Page 221 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

190 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

Rituals may also reduce anxiety, a common emotion after disaster, even
apart from whether someone has an underlying psychiatric condition. One
study compared a group of Catholic college students who engaged in weekly
recitation of the Rosary with another group of students from the same college
who watched a religious content video (Anastasi & Newberg, 2008). The anx-
iety state of the Rosary group reduced significantly after the prayers, whereas
that of the video group did not. And, even though the groups’ respective anx-
iety levels were the same before the exercises, the Rosary group’s anxiety level
was significantly less than that of the video group afterward. The authors
suggested that the ritual quality of the Rosary, which they suggest has the
highest ritual versus religious content ratio of any aspect of Catholic ceremo-
nies, had antianxiety qualities. Ritualistic repetition soothes, a finding Freud
would likely have agreed with, albeit with significant qualifications.

Implications

Resilience has become an important concept by which to understand the
human relationship to trauma. It has been variously described as reflect-
ing an individual’s ability to withstand the effects of trauma or disaster,
whether by having the capacity to (a) remain unaffected, (b) readily bounce
back from whatever effects there are, or (c) bounce back to a new way of
being that is shaped positively more so than negatively (e.g., wiser and
more interesting). These ideas can be captured in corresponding images of
a tree that is unbending in the face of a hurricane’s winds, that bends but
returns to upright, or that bends and returns to a new posture that is no
longer upright but no less stable. Insofar as disasters constitute traumas at
the level of the community, these images of resilience apply to communi-
ties as much as individuals.
Reason, as well as the limited number of studies available in the pub-
lished literature, suggests that rituals promote resilience. Their shear
occurrence probably even embodies resilience—a community comes
together and, thereby, shows itself that it is still standing and still func-
tioning in unison. Psychiatry has long been attuned to unhealthy aspects
of rituals but has far to go in trying to understand what are healthy, resil-
ience-enhancing aspects of rituals, at least as regards disasters and prob-
ably even the daily stresses of life. Yet, the positive elements of rituals in
the face of disaster seem evident enough and the occurrence of rituals
natural enough to not have to reduce rituals to a clinical activity. So, why
get psychiatrists involved at all?