, enhance adaptation,
and deal with anxiety or fear.
Rituals and ceremonies, in fact, can be put to therapeutic use. Johson et
al. have written about the three effects that ceremonies can have in help-
ing patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Johson et al., 1995).
There is good reason to believe that these effects can be generalized to
traumatized populations, irrespective of whether PTSD is at issue. First,
rituals compartmentalize the trauma, creating a safe and contained space
within which to face the emotions of the experience without flooding the
rest of life. Second, these events not only recognize the trauma but also
become metaphors for transformation and change. Third, rituals and cer-
emonies embody attachment to the family, the community, and society at
large, reflecting a shared journey away from what happened. They based
these observations on four ceremonies they have used to assist combat
veterans and their families to recover from the psychic wounds of war:

1. An opening ceremony welcoming patients and their families into their
months-long treatment program
2. A family night ceremony that emphasizes sharing of feelings and for-
giveness of pain caused by the veteran and their PTSD
3. A ceremony for the dead that memorializes dead combat buddies
4. A “crossing over ceremony” that marks the patients’ completion of the
program

Thai Buddhism’s view of the afterlife played a role in how people dealt
with the staggering loss of human life that resulted from the 2004 tsunami
that struck Thailand (Sorajjakool, 2007). In Thai Buddhism, the spirits
of the recently deceased are thought to wander around as ghosts seeking
rebirth. Monks chant special prayers to help the dead to relinquish their
connections with those who survive them and the places they lived so
that they can indeed be reborn. Psychologically, ghosts represent an unre-
solved loss. Rebirth can occur into a “happy place” or a “world of suffer-
ing,” and those who have earned sufficient merits in their prior life will be
reborn into the happy place as a human or an angel. Large-scale memorial
services following the tsunami, therefore, focused on survivors, through
the chanting of monks, passing on merits to the deceased, enabling them
to stop wandering as ghosts and to be reborn in a happy way. In this way,
Buddhist ritual enabled large-scale grieving to occur, letting the living let
go of the deceased as much as the deceased to let go of the living.