Let’s talk trauma Recovery Supporting Rituals.

Let’s talk about Recovery Supporting Rituals (RSR’s). Because, for my money, RSR’s are the key to realistic, sustainable trauma recovery. 

The content I write on the internet has, broadly two purposes: to make hope accessible, and to make tools accessible to survivors working their trauma recovery. 

The goal of some of the material I write about is to communicate broad ideas and fundamentals of what  call Trauma Recovery Mindset (TRM), from which we can derive specific, individualized tools survivors hopefully find useful in recovery. 

Many of those tools turn into Recovery Supporting Rituals (RSR’s). 

What is a ritual? It’s a behavior that has structure, is broadly replicable across time and contexts, and which we choose to do over, and over, and over again. 

Every major religion, political party, or other entry that successfully changes the way humans believe, think, and act, has rituals. That’s not a coincidence— it’s because rituals work to change how humans believe, think, and act. 

Trauma recovery is about changing what we believe, what we think, and what we do. If our recovery doesn’t help us do all three, it’s not working. 

If you haven’t noticed, changing what we believe, how we think, and what we do, can be pretty f*cking challenging. If it was easy, I wouldn’t have a job (well, this job, anyway; I’d probably be playing piano in a bar for tips); and you likely wouldn’t be reading this. 

Changing beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors is challenging because we believe what we believe, think what we think, and do what we do because of conditioning. 

We’ve been conditioned, programmed, brainwashed into our current beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors. 

Here’s the thing: that conditioning is physical. Our past experiences, notably abuse, neglect, and other trauma, have resulted in literal, physical pathways in our nervous system.

Those pathways aren’t going to reroute themselves— but they can and will change in response to experience. Neuroscientists call this “neuroplasticity.” 

The catch is: those new experiences that will realistically reroute our neural pathways, resulting in changed beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors? They have to be consistent. They have to happen over and over and over again. 

This is why we want to ritualize them. 

We want to give those new experiences structure. We want those new experiences, which we’re counting on to literally, physically reshape our nervous system, to be realistically accessible in different settings, and to be reliably replicable day after day after day. 

We need them to become rituals. 

Many of us have experience with rituals that do NOT support our recovery. Most of the rituals we’re used to were designed by someone else, for the purpose of us believing, thinking, and doing what THEY want us to believe, think, and do. 

What makes a Recovery Supporting Ritual “recovery supporting” is the fact that we design them, for the purpose of believing, thinking, and doing things that will nudge us closer to feeling and functioning differently. 

The RSR’s you design to support your recovery may not look like he RSR’s that support my recovery. Your RSR’s are going to be cued to the beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors that you’re trying to develop in your specific trauma recovery. 

But what all RSR’s have in common is that they are purposeful; they are realistic; they are replicable across settings and contexts; and they are adjustable in response to changes we experience in our symptoms and recovery needs. 

The success of our trauma recovery is, in my experience, strongly tied to our RSR’s. 

It’s not what we do every now and then or when we feel like it that will determine the realism or sustainability of our trauma recovery. 

It’s what we do purposefully and consistently. 

Our rituals. 

If trauma recovery is brainwashing ourselves in opposition to our trauma brainwashing, Recovery Supporting Rituals are the nuts and bolts of how we do it.